One thing that this project has kept on showing is that there is never just one story happening in games at any given time. When movie action games were doing numbers in the late ‘80s, there were still plenty of people playing snooker, Daley Thompson’s third compilation, and Crazy Cars. 2005’s rapid multiplication of street racers and Star Wars games couldn’t take over the whole year (at least no one thought of combining the two).
So in 2010 there were plenty of alternatives in the mainstream to first-person shooters. It was still a rather crowded market, sci-fi shooters even more so. To stand out, British developers Rebellion returned to a game of theirs from back in 1994 on the Atari Jaguar, Aliens vs. Predator. This was a concept newly boosted by having been made into two movies in the interim, and it was also one which itself played on the idea of multiple stories happening at the same time.
I’ve never watched either an Alien or Predator movie, so the latter aspect is the one which worked more to draw me in. In both 1994 and 2010 iterations, Aliens vs. Predator is more like three games in one, like Die Hard Trilogy but with a trilogy of species instead of the accompanying films having been good enough to make it to three entries. Each of the humans, xenomorph aliens and Predators has their own scenario and their own quite different interface and set of controls, and you can play through any of them in whatever order you choose.
The one where you play as the humans is unsurprisingly the most traditional, a bare-bones FPS which ratchets up tension and powerlessness with plenty of lights going out and unseen things scrabbling around in the dark. The characters and story are similarly limited and it’s the least inspiring of the trio. Once it’s drawn out the initial introduction of its first angry alien, its best trick is kind of already done.
The predator scenario gives you a much more powerful array of weapons and numerous vision overlays highlighting different things, ready for fighting xenomorphs and humans alike, but with a requirement for precision. You can make big leaps between treetops, but only by locking onto specific spots and then triggering the jump. It feels a bit like Metroid Prime if, instead of exploring, it was about ripping people’s spinal cords out of their necks. It’s better than the humans, but suffers from the opposite problems, with the interface mediation over-complicating it and keeping everything at a certain distance.
Finally, there’s the alien scenarios, which have some controls in common but are really not very much like either of the others. Rather, they are an FPS with the limits turned off. You can attach to walls or ceilings, and make rapid leaps between any surface. You can click the left stick and gallop at incredible speed towards your unwitting prey. You are probably best off not playing this one if you have any propensity at all towards nausea from first-person motion. Even without that issue, it can get too disorienting at moments, but managing to pull off dropping from the ceiling for a killing and then flipping gravity back in your favour is a unique kind of satisfaction.
The scenario starts off with you as a captured alien being poked at and showed off by gleeful humans, and it serves two important purposes. One, a tutorial is needed because, although the game is helped by some smart interface choices like the asymmetrical reticule which helps you know which way up you are, it needs a fair bit of explaining and getting used to. The even more important reason is to set the prevailing motivation. Again, I haven’t seen Alien, but as I understand it, the trigger to the alien onslaught being specifically corporate greed and hubris is fairly central to the whole experience.
I don’t usually find stealth games in which you do horrible things to people anything like as enjoyable as I find being a xenomorph, smashing out the lights and launching at the face of some unexpecting sucker saying “don’t let your guard down, marines!”. When the instruction comes up to kill everything that gets in the way, the fact of explicitly playing the role of an inhuman force of nature acting out some kind of cosmic justice helps a lot. Between that and the mind-bending use of space, Aliens vs. Predator really does feel like it’s got something different to offer than anything else around.
Top of the charts for week ending 20 February 2010:
