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Aliens
VS. Predator ©
Fox Interactive
What
happens when you cross two highly touted marketing names and put
them into one product? Well you either wind up with the Spice Girls
vs. the Backstreet Boys, or, as i prefer it, Aliens vs. Predator
(AvP). It seems when you do something like this, it is all too easy
to abuse the names for sales and release a shallow product (like
games bearing the name StarTrek). How does AvP hold up? Let's see.
The
basic premise as follows, you play from a FPS point of view, and the
game controls and behaves just like any other standard shoot-em-up.
However, you can play as 3 totally different types of characters,
each with their own complete campaign. The first one I chose was the
almighty Predator. The Predator has the ability to self heal, cloak,
had a multitude of visual modes for seeing enemies, and lots of cool high-tech
weapons.
You
may also play as the Space Marine, the most "traditional"
of the 3 characters. Here you will use the standard pistol/machine
gun type weapons, and you also have the ability to track enemies on
radar. In my opinion, the Marines are the weakest of the 3. In order
to use night vision to see in the dark, you give up the ability to
use your radar, making yourself very vulnerable.
The
Alien is the oddest and my worst of the three in my opinion. You get
to crawl up and down walls, but the controls felt too foreign to me
and I couldn't get used to it. The Alien has several visual modes for
hunting prey, and had some devastating up-close attacks though it
doesn't have any distance weapons. Also, when hurt, the blood of the
Alien can hurt the attacker.
OK,
the first question everyone asks is, how are the graphics? They are
decent. Great? Nope. Horrible? Not that either. The graphics in Alien
Vs. Predator were at times had some absolutely amazing effects. The
way the Predator's hands moved when self healing or activating the
cloak device is simply stunning. However, fire the shoulder rocket
and it looks like a little golf ball being tossed out. This was very
disappointing to say the least. Some of the settings looked
beautiful, while others look extremely squarish and rushed. For the
decidedly "decent" graphics, this game should not run as
poorly as it seemed a lot of the times. On my P2-400 with a TNT, the
game can hitch and hiccup when in a battle in resolutions above
800x600 and in 32 bit color. Even 640x480 seemed to be pushing AvP.
The
sound is another one of those things that welcomes buzzwords. A3dD
this, EAX that. I don't care if you have a $5000 sound setup, this
game is still going the same. Sound is used in this game very
sparingly to add to suspense, therefore you didn't hear a lot of
sound, and what you did hear is adequate but was nothing special.
As
always, the game play is the most important factor when playing any
game. I found the control in AvP a little stressed in all 3 different
player modes, though adjusting mouse sensitivity did help a little.
While most of the time I felt myself decidedly "unscared"
by this "scary" game, when you are a Marine and all the
lights are out and you see an alien coming at you through a tunnel
with background lights flickering, for a tiny moment it does feel
like the movies. This is just for a brief moment. After that, I
realized I was looking at a game, not a movie. In the end, this is a
decent game.
AvP
comes with the standard assortment of multiplayer options in the
game, including the increasingly popular LAN/IPX mode and TCP/IP to
play over the net. While playing over the Internet, I would notice
some jerkyness, and something else also bothered me: the build
number. If you go to the console and press ~, you will notice this is
build 90. What does this translate to? It means that any questions of
being rushed have been answered. While it was enjoyable to play over TCP/IP,
this is for sure not a Quake 2/Q3A killer. The design of the
multiplayer maps can be summed up like the entire game has been,
which is adequate.
The
multiplayer support is decent, as is everything else in this game.
But that is just it. This is a decent game, but nothing exceptional.
Unless you are expecting a great game you will not be disappointed,
but you will constantly be feeling they should have held off on the
release for just a little while longer to tweak some things. This
game was not good enough for me to bother completing in single player
mode, but decent enough to keep trying, for a while anyway.
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GAME
TYPE
First
Person Shooter
REQUIREMENTS
P200,
180M HD, 4X CDROM, Sound Card, Windows 95 / 98, DirectX 6.1, 3D
Acceleration Card /w 4M RAM
PRICE
$49.99
REVIEWER
M.
C.
INFORMATION
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Published |
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Demo? |
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Release
date |
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79% |
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Quick
Summary:
It's
a first person shooter that's "adequent" |
SCREENSHOTS
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