grimjack2's Full Review: Aliens Versus Predator 2 Gold Edition for Mac
I really loved both the movie "Aliens" and the two "Predator" movies. "Aliens" truly captured a feeling of squad level combat that has been imitated many time by computer games. The concept behind the Predator race of hunters is perfect for a first person shooter. I would have been surprised if no one had tried to make a game out of these two franchises earlier. There was a professional game released on the Atari Jaguar back in 1994 that really stank as opposed to some of the early computer 1st person shooters like "Doom" and "System Shock" which had been released shortly before. More common were the modified versions (or 'Mods') made for Doom and Quake that did their best to imitate the world and weapons of both the Aliens and the Predators. Some were pretty good, but they all had an amateurish feel to them.
Not this game!
Alien versus Predator captures the feeling of playing as an Alien, a Predator, or a Space Marine. The worlds feel perfect, the weapons look and sound perfect, and most importantly each creature feels just right. A weaker game would have had each player feel the same except for different graphics with the weapons. Not here. The Alien is so fast that it feels like he's gliding as he runs on walls as easily as the floor. The Predator is very quiet when he moves, can fall and jump further than a marine, and his invisibility is just enough to keep distant enemies from seeing him. The Marine feels just like you or I might loaded down with heavy equipment, and possessing far too little natural strength against either of his opponents.
As an Alien, you are just one of the many members of a hive who starts out trying to stop invading humans from entering your temple, later tries to free captured aliens, has to stowaway aboard an escaping human shuttle, eventually come into contact with a Predator hunting for you and other humans, and then eventually start your pleasant descent to Earth so that you can turn all humans into hosts for your race.
You attacks are the most limited of the three. You have your claws, which will take a few swings to kill any human, and more for a predator. You have you tail, which is almost a one shot kill on most characters. And you have your secondary mouth attack. If you line up your teeth just right with an enemy's head, you will shoot out your secondary set of teeth, killing instantly, and gaining back some health. This is the only way an Alien can gain more health.
The opening environment is a really eerie Alien temple. There are drawings of various Aliens on all the walls that look like Hieroglyphics. Apparently some ancient race worshiped these parasites. A later level has you working your way through a human spaceship, but when you approach the bridge they set off the auto-destruct which allows you to hear that rather scary voice counting down, adding to the tension as you try to escape the level.
As an alien, speed is your best asset. I have never moved so fast in a first person shooter before. You can literally race by a number of humans slashing with your tail, and when you look behind you, many of them have torsos cut in half. You also have no problems running on the walls or ceilings as easily as you move along the floor. You only have to hold the Alt-key down as you slide or run into a wall to start climbing it. No other shooter feels like playing as an Alien in this game. You also don't see 'normally'. There is a weird fish-eye type of view similar to the point of view shots from "Alien 3". This isn't as distracting as it sounds, and it certainly adds to the feel that this game is unlike any other.
The alien is best played making good use of air ducts and crawl spaces. You don't want to take on marines head-on with their long range weapons when it can be avoided. You also can run along ceilings to avoid men on the ground, and pounce from above. Once seen you can't hide again, but I was able to hide in the shadows and drop incredible distances into the middle of a group of humans.
One neat thing about the human AI is that if you kill a group of humans in front of another one, sometimes they will drop their weapons and start to cower, screaming for help. This makes it very easy to use your mouth attack when low on health.
One of the deadliest weapons humans have to use against you are Flame Throwers. When you are on fire you are constantly and quickly taking damage until the flames go out. The way to do this is to run for a long period of time. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Usually you are being pursued at this point, and you are quite visible to any opponents.
As a Marine you will start by trying to escape from a research site built around the Alien spaceship from the first Alien film. Then you will try to investigate from what is now the abandoned colony from the second film, later working your way to a rescue craft that is of course over run with aliens. Your space station has also been infested, and even includes a few Predators that are there to hunt Aliens, but don't mind hunting well armed Marines as well. Unfortunately for you, some of the Predators have been turned into an Alien hybrid that makes them have the stronger capabilities of both species. Eventually you must face the Queen Alien in a space hangar, similar to the one at the end of "Aliens", complete with the underground area under grates and the lifter robot.
As a marine, you are far too weak to handle either an Alien or a Predator hand to hand. Fortunately you are loaded with many powerful weapons. You have a 10mm assault rifle, and even a more powerful smart gun which 'locks' onto its targets. There is also a rocket launcher that is almost too powerful to use without hurting yourself. The same goes for the grenade launcher since so many opponents want to fight you up close. The flame thrower works great against alien face huggers, and setting a predator on fire will make him very visible for you to aim at with other weapons. The big daddy of your weapons that is seldom seen in the game is the Mini-gun from the first Predator movie. Its one big weakness, however, is that you have to stand still while using it. This makes it difficult to use in an open space the way your opponents move around so much
Everyone's favorite Marine accessory is here, the motion tracker. Looking and sounding just like the movie, it is a very welcome feature, yet it unfortunately doesn't do much good. It almost never helped me when I needed it to, simply because although it's range is moderate, the aliens are on top of you almost as soon as it detects them coming. The predators tended to strike from a distance, also making them not register on the device either. Still, the first time it started beeping menacingly my hair stood on end, and I made my character frantically began spinning in circles looking for the approaching enemies.
Aliens come at you from nowhere and really made me jump. More than any other game, including System Shock, I jumped out of my chair as Aliens sprang out of nowhere and filled my view with their attacking bodies. They will let you pass a hole in the ceiling just so you can be later attacked from both sides. There is a great sense of motion in the game. If an alien is lunging at you, and you 'dissolve' him with a massive hail storm of bullets in mid-air, his acidic blood will continue moving forward damaging you.
As the predator, you start by killing humans in a base where they have been alerted to your presence and have even captured your ship. Reaching your ship is tough, because the area around it has now been infested with Aliens. Deciding to fight for honor, you eventually work your way in the Hive itself, eventually taking on a Queen Alien with only your hand to hand weapons.
Like in the movies, as a Predator you won't be using normal vision for most of the time. Here, Predators have four vision modes. One is normal, one is a heat source to see humans better like in the movies, but Aliens are almost completely invisible in this mode. Another lets you see Aliens, but not humans easily. And the final one is best used for multiplayer and recovering your flying disc. It highlights Predators and their technology.
The Predator weapons are right out of the movies as well. You have you claws and a spear. The spear gun usually has a limited amount of ammo, usually twenty per level. You also have the plasma cannon with three triangle lights for aiming, and the flying disc from the second film. This disc seldom killed more than one opponent, or came back like it was supposed to, but it killed well enough that I didn't mind having to retrieve it from the wall.
The Predator might be the easiest character to play simply because he almost has unlimited health due to his ability to recharge when not cloaked. You also have the healing syringe from the second movie.
The sounds for this character are dead on, and nothing is worse then hearing your scream as you get shot from a distance and you hear more humans coming, hoping to follow your glowing green blood trail right to you.
The game's graphics were stupendous for last year, and still not too bad for today. The game plays just fine on even slower machines. Because you are playing in dark areas, and usually through a specific vision mode that washes them with one color, you may not appreciate them fully. The character graphics are dead on, and varied just enough to seem realistic. All the weapons and environments feel right out of the Alien movies, and add a sense of thrill whenever you come across something you recognize from one of the films.
The sounds are perfect replications of all the items from the movies as well. I have been hearing them as computer startup sounds, and modifications to other first person shooters for years. It was good to see them finally match up with the graphics and characters.
There is a level of violence in the game that might overshadow true gore-fests like Soldier of Fortune. As a marine, I've shot off Alien's appendages and they move differently, and slower depending on what I shot off. As an alien you can remove human limbs, and they too act accordingly, although with a severed arm, they tend to just scream, and die in about ten seconds. Cutting a human's torso in half will even leave the top half twitching for a little while. As a predator, I shot a spear gun that took off two human heads and left one pinned to the wall. This was something cool to see. It was a shame that bodies disappear after about a minute, cause I wanted to go back and look at that again.
An early complaint about the game was that it didn't offer any in-level saved games. With the Gold edition, they have changed this so that based upon your difficulty level you can save a few times per level.
There are only five or six single player levels for each character that don't really offer lots of replay value. Still, I found myself incredibly entertained trying to beat each one. There is a real sense of accomplishment advancing from one level to the next, because there is a story of sorts playing out between them. You don't carry over any weapons, and your health is restored when starting the next one, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is pretty standard for most first person shooters.
I also want to mention that the game took some concepts not just from the movies, but also from the novels and comic books that came out later. Some Aliens have taken over Predators, and look and act like an appropriate hybrid of the two. There are also some of the Queen's strongest warriors, the Praetorian Guards, who are basically smaller weaker queen aliens.
This game tends to be floating around the bargain bins these days and was well worth it at full price when it came out!
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