Aliens vs. Predator

Take a couple of tough guys with a taste for fishnet stockings, a couple of aliens that love to make out with your head until it bursts open and a gang of marines with an appreciation for automatic weapons and foul language. What do you get if you take those three and put them together on a distant planet? A lot of fighting, that's what. We've seen it before; three races, three different types of warfare, three different ways of hating each other. You get to play as all three and straight away you get to dish out as much pain as possible on everybody around you.

You know what you're getting by now. You get to move through military bases, jungles, sewers, ruins and everything else you can find on a remote planet at the nowhere end of the galaxy. The three races' storylines mix with each other and you get to visit the same locations while completing different missions, depending on whom you choose to play as.

As a fresh marine you get a pretty harsh first day on the job. If you thought Leon Kennedy had a bad time, wait until you see what this guy has to go through. You're a part of a group of soldiers that has been sent to the aformentioned planet to find out what's going on. Of course it gets complicated straight away, since a Predator ship suddenly appears out of nowhere and blows the human mothership out of the sky. The landing team survives, except the rookie that gets his head bashed in by some badly secured carry-on luggage.

When he finally wakes up, he's alone and there's no trace of his colleauges to be found. All he's got is a com-link with his seargant. The first minutes of actual gameplay is pure horror; you stumble around in the dark, strange noises everywhere, shadows that move, your motion sensor keeps blipping and indicates that there something moving out there. After a while you come face to face with the third race involved in this horror drama; an Alien. From here on out it's all about fighting your way through badly lit corridors in a pretty low tempo and filled with nasty surprises.

The Predator campaign is the highlight of Alien vs. Predator. You got all kinds of weapons and toys and you always have a trick or two up your sleeve. Making yourself invisible is perfect for dealing with those pesky human marines, especially when you want to lure them into an ambush and let every weapon in your arsenal loose on them. That arsenal is quite impressive, with laser canons, spears, boomerangs, proximity mines and - of course - the classic knives for some tasty close combat. You also have a whole bunch of acrobatic skills that the other two races lack and most of the time you can jump your way through the levels. This works pretty well, until you end up in places where the platform you want to jump to happens to be too close or not accessible from all angles. Most of the time this isn't a big problem, but at times it feels a bit too constrained.

The Alien-campaign is a lot shorter than the two others, it's over in about two hours while the humans and Predator get at least four or five. As an Alien you have no ranged weapon, instead you have to trust your claws and tail. Your greatest asset is the environment, though. You can destroy light sources and move up on your enemies in the dark and with that lovely Alien hiss you can you trick the silly humans to come looking for you. Snack time!

As it should be, the Alien is much more agile than the other races; you can climb on walls and roofs and pounce your clueless victims from there. As an Alien you have to adopt a completely different strategy, since your body is pathetically frail and can't take very much damage before falling into pieces. So even though you are able to charge your enemies like there was no tomorrow at some points, you usually have to be a bit more careful in your approach.

The campaigns do wary quite a bit in quality, though. As stated earlier, the Alien-campaign is quite short while the Predator offers a lot more entertainment than that. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the game's controls either. The marines are way too clumsy to control, which especially gets in the way when you have to go up against an Alien. Imagine a large piece of meat armed with guns against a jacked up space ninja. Not a pretty sight and in those moments the controls can easily get in the way of the game experience. I do understand that you are carrying a lot of gear, sure, but I would have preferred it to have been designed a bit better than this.

I'm not a huge fan of the online part either, even though it's certainly good for a few hours of entertainment. Up to four players can co-operate as marines against hordes of swarming Aliens, until there's no survivor left. There's also Predator versus humans and a whole bunch of different variations of the classic deathmatch. The survival mode is fun, absolutely, but the rest of the online modes fail to get my juices flowing.

The sound manages to set the mood perfectly most of the time, with a lot of small details like rotating fans, distant hisses or the muffled sounds from a far away carbine going off adding to the experience. Moving around as a Predator or Alien and listening to the humans' nervous chatter and the soldiers telling each other to "stay frosty" while you prey on them is hard to beat.

Graphically, it's not as interesting. The level design is boring and even though lighting effects and some nice environments you easily spot the low-resolution textures and uninspired design. The animations are stiff and unvaried, even though the so called trophy kills are really cool to behold. They are especially nasty execusions, the are raw and terrible violent; they are a lot of fun to pull off, even after you've seen the same animation about 4000 times.

Aliens vs. Predator is that kind of game that at times feels pretty weak, while more than often it feels pretty OK. In some ways it's a welcome addition to the franchise, even if it never measures up to Rebellion's original game or Monolith's sequel.