Aliens vs. Predator

This is for people who want the fantasy of being the Alien, the Predator, or the marine standing between them delivered straight, and it is not for anyone who needs modern shooter comforts like generous checkpoints, clean melee, or a busy multiplayer lobby. Rebellion built this as a return to the studio's own 1999 AvP, and that DNA shows everywhere: three separate campaigns, three completely different control schemes, and almost no interest in holding your hand while you learn them. The 91 percent Steam rating and the 68 Metacritic are both correct, which tells you most of what you need to know. Critics graded it as a 2010 shooter. Players graded it as an Aliens vs Predator simulator. The second scoring system is the more useful one here. The Marine campaign is the part that sticks. You get a pulse rifle with that clattering ammo counter, a shotgun, a smartgun that does the aiming for you, a flashlight you will hate having to put away, and a motion tracker that turns every corridor into a countdown. Rebellion understood that the horror in Alien is basically arithmetic: something is thirty meters out, then twenty, then it is off the tracker entirely because it is above you. Ammo is tight, the colony interiors are dark in a way most modern games are too polite to attempt, and the first time a facehugger closes the gap between you and a vent, you understand why this thing still has an audience sixteen years after release. The other two campaigns trade fear for power in different flavors. As the Predator you climb, cloak, and pick your angles: vision modes to sort warm bodies from cold machinery, wrist blades and a plasma caster for the payoff, focus jumps that let you cross a canopy or a rafter line without ever touching the floor. It plays like a stealth game with a very short punishment window, and the trophy kills are gratuitous in exactly the way the license demands. The Alien is the strangest of the three and the most divisive. You run along walls and ceilings with a free surface traversal system that keeps its own opinion about which way is down, you carry no ranged weapon at all, and you top your health back up by eating people. Plenty of players never get comfortable with that camera. The ones who do will tell you it is the closest anything has come to the animal's point of view. What holds it back is most of what happens between the good set pieces. Melee is a rock-paper-scissors of light attack, heavy attack, and block, and it feels floaty on all three species, which is a real problem when two of your campaigns are built entirely around getting close. Checkpoints are stingy and placed by someone who clearly never lost ten minutes to one. The story is a thin frame holding the levels together rather than a reason to keep playing, and the human characters barely register. Enemy AI swings from genuinely unnerving to walking face-first into a doorframe. Each campaign runs a handful of hours, so the whole package is short, and you will notice how much level geometry gets reused across the three passes. Multiplayer was meant to be the long tail, and it is worth setting expectations there. The mode list reads well: species deathmatch, mixed species matches where the balance argument is the entire point, an infestation variant where one alien turns every kill into another alien until the last marine is standing alone, a predator hunt rules set, and co-op survival against escalating alien waves. When a lobby actually fills, the asymmetry does something almost nothing else replicates, marines welding themselves into a chokepoint while tracker pings crawl across the ceiling. The catch is how often that happens on an old PC shooter with a small, loyal population. Plan your purchase around the campaigns and treat any match you get as a bonus. Come for the Marine campaign and the Predator power trip, go in knowing the melee is stiff and the checkpoints are mean, and do not expect the story to carry anything. If you want a tightly balanced modern shooter, several things do that job better. If you want one evening being hunted and one evening doing the hunting, with source fiction handled by people who obviously cared about it, this holds up considerably better than its critic score suggests.

Alex · Scout Team

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