Whoever at Fox Entertainment thought up the idea to combine two highly popular series that have a huge cross-promotional fan-base should be given a medal. Combining the Aliens and Predator series is pure genius. With combining them you get some great visual effects (a sure way to lure the teen-age crowd to buy your game), some pop out and scare you moments which will keep the heart racing, and given the species portrayed you know there’s going to be some serious carnage!
LET’S ROCK!!
What a great line in the movie “Aliens” wasn’t it? Everything’s going to crap around the Marines, the lieutenant on the APC won’t do anything or listen to Ripley, so Vasquez just opens up on the aliens, effectively saving the day before Hicks gets control of everything and gets everyone out of there to fight again. “Jamie, do I get to do that in this game? Do I get to rip some aliens apart? Do I get the Smartgun? How about the flamethrower?” To answer your questions: Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. More importantly, “Is it fun to be the Marine?” Well, not really.
Granted, as the Marine you get to carry a whole slew of weapons seen in the movie as well some new ones in the game: the sniper rifle, rocket launcher, chain gun, grenade launcher, and shotgun. However, in the single-player mode you don’t really have too much need for these new weapons. The SmartGun can track and shoot enemies rather easily and there’s quite a bit of ammo around negating the use of a sniper rifle. Also, the shotgun, while powerful, is limited due to the reload time. In the middle of a firefight, aliens jumping hither and fro trying to rip my face off, the last thing I need is to have the eight round magazine be empty. May as well load your last saved game if that happens. The other two firearm weapons (sniper rifle and chain gun) are introduced so late in the game that you don’t get to use them for any long duration of time. I don’t even recall firing the sniper rifle. Same story with the grenade launcher. The M-41A Pulse rifle has one slung under the gun so a second grenade launcher is redundant and mostly there I imagine for multiplayer. They try to spice it up by giving the second launcher multiple fire modes but I never even tried it.
Another problem I have with the Marine levels is the enhanced vision modes. You get three: a shoulder lamp which lights up only a small portion of the surrounding area in front of you a night vision goggles which light everything in a green, and then a packet of flares which stick to a surface (sometimes) and glow a eerie bluish-purple for a short time. Sounds cool, right? It is for about the first two levels then you realize something; whoever made these damn levels does not realize that there are more colors than green, black, dark blues, and more blacks. Here, I want to put something here in this article that hopefully future level designers might recognize:
This is called a color wheel. Notice here, dear reader/level designer that there are these bright
vibrant colors called orange, red, and the infamous yellow. Dammit please
use them!!!
True, I got all sorts of shades of color when I played the Predator levels but right now we’re discussing the Marine levels; and that’s one-third the game!
I guess I’m also mad because unlike most games since oh, I don’t know, Quake 1, there’s been the ability to mess with gamma correction!! Where is that in this game? Answer: I don’t know!!! So, rather than possibly being able to walk around without night vision or the shoulder lamp turned on, I had to use them all the time, meaning I either could only see a small portion of the wonderful graphics in this game OR everything was awash in puke green. And don’t give me that crap about the lighting on some levels. One or two red lamps don’t count! This problem with the colors on the game is a big reason why I had to use the SmartGun to track targets so often. I say if you have a dark monitor (which mine isn’t!) then you might have problems like I did with the Marine Levels.
GET AWAY FROM HER YOU B****!
Playing as the alien is quite simply the best part of the game. The reasons are many. You get to become a pure hard-core killing machine jumping on it’s prey, climbing upside down walls, and biting the heads off of people to regenerate your health.
But most importantly, you don’t just jump in as the eight foot tall alien and begin ransacking. Instead, you start out as the face-hugger, scurrying across the ground in search of a host. After you find the host, your burst forth as the small alien, looking to feed so you may grow.
Only then do you get to unleash a world of hurt on anyone in your path, switching between infared (vision) and normal vision. What’s great about this is that even in normal vision mode, potential hosts/victims show their bodies giving off pheromones, negating any of the problems with seeing in the dark that occurred as the Marine.
Basically, that’s about all you can say about the Alien. It grows, it matures, it kills with wreckless abandon, feeds, and then moves on to the next task. I could find no real fault with this part of the game.
IF IT BLEEDS, WE CAN KILL IT
The Predator levels fall between the Aliens and the Marine levels. Fun, but only just so.
As the Predator, you’re supposed to be more prone to stealth, tracking, and eventually killing your prey, preferably by beheading your quarry.
While it is only my second favorite part of the game, the Predator level was the only one that had me howl in delight during parts of the mission. The reason being is the screenshot below:
You see that? As Predator, you have a spear gun that you can use to shoot prey. A soldier was standing around next to a tree so I decided I really wanted to hit this guy hard. I aimed my spear gun and pegged him right in the head. To my utter surprise the body didn’t just fall down, the head came off, stuck in the tree and the body crumpled to the ground. Then, the Predator (which in this case was me) laughed and roared in pleasure like he had just heard a good joke at the Predator-Improv. Sometimes, it’s the little details in a game that can make you smile!!
A big part of the problem with the predator levels is that sometimes he’s too powerful. The Predator needs energy for his cloak and some of his weapons as well as health to stay alive. I ask though what’s the point of even measuring these things since the Predator carries a medical pack and energy recharger? If he runs low on either he just finds a quiet spot (and there are many) and can just heal up before running into the next room? How does the game get around this predicament? It throws in a lot of automated gun turrets which give you no time to react. It seems like a bit of a cop-out.
THE BIG PICTURE
All right, so I broke down the three different phases of the game. But what about overall? Can I gripe about those, too? Oh yes I will, thanks for asking!
Now, in the game you’re trying to avoid the other two species or wipe them out. You’re armed to the teeth with heavy weapons, razor sharp claws, and energy beams. Lock, cocked, and ready to rock!! But why then, oh why then, around every corner I turn I see this!
That’s right!! Half the doors in the damn base are locked!! And I can’t go in them? Can I blast them open? Nope!! Can I rip them open?! No way?! How about running a bypass with the hacking tool as the Marine. Don’t make me laugh. The developers make this wonderful atmosphere, an intriguing storyline with some nice cut-scenes and fit it all onto a two-disc set. But then, for whatever reason, they shut me out of half the base in the game!! The force me to go where THEY want me to go. Would it have hurt to let all these doors open? Would it have hurt anything to maybe have a third disc in the game so the rest of these rooms and halls could be rendered which lets me see the whole base or just wander around if I want to do that?!? It completely snapped me out of the atmosphere of being a Marine running for my life, or the Alien looking to return to the hive or the Predator trying to find his captured comrades. Because I knew that if I could find that one door or hatch, I’d be able to get to the next section of the game no problem. Come on, make me think just a little or don’t include those damn doors at all. Heck, you could have just wrecked the doors to where they wouldn’t open fully and then I’d have been happy.
Finally, let’s talk a little about how the game controls the computer guys. Notice I don’t use the catch-phrase AI. AI is a stupid phrase to use in a game. These things don’t think for themselves. I wasn’t expecting great things but at least some sort of challenge. However, I get this instead:
As you can see, one of the soldiers is down on the ground and now his buddies have come over to have a look. I can only imagine the conversation the computer is having.
“Hey object1, look at object 0. He’s on the ground with a spear in his chest.”
“Wicked! Hey Object 3 and Object 4, look at this.”
<TOGETHER> “Wow!”
“Hey, let’s take off in different directions so the player can kill us easier!”
<ALL>: “YEAH!!”
Naturally, I head shot all of them because they weren’t using them. No, wait, I take that back. I shot one of them right up the posterior. The Predator didn’t laugh at that.
RIPLEY, SIGNING OFF
A completely mixed bag of a game. A great premise giving any hard-core sci-fi fan a chance to jump into the boots/claws of two movie icons from the 1980’s and 1990’s. All the ambient sounds and even some of the music is dead on and the graphics (when you can see them) are stellar. Even the rendered cut-scenes are well worth watching It’s tainted though by it’s “playing on rails” technique as well as problems which exist in the overall gameplay of the Marines and near invulnerability of the Predators.