Aliens versus Predator

Well, all I can say is, if you liked the Alien movies (especially the second one, Aliens), you will love this game. What made the first and second films great horror movies was the ambiance: dark settings, but not too dark, strange noises, and all the rest. Those were some of the scariest, most exciting movies I’ve ever seen, and I’m a hardcore horror buff of over 20 years. This game bottles that feeling and lets you live inside it.

The graphics are very good, though not the best I’ve ever seen, pretty much what you’d expect today of a good 3D action game. But the excellent use of textures and lighting sets the mood so well that after an hour of solid play I still jump when an alien zooms at me or across the screen. The sound, and the strategically placed absence of sound, is just as reminiscent of the films and adds more to the mood than any other game I’ve seen, except maybe Half-Life. It shows especially when you play the alien: you start in a very quiet environment, where you can hear every character moving if your sound is set right, and creep along on your mission. There I was, crawling along the ceiling minding my own business, when I slipped into a room where an auto-gun detected me and loudly started blasting, it surprised the hell out of me. As the marine, the lack of sound except the muffled blip of the motion tracker puts you right in the mindset of one of the movies. It’s enough to stand my hair on end.

The marine and alien missions make you feel like you’re in some unreleased Alien movie, and the speed of the aliens scared the hell out of me; I’ve never seen another game with enemies that zoom at you with almost no warning. The game is very well balanced, but in very different ways, so playing each character well demands different skills. With the marine, you must master the motion tracker and switching weapons, staying calm, watching the tracker and being ready to backpedal while blasting an alien in an instant, or you’ll be toast. With the alien, it’s all about crawling and surprise attacks, since he has no long-range weapons. One thing I love about the alien is that good use of climbing gives you almost foolproof cloaking, because few enemies look on the ceiling, so I could drop down and kill them without a shot fired. It takes about ten minutes to get the hang of crawling across all surfaces, and I’ll admit I got a little queasy a few times, but once it clicks, the screen starts to look like a scene from the films, a great new dimension for the genre.

Playing the Predator is pretty cool, emulating pieces of the first Predator movie, Latin American guerillas and all, though I haven’t yet reached the point where Predator meets Aliens. The whole game is designed to make you feel like you’re playing inside one of the movies, so if you’re a Predator or Alien fan, and I fit both categories, you’ll get that same feeling with the added adrenaline of interacting with it. You also get more than enough out of three totally unique characters in one game, each side playable against the others.

I’ll end where I began: how much you liked the Alien and Predator movies will tell you how much you’ll like this game. Without the movie connections it’s an above-average game, but with them, it’s just about the best in the genre today.