The Aliens and Predators! Sega couldn’t have picked two better franchises to build First-Person Shooter around. With their interesting skill sets and some clean graphics, the House of Sonic produced a dope a game.
Hit the jump for images and full review.
The story’s put together pretty well. Set on planet BG-386, a human mining colony discovers an ancient pyramid containing an Alien hive. At about the same time, on the Predator’s home world, they alerted to the trespassing on their pyramid and send a recon ‘hunting’ party to make sure that it remains sealed. All the while, deep inside the pyramid ruins, the Aliens start breeding. Again, pretty cool storyline. They obviously hired a screenwriter.
Graphically, this is one of the best looking titles Sega’s released in years. The characters move fluidly and no trace of choppiness that can be noticed with other MMOFPS. The developers did a particularly great job recreating the Predators litany of attributes, from the move of his ‘dreads’ to how they seemingly disappear and reappear when activating its cloaking device. However, when the screen gets filled with characters I did notice lag, but ultimately the AvP runs pretty smooth.
Gameplay wise, they let you choose between three different characters: the Colonial Marines, Aliens, and, the Predators. Between the ridiculous amount of weapons –that dope as laser canon and razor sharp Frisbee saw the most action from me– the Predators will assuredly be everyone’s favorite. But don’t sleep on the Aliens. While lacking weapons, they’re ridiculously quick and their ability to crawl on any surface set you up for some unique combat opportunity. Once you learn how to execute that tail-impale attack, you can rack up kills easily. Humans by far are the weakest of the three. It’s like the developers knew gamers wouldn’t be playing with them, so didn’t bother wasting their time building out a decent playable character. However they’re not completely helpless as they fitted them out with assault rifle that has good range and they incorporated a motion detector to track the Aliens, a nice touch that they brought over from the Aliens flick. No there’s no sniper rifle, sorry Halo fans.
Playing through the Predator single player campaign, (the best) was interesting but frankly I didn’t fall it compelling enough to keep my attention for very long. There are a lot of cool abilities, like cloaking to turn invisible, huge jumps to get to high places, and a way to distract humans in order to lure them away from a group and insta-kill them when one-on-one. While there are a lot of tools at your disposal, the Predator needs stealth in order to work efficiently and this is easier said than done. Against a group of humans you’ll be killed quite quickly, so you really need to be patient and proceed with caution. You’ll have trouble getting the distraction tool to work and get constantly surprised by Aliens (remember the humans have the motion tracking devices) which would attack me from behind and weaken me enough that I couldn’t get through the next squad of space marines. Ultimately, this game was built for online play, and Sega put in plenty of maps and numerous match types, with the classic rack up the kills death match being the best.
Aliens vs. Predator is going to be a better-than-average movie game, but an overall will be a blip on FPS shooter landscape, based on the novelty of the main characters. If you want play a next-gen game with these characters then it’s worth coping, otherwise, it’s a rental.–A. Kennedy
Tags: Aliens, Predator, video games
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I would appreciate more visual materials, to make your blog more attractive, but your writing style really compensates it. But there is always place for improvement
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.
Comment by kbone on March 10, 2010 at 10:03 am