Aliens vs. Predator is all about the differences between the three playable factions. The Marines carry weapons, like the iconic Aliens pulse rifle and even more iconic Aliens motion detector, which blips out frequently enough to let you know that something's moving out there, but not often enough to serve as a direct map to your enemies. The aliens are a purely melee class that can crawl on walls, see well in the dark, and detect silhouettes of enemies through solid surfaces. Predators can cloak themselves, get two vision modes to help them see the other races, and are largely a melee class as well. But they can collect and use specific Predator weapons as they hunt. These weapons end up being especially devastating, but they're kept in check by low fire-rates and a finite amount of energy for your beam weapons.
Of course, that doesn't forgive the game's single-player portion, which drags you through the same dull events from three different perspectives. At best, the instruction you get on the use of your class's tools makes it a passable tutorial for the multiplayer. At its worst, though, AVP contains multiple scripting bugs where things that were supposed to happen simply didn't, forcing me to restart at the most recent checkpoint and hope that the game would carry forward. Also, the AI can't pilot an alien very well at all, like it can't deal with the concept of running up walls. If there's a pillar between you and an alien, it'll run up the side of it and start twitching and spinning around. It gets its bearings after a few seconds, but it looks pretty terrible. It'll take around six or seven hours to work through all three campaigns on the default difficulty setting, but they're not really worth seeing through to their conclusions.
That's really the largest problem with Aliens vs. Predator. There's no one solid aspect of it to make up for the other, busted-up parts. You're left with the impression that the single-player was an afterthought and that multiplayer was the focus. But even the multiplayer is saddled with enough flaws to make this game missable.
107 Comments