Alien vs. Predator Review
Alien vs. Predator
Recipe for the perfect game, Take two box office smash licenses mix gently,
add one VERY unlucky marine, and stir. Atari hit the gold mine with this
license, unfortunately its marketing scheme was sub par. The marketing consisted
mainly of game magazine ads, which were fairly cool but a bit sparce, and
an amazing commercial that aired VERY infrequently. AvP was Atari's killer
app, too bad noone heard of it until it was too late.
Although it was met with rave reviews from many magazines at the time, AvP
came out with little fanfare. It did however give the Jaguar its first highly
selling game, as when word spread copies of the game became difficult to
find. Rebellion proved that the Jaguar was a 64 bit system and gave Atari
its first cult hit. They also proved that a movie licensed game could actually
be good.
The graphics in AvP were incredible at the time and still fairly impressive
today, the space station has a cold, eerily sterile feel to it, like the
complexes in the movies did. The walls and ceiling were texture mapped with
lights giving way to alien cocooned corridors as you progress into Alien
infested territory. Enemies were well drawn and animated well, there was
some choppiness to them but they were well done overall. The Predator
materializing in front of you, or alien screaming as it attacked from behind
were enough to scare anyone.
Vision fields for the Predator were taken directly from the movie and had
that distinct sound as you switched between the multiple fields of vision
he had while invisible.
Music in AvP is nil, there is a slight eery song at the title screen, but
no in game music. This is where AvP shined, its sound effects were incredible,
the station could always be heard as its engines lightly hummed in space.
The chilling calm could be broken by the roar of the Predator oh his evil
laugh while he sits and watches you while invisible =). Screaming Aliens,
shouting Marines and hails of weapons fire broke the calm readily as well.
The sound effects are what gave AvP its ''feel'' activating a computer brought
on the computer ''voice'' from the alien movies, very creepy... it just capped
off the eery sterile feel and made you truly feel like you were all
alone.
Gameplay was rather straightforward, standard FPS (first person shooter)
controls abound walk forward, bakward, turn, strafe, switch weapons, and
the ever present health bar. Medical supplies, food, and ammo is abundant.
and you WILL need it =)
nothing truly innovative, except the overlays that came for your controller,
they made switching between weapons by far the easiest of any FPS I ever
played, and although it becomes second nature after a bit, theyre nice to
have =)
Alien vs Predator is not a flawless game, it DOES deserve its ''10'' though,
as its flaws are rather nitpicky and in no way hurt this incredible game.
What would have made it better would have been more animation frames on enemies,
a run button, and the chance to save a few fellow marines would have been
a nice touch...
Like I said not flawless, but this game is pretty nearly as close to perfect
as any FPS I've ever played, as it suffers from almost NO slowdown regardless
if theres 2 enemies or 10 on screen at once, and that alone in my book is
pretty amazing considering I've seen N64 FPS's slow down to a crawl with
3 enemies.
Rent or buy.... BUY! cause your not going to find a Jag rental place anyway....
but once you play this game, you won't want to stop =)
Reviewer's Score: 10 / 10