Gaming Aliens vs Predator Review and Video

1) Not quite 3 inches, but there's plenty of repetition between the races
2)Yes
3)Yes
4)Yes, but with a keyboard!

I'm possibly the biggest Aliens fan you'll ever meet, and I won't be playing this. Oh for Colonial Marines, which at least had some squad play potential

 

I was playing the demo last night and all the marines were playing as a team, grrr... people always want to do their own thing.

In deathmatch they want to play as a team then in left 4 dead they don't !! But they were French !!!

 

Nice to see a great video to acompany the review, showed some great stuff, and no american trash talking just nice calm talking english peeps....

 

Well, I do tell Joe he's rubbish, but that's not trash talking, that's true.

 

Had? Last I checked it was still coming out. Or at least that's what Gearbox say.

 

Regarding the marine being able to fight aliens and predators in hand to hand I don't know where people get the impression it's impossible or unusual. In Aliens Vasquez fights and beats an alien in hand to hand combat, just she happens to get maimed by the acid spray, but she does a pretty good job of pinning it's head to the side of a duct and shooting it through the face. Both Dutch and Harrigan in the Predator movies also have pretty drawn out hand to hand fights with the monster, although they look set to lose both the evidence is without the element of surprise the Predator doesn't always have it so easy.

Disappointed with the game so far I must confess though. If the aim if the game in Pred/Alien mode is to sneak and kill then as has been mentioned it needs a LOT of death animations to not be boring. Bloodlines and Dark Messiah have been mentioned as examples of games that didn't have many stealth kills, but there again they were not stealth kill games. If you look at Tenchu, Velvet Assassin, Manhunt or Hitman: Blood Money as examples of games where the objective is to bump people off stealthily you'll see often dozens of animations.

If anything can save it, it's multiplayer. Survival mode sounds like a hoot but I miss the skirmish mode from the original game, that was brilliant, as was the way lighting was handled in that game. Feels like a step back in some ways.

 

Perhaps I just suck at melee combat with the Predator. I keep getting owned by the Alien tail attack. A vibra-disc to the attacker's face usually saves me The Predator heavy attack takes a long time to charge, and the Predator gives off an audible warning that what he is about to do. A good Alien will just sneak around it and attack.

The Marines, if they band together, are a frightening proposition. A good marine will dodge the ranged Predator attacks and unless the Aliens swarm, picking them off one at a time is relatively easy.

 

Its Alien vs Predator + a 7 review score. While not fantastic its good enough that I'll be buying it, its Alien vs Predator.

 

There's a good set of videos on Youtube by a guy called tidomann which have a "guide" to the melee combat for each species (although the Predator one isn't up yet). It just walks you through each of the various types of attacks, like the Close Combat Featurette but just... better.

I found playing as the Predator so much more... "safe" in the multiplayer since i'm not instantly punished when i mess up and get countered (slight knockback + stun > knocked on the floor).

The Alien's tail attack is rather deadly (and i found out it has hardly any startup on any surface that's not the "floor" since it's designed to poke out lights... the tradeoff is that it's more disorientating to use). However, whilst the Alien doesn't emit the "growl" of the Predator for the heavy attack, it does have a "standup and slide" visual cue. I think the growl is to warn people when Pred's are cloaked which the Alien obv. can't do.

As for sneaking round the Heavy Attacks, i've personally found that rather hard to do since the lock on with the melee seems to be rather... sticky? As long as you can turn roughly in time with the Alien, you should still be able to connect... i've heard attaching to a wall can be a good counter though.

And as for the shuriken disc thing... if there was one thing that could be classed as game-breaking, i think that would be it. I absolutely hate it when i get caught by that thing since it just feels so cheap, but don't get me wrong. As a Pred it does feel rather satisfying... the problem is that it removes the need for the combi-stick with a faster startup but longer cooldown before you can use it again/comes back to you. However that last point is obviously moot when you can control the damn thing in the air . Many a time have i thrown out the Shuriken, have it miss the first time, get hit by an Alien, go to block and have the disc catch them on the way back merely because they were between me and the return path.... ever so funny but ever so frustrating when it happens to you (especially if you manage to take out that Predator in the time between).

And as for the marine's banding together... that indeed is a larger challenge. I remember one match we managed to set up an "honour" system whereby it was Species Deathmatch (albeit with Friendly Fire), it was actually really fun especially considering the lack of communication between us all. The marine's all went around together in a group and the Aliens skulked about in the shadows before using either another Alien or Predator as a distraction before leaping into the group. Ever so satisfying when you manage to successfully stalk and eliminate a group of 3 marines using distractions and hit and run tactics .

 

the humans are so gimpy lol

 

I challenge you to proving you're a bigger Aliens fan! (j/k)

I tried playing it, just because I love the Aliens franchise so much, and it's just.. unplayable.. the Alien was kind of fun for the first 2 levels and then I just got bored, Marine and Predator are just.. lame. Meh. I'm going back to AvP2 Multiplayer.

That and the game keeps freezing, it's really annoying.


Thankfully 5 new Alien books came in the mail today, so I at least have something good to read to keep me busy.

 

Greetings!

So a follow-up article with screenshots comparisons and performance differences is expected?

 

Found some DX11 screenshots here: http://forum.alienslegacy.com/viewtopic.php?p=111998&sid=f00055266c168bb52f81223f1be358c0#p111998

 

That does look rather swish... hopefully it'll look rougly similar if it runs in DX10.

 

hahahah at this - he is right but its nice that its pointed out!

 

There's also Machiko(? it's been a while since I read it), the (blooded) human that ran with a Preditor pack in the AvP book Hunter's Planet. She often held her own against the Preditor she nicknamed Shorty, so it's definitly not impossible.

 

Yeah Machiko slaps a few aliens about, but the books are just expensive fanfic. The AvP games are very much just Predators stepping into the Aliens franchise. The books seem to be a bit all over the shop. The AvP movies are Aliens turning up in the Predator franchise, and to be honest if it wasn't for the fact the games have been so good over the years the whole thing wouldn't have lasted longer than Freddy vs Jason. There's no consistency and nobody to address the simple fact that a smartgun is to Predators what a hungry bloodhound is to a poorly concealed sausage.

Much as I liked AvP and AvP2 I do miss the days of pure Aliens games. Aliens was arguably one of the very first ever First Person Shooters back on the Spectrum and Amstrad, and there was a really rather cool Alien game based on the first movie as well. Alien 3 on the Megadrive was pretty cool too. Predator just had a sideways scrolling shooter as far as I recall that I played on the Atari ST but it wasn't up to much, there was a Predator 2 game but I think that was even worse. I'm very interested in seeing what Colonial Marine turns out like. Without the Predators the Alien series has real potential, as does the Predator series if somebody was to pick it up. There's a new Predator-only movie in the pipeline so maybe things will take off again.

Fear my Aliens nerd skillz.

 

I have the full retail game now. Trying out the Marines single player and I'm not impressed. Graphically it's nice but I really hate the firing from the hip garbage. Not to mention that the pulse rifle is pathetic. I go through 50 rounds to kill an alien but 12 rounds from a pistol will kill one. Going to try the Predator single player now.

Oh, DX11 graphics rock! Game looks amazing!

 

got the game this morning not happy as for some reason once you choose who you want to play and the intro finiishes nothing use task master and it says game not responding so uninstalled rebooted and it worked so thought i woulg give multi-player ago same as before not responding so at the moment pissed of lol

 

Corrected. I'm gonna popularize the concept of Vocabulary Nazism