wentieth Century Fox has combined two of its most popular science fiction film
franchises into one game that follows the story of three separate characters.
First there is the human, a Colonial Marine as seen in the movie Aliens. Then there is an actual alien from Aliens, and finally the Predator from the Predator films.
Each character has its own story arc that takes place over five or six episodes
(a.k.a. levels), while the three arcs together make up a larger plot that involves all three species. The game is played from a first-person perspective like Doom or Quake, although each character has substantially different abilities and options. For instance, the Alien can move quickly, make incredible jumps and climb on any surface, but it can't carry weapons, and it's limited to only three close-range attacks: the claw attack, the jaw attack and the tail attack.
The Predator, on the other hand, is loaded with offensive gadgetry, including a
variety of projectile weapons, a cloaking device, and four separate vision modes that can give some of its weapons the ability to auto-target. It's also a fairly robust critter that can move faster than a human, but it's not a match for the Alien when it comes to speed. Finally, there is the Colonial Marine, a badass among Homo sapiens but a relative wimp compared to other lifeforms. The marine is nothing without his weaponry, but luckily he's got plenty of it, including the pulse rifle, the smartgun, the flamethrower, a stand-alone grenade launcher, a SADAR rocket launcher and a minigun, not to mention helpful equipment like the motion tracker and image intensifier.
The game has three separate difficulty levels--training, realistic and
director's cut--and completing all of the regular episodes on each difficulty
setting will give the various characters access to five bonus episodes. AvP also includes numerous multi-player options, such as TCP-IP and LAN support.
A hit that misses
There's no doubt that AvP is one of the year's most highly anticipated games. And it's clear that Fox made every effort to get it into the hands of players as soon as possible. Unfortunately, they seem to have cut some pretty big corners in the process. Because of this, AvP has been plagued with problems since its release, including huge numbers of players who are unable to get the game running at all and others who experience frequent crashes. Which is a shame, because with a little more time, AvP could have been one of the best SF games ever.
As it stands, AvP is seriously cool, just not great. To begin with, the premise is outstanding. What SF gamer wouldn't relish the chance to pit the mighty Predator against the fierce Alien? Or to take a turn as a "tough hombre" Colonial Marine? In this respect, AvP delivers. In fact, it might even go too far in creating realistic action, as the game can be downright hard at times. Luckily, Fox has heard the word from gamers, and it's already working on a patch to provide an in-game save feature that should make things go a bit smoother.
Fox also scores big when it comes to ambience. Put simply, playing AvP feels like being in an Alien movie, complete with authentic sights and sounds. This is pretty fun during the single-player missions, but insanely fun during multiplayer games. And all of the creatures are nicely balanced...which means, of course, that the Predator has an edge when it comes to deathmatches, since it's designed for the hunt. And that's as it should be. In fact, almost everything in AvP is as it should be, it's just that the programmers missed a few targets during their final bug hunt.
