Kill all monsters! (Aliens Versus Predator 2 (PS))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Aliens Versus Predator 2 (PS)
Date:	28/11/01 (328 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks and sounds great, Aliens, Predators, Marines, 3 styles of play

Disadvantages: Dodgy A.I. in places, Needs powerful system, Lengthy loading trimes

Aliens Vs Predator 2 is (unsurprisingly) the follow up to Rebellion's hit of a few years back based on the same licence. This time, the game has been produced by Monolith, using their Lithtech graphics engine in association with Fox Interactive and Sierra Online.

It's a first person shooter (FPS) in which you can play as any of the three main species to have featured in the Alien or Predator movies (i.e. Human, Alien or Predator), and you must play all three characters in order to fully understand the whole story.

The basic story, to whet your appetite, is set around the same time as the end of James Cameron's Aliens movie. On another planet, LV1201, the three species are again interacting. Some human researchers are investigating a giant Alien hive as well as an archaeological dig of another species (the "Pilot" species from Alien), but it appears that this planet is also a well-known (and ancient) hunting ground of the Predator species. Obviously, things go a bit pear shaped, and a Marine rescue squad is sent in to see what's going on. Add to this, some good old greed, double crossing etc. as in the Aliens movie and the plot, while not exactly a work of art, is interesting enough to see you through the game. The fact that you can only learn the whole story by playing the three species is a good touch as well. The story takes place over quite a long time period, and the three individual storylines of each species has it's own timeline, again which over lap to form a longer, complete story.

The game is set over 21 levels - 7 per species, and can be quite difficult. Unlike the original (unpatched) game, you can save whenever you want, and so this offsets the frustration. You can select the difficulty level at the start of each species (the game is basically three-in-one, with a common story arc) rather than have to play all the way through on one setting. One handy feature when you first load the game is the &q
uot;Continue Game" feature which basically loads your latest save game file automatically without you going to all the hassle of selecting one from a menu and hitting the required buttons.

The game comes on two CDs (one of which is only used for the installation, and one which is needed to play the game) and a full installation of the game will take up 1.3Gb of your hard drive space. Monolith recommend this as a way of speeding up loading times etc. More about this later, though.

Right, now on to the game proper. I've already said that it's quite difficult, and I'm not even playing it on the hardest difficulty level! There are four levels to choose from based on your FPS experience ? Easy, Normal, Hard and Hardcore. (I'd hate to see what hardcore levels are like!) That's not to say that the game is as frustrating as the original, because it's not. For a start, the ability to save when you want is a blessing, as is the ability to pick your own difficulty levels. The game isn't as dark as the original either, meaning you don't get killed unexpectedly as often as the original by enemies springing out of the darkness.

The game plays very well. Unlike the original, the Lithtech engine provides a more colourful (rather than the monotone of the original) environment for you to run around and shoot things in. The three different species provide an interesting variety of gaming styles within the one genre. The human marine is all about guns - all you have to do is survive, no more no less. The Predator is slightly different with your different vision modes and different type of ranged weapons as well as the fact you can now collect "trophies" by collecting the heads of anyone you kill. The Alien is all about speed and stealth - you are not blessed with weapons as such, or lots of health, but you have speed, teeth, claws and a tail. Each of these can provide interesting challenges within the game espec
ially when you are only starting playing as a species for the first time. The ability to climb on walls and ceilings as the Alien, for example, takes a while to get used to as you get disoriented very quickly.

The A.I. is quite disappointing. When playing as the Alien, darkness is supposedly your friend. I say supposedly, because the enemy seems to sense you irrespective of lighting conditions. You can creep up on a human civilian in a brightly lit corridor one minute, only for a marine 30 metres away with his back turned to suddenly swing around and fire his gun at you. Unfortunately, this lessens the impact of playing as three different species.

Once you do get to grips with the various play methods, then you can start to really appreciate the game. On the lower difficulty levels, you are given what are termed as training messages. These will pop up every now and again when you need to know something new e.g. about the vision modes of the Alien or Predator. While not strictly necessary for anyone who has played the original, these can be a blessing for newcomers to this licence.

It's also worth mentioning the sound. Even with the backing of Fox Interactive, I am convinced that the sounds are not taken directly from the original sounds used in the film, but are either sampled from the films or approximated by Monolith's sound guys and/or gals. A lot of them are spot on (or as good as), but there are one or two that just don?t sound right. Not that it matters of course, unless you're a complete Aliens/Predator nerd because the sounds still suit the game really well and provide bucket loads of atmosphere.

One thing that I find not as good about this version over the original is the way the levels were constructed by Monolith. In the original version, several levels were visited by all three species. This may make it sound repetitive, but due to the different playing styles, the levels played in totally different ways du
e to, for example, the Aliens wall climbing ability letting them go into air vents and tunnels, whereas the Marine was forced to use stairs and lifts. This was good because it gave you a better view of how much differently the three species played. The way the levels were designed in AvP2 could be compared to Half-Life and it's two add-ons/sequels (Opposing Force and Blue Shift) where every now and again you might encounter a small group of rooms from a different chapter.

Once you have completed level, it remains in the level list for that species. This means that once you have completed the whole seven levels for a particular species, you can go back and pick any level you wish to replay from the level list.

The manual is good, giving brief pieces of information about various weapons etc. and a list of the four sets of default keys (one "shared" set, and one for each species). It also has a section explaining the various tweaks you can make to the graphics and sound to improve the game?s performance.

Before I go onto the required specifications for the game, I'd like to make a point about the Lithtech engine. It's a very good-looking engine that is capable of doing a lot of different types of FPS games. By using this engine over the original, the game can have big outdoors levels (something the original engine couldn't handle at all well) for some Predator/Marine missions, while still keeping things nice and claustrophobic for the Aliens missions. But after playing AvP2 and No-One Lives Forever (which also uses a version of the Lithtech engine), I have to say that it takes ages to load saved games. Saving games is no different than any other FPS game, in terms of speed, but loading can drag on for several minutes if you're starting from scratch. There also seems to be far too much hard disk access for my liking, again, this is only something that occurs with Lithtech games.

I suppose the question eve
ryone is asking is "Is it any good?" The answer, I would have to say, is yes. The next obvious question would be "Is it better than Half-Life?" There's a long answer and a short answer to this question. The short answer is: "It all depends on how much you like the Aliens and Predator movies".

The long answer is this: It's nearly as good a game as Half-Life. Although the style of play is different, both games are quite scary. The continuous nature of Half-Life makes it seem like a longer game, but it?s probably not. AvP2 is a better game than the original. Most of the best bits are there, and there are enough new concepts to keep it fun (play as a face hugger or chest burster, or use a power loader). It's probably not as groundbreaking as Half-Life in terms of storyline or AI enemies, but it's still a damn good game. It's especially recommended if you like the movies or FPS games in particular. If Monolith had paid more attention to the A.I. as regards seeing in the dark, and a few minor annoyances with the engine (i.e. running into invisible objects when attacking or fleeing enemies) then this would be groundbreaking. As it is, it's just very good.

Anyway, Monolith?s recommended (not minimum specs, which are lower again) specifications for this game are:

Intel Pentium 3 600MHz (or equivalent, I assume)
256Mb RAM
32Mb 3D graphics card
CD-ROM
DirectX 8 (this comes on the CD, if you don't already have it)
DirectX compatible16-bit sound card (most are these days)
At least 750MB hard disk space
The games claims it works on Windows2000, ME and 98. No mention of XP though.

I was running this game on a (where different from above):
AMD Duron 750MHz
192Mb RAM
1.3 GB full installation

The game ran fine on my system, apart from the excessive disk access as I mentioned before. There are loads of options that you can turn off to get bette
r performance from the game without losing detail, and the game plays so fast, you're not going to notice the loss of a few effects anyway.

There is a multiplayer aspect (which needs a LAN [local area network] connection or 56k modem) to the game which I have not yet experienced. At the time of writing there were not many servers providing this game for multiplayer, and my lag wasn?t low enough to play. Unlike the original, AvP2 does not come with AI bots for a single player, multi player experience (does that make sense?).

For further information, you may wish to seek out:
http://www.planetavp.com
http://www.avp.sierra-online.co.uk
http://www.lith.com

Summary: