Unfortunately, since my hard copy of AvP on 360 was given away or sold at some point, I had to buy this again on the Xbox store for $20. However, it seems to be astronomically expensive on Amazon if you want to get it new, so $20 isn't all bad.
This game has actually aged pretty well if you just want to run through it. I played the three campaigns on hard in about a day's worth of time; I felt they were pretty easy actually, so I must have improved at FPS games in the time this was released, because I remember feeling more challenged on the normal setting when it was released. The Predator campaign had a couple moments where I got stuck on hand-to-hand combat with the Xenos, but it was all doable after a few tries. It's all really about timing. The human campaign is easily the best and most atmospheric, except for the 2nd half of the final level which really takes you out of the game in favor of a grueling lead up to an underwhelmingly designed boss fight.
The Xenomorph AI in the human campaign is what continues to impress me about this game. Very cunning enemies; they make the ACM Xenomorphs look like a joke, and that game was released later.
The Predator and Alien campaign are fun, but the human AI is still notably awful. Distracting the humans w/ Predator's voice mimicking is hilariously unrealistic. Their verbal responses to these are lazy and cut out all the tension of the moment. The AI also don't respond realistically to finding their dead friends. I'm also still bitter that the headbite isn't one of the primary attacks playing as the Alien. It ends up being a stealth type kill instead of something activated when the human heads are in the center of the screen. There also isn't a satisfying crunch sound when executed, but that might be nitpicking.
Overall this is still fun and worth playing, and maybe it has aged well because of how bad ACM is. This still doesn't improve upon AvP (1999) or AvP 2, but it's a worthy entry if you ask me, if only for the human campaign. I even played some multiplayer, and that was a good time as well. Even had a game with 7 people in it at one point.
I very much hope this ushers in backwards compatibility for:
- Aliens: Colonial Marines
- AvP: Excinction
- Predator: Concrete Jungle
I will feel stupid doing it, but I will purchase all of these games again if they'll run on Xbox One. The lovely thing about backwards compatibility is the more powerful machine slashes the load times for these games, making them much more time efficient to play as an adult, as opposed to the past when I was a kid without real responsibilities and could sit around all day watching load screens.
