Review: Aliens vs. Predator
PC (reviewed), Xbox 360, PS3
James Heffield | Tuesday, March 30 2010As you hiss from a steel vent and drop down into a dark corridor to rip the head off a marine or ram your alien tail through one of his eye sockets, it dawns on you that Rebellion’s Aliens vs. Predator remake is pretty gory.
It’s been just over 10 years since the UK studio released the original Aliens vs. Predator on PC and it seems the advances in graphics since then have inspired the games developers to give it another crack.
The game features three single player campaigns allowing gamers to enter the fray as an alien, a dreadlocked predator or a woefully outgunned US marine. It’s built more on suspense than constant combat and, despite the gore, you will sometimes go for relatively long periods before encountering anything to kill. That makes it feel a bit more like a movie than a game at times and it can seem that you’re just being moved from one scene to the next to progress the plot.
The game’s stunning graphics induce fear, emphasizing shadows and creating the claustrophobic atmosphere fans of the Aliens movie franchise will be familiar with. AvP is one of the first shooters to support DirectX 11 hardware tessellation and requires a relatively powerful graphics card to run smoothly – a 512MB card just won’t cut it.
The third species, the predator, is the most challenging to control. He has a huge array of weapons at his disposal, from talon-like wrist blades and spears to a shoulder mounted plasma cannon. You’re able to use a cloaking device as you leap from tree to tree hunting down marines and aliens using your infrared sight.
There’s also a multiplayer mode that allows gamers to pit the three species against each other in three-way online action.
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