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Review: Aliens vs. Predator 2Reviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Computer: 800MHz iMac, 256MB RAM, GeForce 2 Review Date: October 22, 2003
Alien vs. Predator 2 is a good game. It's the all-too-rare licensed concept that actually manages to capture the feel of the movie, rather than smoosh the movie into a game the designers had to make to get the product on the shelves at Wal-Mart before everyone realized it was crap.
And I'm a big wuss; just ask Hiner. I should be easy to scare. Yet, the Unreal Tournament model on which you spent four weeks in committee meetings trying to decide if one horn or two was edgier is no more frightening than an unexpected gnawing rodent that I've chosen to keep in my house for entertainment. To be clear, this is not your goal.
And that's fun. That fulfills the premise that pretty much every video game based on a movie has failed to provide; putting you in the movie. And then they mess with you. Because now you still have a whole third of a game to go. You have to play the human.
Oh sure, you have weapons. You have all the weapons from Aliens, James Cameron's deep-tongue kiss to fanboydom, who never forgave Sigourney Weaver for doing Aliens 3 until she did Galaxy Quest and wore a Wonderbra. You've got the classic pulse rifle with the over/under grenade launcher. You got the flame unit. You even got the smart gun, a rifle so kickass it needed your two arms and two more robot arms to operate. But you know what, it's all the same when you can't see the damn thing trying to frappe your face; you end up dancing around in circles like someone screamed there was a bee on your neck, holding the fire key until it goes "click." They wait for that sound, you know. Then they show up. So, it's fun and scary, and it's like being in the movie. They've added a lot more detail from the first version of the game. The Predator gets his largely unnecessary battle spear. It's another weapon that kills humans instantly. They also get this battery that recharges their power supply instantly. So they can kill humans quicker. And, of course, they're invisible. Yeah, that's fair.
The game looks great, of course; well, as great as it can look when lit with so few emergency lights that it looks like any teenaged heavy metal fan's bedroom. You'll find yourself cycling through the game's various vision options just so you can 1.) take in the amazing level design and 2.) figure out where the heck you are. And the final cherry on the cake, Aliens vs. Predator 2 manages to put a new spin on the run-and-shoot formula. The Alien and the Predator both find great advantage in holding perfectly still, and the presence of the Alien forces you to think in three dimensions, Kahn. So, reward the fine people who design games like this. Now. Hurry. Run out and buy a copy of Aliens vs. Predator 2 before they decide to go with a proven formula. Like gladiatorial games set in a dystopian future. Or Tetris clones.
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And here's the other weird thing about it: it's based on a pair of horror movies, and it's actually scary. This is a major accomplishment. Every game ever published in America is about zombies coming to eat people, usually people in miniskirts and tube tops. Or they're about demons who Only One Man can stop, usually by not playing by The Rules, whatever the rules for fighting demons may be. But despite using Revelations as their source material, strangely, not one of these games is scary. The best they can do is startling. Something jumps out at you, and you're startled. Note to the secret society of geeks who control the gaming industry from their parents' basements...anything is surprising when it leaps out at you. If my guinea pig ran out of the closet when I didn't know she was out of her cage, it would scare me...and it would scare me as much as your freaking zombies. And don't bother explaining that they're bio-zombies; that's a freaking given, you dorks.
Yet Aliens vs. Predator 2 is genuinely frightening in an entertaining way. Certainly in the colonial marine levels, where you play one member of a squad of soldiers sent to deal with the problem of all these mostly invisible extraterrestrials who really like killing colonial marines. And here's the really twisted part; they let you play the aliens. Oh, that part's great! The Predator runs around literally invisible, with a plethora of weapons designed to eviscerate the idiot humans before you even know you're there. Ha ha! Stupid humans! I rule all! As the Alien...well, let me put it this way. You get your health back by eating heads. You line the human up in the middle of your screen, as they stand there, crouched in utter fear of you, and you pop out the little mouth inside your big mouth out and eat their freaking head. Okay, I get it now, I get why moms are upset about the games their kids play. This is not hopping on a turtle to kill a mushroom. This is shooting someone's head off with a pitchfork-gun so that a nightmare monster can eat it.
You start off as a squad. Squads are good; they give the enemy someone else to shoot at. But, of course, you get separated. Oops. Now we're back in familiar territory; one warrior against the hordes of hell. But again, unlike a game based on being stalked by my guinea pig, this is scary. And I think it's because of the sound. The sound of AvP2 is creepy as hell. Let's start with the motion detector. It's a nice little device that should be comforting. It tells you if big sausage-heads are coming to eat you. But it's unnerving. First of all, it's got that regular beat when nothing is wrong. Then, it changes. But it doesn't just detect boogums, it detects anything that's moving, and the level designers made sure to put in lots of things that are swaying around. So you fire off a few rounds, just to be sure. Motion detector detects that. And it detects if you turn around too fast. And if you wet yourself.
The Aliens are mostly unchanged from the first game. They crawl around on the walls and ceilings, through air ducts. Munchable humans are surrounded by an glowing aura that might as well say "Eat At Joes." The big change is that the aliens grow in stages. In the single-player game, this is fun and challenging. You start off as a face hugger who has to find the one human asleep that they can infect. Then, in a complete change of pace, you play an alien worm who can't do crap except eat dogs, until you grow into the full Alien we know and love. And that's all well and good for single player, but when they try to weedle this in to the multi, it becomes virtually unplayable. When you facehug a human, he lets out a scream. Then all the other human players come a'runnin' and wait for you to pop out of the corpse so they can kill you. So, that's a problem.