Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Feb 18, 2010, 09:48:01 AM
Not at all. You just need to fully grasp the controls. You can become quite fluid with the Alien when you completely understand the controls.
This. I played the entire game on hard mode and found the Alien, by far, the most fluid and reliable in terms of getting kills.
I got a few things to say about the game, anyway, starting with the negatives.
No-one else seems to have commented on the sense of atmospheric inconsistency within the game. I don't really mean the environmental changes; if anything, they do wonders to prove the consistency that
is there. In one outdoor section, I realised, with some dread, that the Aliens were swimming towards me under the cover of the shallow water, blending in with the reeds and vegetation. Behavioural adaptions like that are a really powerful indicator of the deadliness of the Xenomorph in narrative terms, and the care Rebellion have given the game in design terms. So it's a bit odd when some Aliens spit slow-moving gobs of acid at you, as it smacks the immersion around a bit. If the acid attacks were quick, short-range, disorienting attacks of opportunity, they'd be frightening, but as it stands, they just come across as a goofy, ham-fisted attempt at gameplay variation.
Part two of the issue is some of the larger Xenomorphs you fight. Alright, so a boss health bar isn't going to do anything for immersion and Rebellion knows this. Aliens vs. Predator is a game that thrives on old-school gameplay conventions and for that it can't be criticised, because it's not an indication of quality as much as it's an indication of flavour. Where the Praetorians in the original game were slightly larger than your average Alien and were a bit more formidable in combat, these ones are
huge in comparison. We're talking about twice the size of your average cock-headed space abomination. It begs the question: why? Aliens thrive on sneak attacks, mobility and blending in with the environment. What good does a big one do when a normal one already batters down steel doors? This issue is exacerbated later on in a situation that's much less
Aliens than it is
Serious Sam's Adventures in Freya's Prospect.
The Predalien fight is another enigma. Much like the situation mentioned above, it's not really reminiscent of something I'd want to see in an Aliens vs. Predator game. While the cut-scene that follows the fight justifies it through sheer badassery, the fight itself feels overly forced and not as characterful as I'd have liked. The good news is that the Predalien has a decent design for once. Perhaps the head is a tad bulky in relation to the rest of its body, but it actually resembles a Xenomorph moreso than it does a Predator. Finally, and thank goodness.
But the point of this whole tirade was atmospheric inconsistency, and thus it ties into one of the positive aspects of the game - when you're not fighting a boss, the game is overall brilliantly atmospheric. From fighting your first Alien as a Marine, to stalking hapless humans as a Predator, all the way to the brilliant subterfuge of the Alien, the game is tense and nail-biting. Unfortunately, this is what causes the boss battles to be so jarring, as they don't exactly
fit. It's like someone at Rebellion came in during the level planning and said, "Hey, you know what'd be
totally badass?" without proper thought towards the progression of the narrative or the level design. In the entire game, about four of the boss battles are really plot-justified, with the others serving only as filler.
The storyline itself is no great shakes. Events within the game seem loosely associated at best, and the way the game itself progresses, I can pretty much tell that the story was written to justify the gameplay and environments. It's a shame, since the setup is so effective: Weyland Yutani set up a colony on an ancient Predator hunting world and discover a buried temple. They open it, thus activating a galactic beacon that can be picked up by any Predators within like a billion parsecs. Thinking nothing of it, the Weyland-Yutani goons take some Alien eggs. Lab-bred Xenomorphs are no different from their wild counterparts, however, and as soon as a power failure loosens their bonds, the whole colony goes to hell.
The Alien campaign wins the award for the most disappointing use of the plot, probably because it has the best opening. In fact, the first couple of missions support the plot quite nicely in particular, but after that, disassociation begins to set in and it feels like a string of random occurrences thrown together, which it pretty much is. Special mention has to go to the fourth mission, though, which is sincerely brilliant in its character, design and approach. It may in fact be my personal favourite, as it encompasses everything that is Alien: vent-loitering, fear-mongering, back-stabbing and inexplicably causing all the problems in the universe. Indeed, apart from the first mission, the fourth Alien mission is where it flirts with the plot most overtly, bringing everything together with a thin but powerful bioglue. Overall, the Alien campaign is probably the strongest in terms of gameplay itself, with the Alien's stealth, hissing, agility and sensory adaptions being the most intuitively used abilities in the game.
The Predator campaign is stronger in plot, although still a bit meandering in relation to the Marine campaign. Luckily, the gameplay saves this once again. Setting up kills as the Predator is satisfying. There's a sense of victory in pulling a Marine away from his comrades and gutting him like a fish dinner. Many people have noted that your wristblades are your primary weapon, but that's not exactly true. They're more like your constantly at-arms fallback weapon, whereas the weapon you select will be doing most of the work, especially towards the end of the game when you fight more resilient foes. In particular, once you get the spear, this campaign starts to become much more tedious than tense.
Most powerful is the Marine campaign, but it's also the most telling of a narrative designed as an excuse to progress through a range of environments rather than to tell a story. You'll visit a variety of cold, metallic structures not unlike the ones we're used to, but eventually the campaign gives way to the native forest and even more mysterious things. It would've been nice if there was a
sense of backtracking, in a "I've been in this general area but never in this specific location" kind of way. Returning to an area for something that's just become plot relevant is a great way to strengthen the a story and change the conditions concerning the area. Instead, it's just "OKAY NOW GO HERE", which prevents any one location from feeling that important. Either way, the journey is a tense one. It reminded me of Dead Space at times. Dead Space is probably more compelling in terms of atmosphere, but only because it understands entirely the point I made a couple of sentences ago; by keeping the environments strongly linked and codependent, it brought both a sense of relevance and desperation to all of your gameplay input.
The other negative I want to mention is completely, utterly subjective. Even moreso than the previous points.
Alright, Rebellion. You like Predators. We get it. But there's no canonical justification for them ever really being stronger or more resilient than Aliens. The canon does not support this. Claims to the contrary are the invention of comics that weren't as
Alien or
Predator as they were
Generic Space Monsters Gets Its Ass Kicked By Bronze-Age Hero. It doesn't do credit to the concept of either creature and there's no reason the gameplay would demand it. For instance, a Predator boss fight could be a much more powerful experience if the weapons that negated its cloaking weren't so readily supplied. That way, its relative vulnerability is offset by its invisibility. This is, overall, much more characterful as the way the Predator boss fight was actually implemented ended up giving it attributes unsupported by canon while destroying one of its most iconic attributes in the process. Sorta like the AvP comics, I guess.
Issue further exacerbated when fighting Predators as an Alien - apparently they're badass enough to throw you around if you attempt a stealth kill. Also, it seems their light attacks knock you down, even if they're blocked, so being attacked by one is essentially a case of being knocked down, the Predator going in for a trophy kill, you intercepting its attempt and then running away to regenerate your health. I think the sheer Predwanking that went on in this game actually exceeds AvP2, which says one hell of a lot. Sure, in that game they had ridiculous amounts of health on the harder difficulties and killed you in one hit, but at least they didn't completely break and subvert a combat system to show you how much they rule.
Yes, Predators should be more challenging than Marines, especially in a hand-to-hand fight, but there's absolutely no reason for them to be so goddamned powerful. Why put in a combat system just to subvert it? Why not put in more, weaker Predator adversaries? After all, dead Predators were scattered around the Predator campaign without much explanation. It all begs the question: why did Rebellion make such a big deal out of the combat system when it really applies only to the Predator in an Alien vs. Predator fight?
So I'm disappointed that canon was undermined, yet again, to make Predators look more powerful. Especially since this came at the expense of the Alien.
Alright, now for
positives.
As previously mentioned, the atmosphere is above and beyond what most games can hope to touch. The lighting, sound and visuals diffuse into one-another amorphously as you progress through the game. Also previously mentioned was the gameplay, which suits each species near perfectly. The Alien is a terrifying master of surprise, while the Marine is a glass-cannon gun emplacement, with the Predator acting like a sniper that gets his hands dirty. Overall, these are the two most important aspects of any Aliens vs. Predator game and Rebellion have nailed them. Playing as each species feels better than it ever has.
This game is a remake of AvP'99 in every way - from the strengths of its atmosphere and gameplay to the weaknesses of its narrative. To be fair, however, each ending does either allow for or overtly hint at a sequel, which might validate the narrative of a game that, in retrospect, feels very much like a prequel. An excuse for future events. Of the endings, the Predator one is free from flaws. The Alien one is also brilliant, but gets held back by an act of what might be considered fan-service that quickly becomes underwhelming after a bit of thought. Rounding off the Marine campaign is a compelling invitation into the next game, although, like the Alien ending, it suffers from a flaw born of comic book logic and a failure to understand the simple effectiveness of the source material.
I've spent most of my time here bitching, but this game is an overall worthy addition to any gaming library. It has its flaws, but they're peripheral overall and mostly fail to impact on the core values of the game. Sci-fi fans might feel a bit left behind, as the gritty plausibility of the setting makes it feel more like an extrapolated history more than sci-fi proper like Star Wars or Metroid. It falls far more neatly into the realms of thriller, stealth and beat-em-up.
In the absolute simplest sense, this is a great game held back by poor polish and poor narrative planning. Play it for the gameplay, play it for the atmosphere.
