Unfortunate squandering of the AvP license, but still good fun to play, especially if you're a fan of the series.
User Rating: 7.9 | Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction XBOX
THE GOOD: AvP novelty is cool, playing as Aliens rules, ExoSuits are awesome THE BAD: Generic units, playing as Marines is bland, sub-par audio quality SUMMARY: Let me start out by saying that I'm a huge Alien, Predator, and AvP nut. That instantly makes me biased in favor of this game. I held out on buying it for a very long time, but I ultimately broke down and bought a new copy of the game recently. While AvP: Extinction could have been an absolutely stellar game, it ultimately comes across as a reasonably mediocre real-time strategy game. The plot is pretty basic. It all takes place on the planet LV-742, a Weyland-Yutani mining colony. Predators have been hunting Aliens for a long time, humans show up and have an Alien infestation problem, all three races fight eachother. The missions provide some insight into the grander plot, but you only really get a true sense of what's going on if you beat the campaigns for all three races. Even then, the storyline is quite bare-bones compared to other RTS games like Command and Conquer or StarCraft, or even other AvP games, such as Aliens vs Predator 2 for PC. Unfortunately, there is no "epilogue" or any sort of closure after you beat any, or even all, of the campaigns. There are 21 missions split up over three campaigns with 7 missions apiece. Obviously you get to play as the Marines, Aliens, and Predators. The game is also reasonably long - I play real-time strategy games very cautiously, so I was spending easily an hour or so on each mission, at the least. The sixth Marine mission took me over two and a half hours to complete. The Marine missions are, in my opinion, the most difficult. The Marines' main advantage is that every unit has a ranged attack. They also have the easiest manner of gaining currency in bulk for building units. Outside of this, Marine units are reasonably weak, and players will find themselves mass-producing the most powerful units later on in the campaign and leaving the lesser units (like the Infantryman) long behind. In a stand-up fight, most Marine ranged units get totally outclassed by their Predator counterparts. The Predator units are decidedly more expensive, and have lots of cool little features like draining enemy health, or killing any unit in four hits or less (regardless of size, power, or total health), and obviously, cloaking. All Predator units can cloak for a certain duration. All Predator units also get a medicomp that they can use to heal back to full strength (at the expense of energy). In this way, Predator units are decidedly cheap, especially the most expensive Military-class Predators. The Predators seem... overpowered, much as they did in AvP2 for PC. This is not to say that playing as the Predators is any less fun, or any less easy. The Aliens are definately the most unique and most fun to play as. The game faithfully recreates the Alien reproductive system (albiet at an extremely accelerated rate -- the time from facehugger to embryo to full-grown Alien is under a minute of gameplay time) and this leads to some interesting gameplay challenges. Players must create eggs, secure a location for the Queen, capture hosts, impregnate them, and then repeat to build up a sizeable Alien population with which to attack the enemy forces. There is something rewarding about creating an Alien hive completely from scratch (one facehugger) and eventually amassing a force of 50 Aliens to send out to wreak havoc. The graphics have their high points and low points. Terrain textures are very detailed, even including drips of water falling from the ceilings in caves and causing little ripples and splashes when they hit the ground. Trees and shrubs look detailed and have appropriate apparent height. Where the graphics suffer is on the actual units themselves. For the most part, all the Predators look roughly the same unless you are using some of the higher-end military Predators. The Aliens look a bit cartoony, and while I personally found this very amusing, it doesn't do much for the game's "serious" atmosphere. The Marine units are not terribly detailed, although careful examination reveals that most of them are actually super-scaled-down versions of the character models from AvP2 for PC. The character animations are quite fluid, though, and the death animations for most characters are pretty amusing. Predators will sometimes fall to the ground, try to get back up on their feet, crawl/drag themselves a few feet, and then expire. The sound is decidedly... underwhelming. Every Marine unit has two preprogrammed phrases. One is the phrase it speaks when the unit is selected, and the other is the phrase it speaks when confirming an order. Needless to say, it gets annoying when you hear an ExoSuit say "Talk to me!" for the ten-thousandth time. All of the Predators have the same click/growl, and all the Aliens have the same hiss/snarl. I wish more effort had been put into unit sound design. Other than this, many of the other sounds have been taken straight from the Alien and Predator films, such as weapon firing sounds for the pulse-rifles and smartguns, or Predator weapon sounds like the plasmacaster and disc. The controls are, surprisingly, not as horrible as one might imagine. While a keyboard/mouse setup is obviously optimal, the control system (on the XBox, at least) makes the most of the controller and puts everything in convenient locations. If I had to fault it, the camera system is a little goofy and takes some getting used to, but it never really hindered gameplay once I'd gotten the hang of it. Don't get me wrong - I really wanted this game to kick ass. I love AvP, and I've been waiting for a "real" AvP RTS game ever since StarCraft was new. However, Extinction seems to try TOO hard to distance itself from StarCraft, which it could have easily ripped off from beginning to end (then again, StarCraft is ultimately a send-off of the Alien and Predator films, which are quoted liberally throughout). Ultimately, Extinction sacrifices a lot of the elements that made StarCraft both fun and functional, such as air units, buildings, a tech-tree, and other vehicles. Being a console-only game also doesn't garner Extinction any points. I wish the game had multiplayer support, or at least downloadable content on XBox Live. Also, the game lacks a skirmish mode for quick battles and whatnot, something I felt could have really upped the replay value on the game. One final word: ExoSuits r0x0rs my b0x0rs. The in-game "bestiary", which lists unit descriptions and statistics, is also very clever. Ratings: Casual gamers: 3 out of 5 -- there really isn't anything revolutionary about this game. It's fun and it's worth playing, but only for free. If you're an AvP fan: 4 out of 5 -- the novelty of being AvP is a BIG selling point. Playing as the Aliens kicks ass. If you're an AvP completist: 5 out of 5 -- well, it's AvP. That makes it worth owning. Personally, I am very glad I bought it. 74% - good effort, good idea, ultimately mediocre execution My rating system: 5 = buy it 4 = pay money and rent it 3 = borrow it from a friend 2 = watch someone else play it 1 = don't bother
