In the face: Aliens VS Predator (2010) PC/360

It was late in the last century when I stood over a friend’s shoulder and peered into a world of terror. Pre-fab corridors drifted off into the darkest of shadows, with red emergency lighting pricking at the black. He carried a pulse rifle, with an over/under grenade launcher and some flares. The environment throbbed with ambient noise but his motion tracker was a metronome of peace.

As he picked his way through the empty halls, tossing flares to light the way ahead, the tracker would blip, until, with a not-far-enough-away familiar shriek, movement would explode towards him. They came, black serpentine creatures with razor claws and faces of teeth. The pulse rifle spat at them, the grenades tossed them back but they kept coming, until he had no choice but to run.

The first time I watched Aliens VS Predator (1999) played on a PC I was so immediately riveted and overwhelmed with tension I actually asked him to pause the game.

AVP (2010) recaptured that magic up until the point where I, as a marine, punched an alien.


In what I must assume was a concession to cross-platform developing, melee combat is introduced and robs the game of all tension. Once you punch an Alien in the face, fear is no longer an option.

Less egregious but still annoying is a similar cross-platform concession requiring separate button prompts to transition as an Alien from vertical to horizontal surfaces. Unlike the original, where the Alien moved freely with lightening speed across any surface, AVP (2010) ‘s Alien mission has neither the speed or freedom of movement afforded by the precision of a mouse and keyboard.



Unbreakable animations also prevent the only joy of playing as an Alien, that of a meaty head bite shown in all incarnations from within the mouth of the Alien. The graphic violence of popping a hole in a Marines skull is thrilling the first few times, but after suffering perforated deaths while waiting for the animation to finish, the bloom is off.

The Predator missions suffer the least in the newest version, though the plentiful vision types offered previously are reduced to 3, Normal, Infrared, and Alien. Unfortunately plagued by an overly complex control scheme, furious hack and slash moments are replaced with hop and block and once again, unbreakable animations.



AVP (2010) is a stunning game on PC, where muddy console textures have clarity and DX11 effects create weighty atmosphere. Unfortunately, the gameplay concedes too much in moving to console and retains too little on PC.