Don Gamers

INFO

Aliens vs Predator Ever since the Predator and Aliens franchises made their debut on the silver screen, people have wanted to see them wage war against one another. In 2004 their wish was granted with an abhorrent film adaptation, followed by another poor attempt in 2007. In an effort to breathe new life into the struggling franchises, Rebellion Games (the very same studio that brought us the last great AVP effort in 1999) is taking a stab at a virtual iteration for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. It delivers three short single-player campaigns along with a suite of multiplayer modes and maps.

You’ve got Aliens, you’ve got Predators and you’ve got hapless space marines. The only question left to answer is: is it any fun to play?

Note: For this review I played on an Alienware desktop running Windows 7 with an Intel i7 processor running at 3.2 GHz, 6 gigs of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 260.

While that answer will be stretched into the next thousand words or so, I will start by saying that Aliens vs. Predator has an extraordinarily steep learning curve if you’re playing as either of the extraterrestrials. For that reason, you’re going to want to start with the marine campaign. It’s a much more straightforward first-person shooter that does a good job of introducing you to the world around you. You’ll hear the same radar blips from the films and that telltale machine gun effect has certainly made the jump to the virtual world as well. The audio effects adequately pull you into the Alien world, it’s just too bad that there’s nothing beyond that to enjoy. See, the design of the marine’s campaign is very cookie cutter as far as FPS design is concerned. There’s some fun to be had, and it provides an introduction to the melee mechanics that you’ll need for the Alien and Predator campaigns, but at the end of the day there are just too many better FPS games out there.

Aliens vs Predator PC Game System Requirements

Operating System: XP, Vista or Windows 7 / Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz / Athlon 64 3000+ or equivalent processor / Memory: 1 GB System RAM (XP)/ 2 GB System RAM (Vista) / Video Card (graphics): DirectX 9.0c compliant video card with 128 MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better, ATI X1600 or better) / Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card / DirectX: DirectX 9.0c