What's Good	What's Bad	4.0 out of 5.0
Fear inducing ambiance smooth gameplay Three species with different strengths	Extremely difficult No mid-level savegame (patch forthcoming) No dedicated server support for multiplayer

That simple exchange of words has haunted me since I saw Aliens in 1986. That movie succeeded in instilling a level of fear into a movie audience that was almost primal. Then, a year later, came the release of Predator. Again, man was being hunted-this time for sport. The fear just kept piling up.

Several years later came the movie Predator 2. A scene near the end of the movie depicts a trophy case inside the Predator ship that contains a skull that looks suspiciously like an alien carapace. Now that's a confrontation I wouldn't want to miss. From a distance, of course. Another movie perhaps? A comic book? How about a computer game?

It's taken nearly 10 years for that to happen, but Aliens versus Predator was worth the wait. Fear played a large part in the first movies and it should come as no surprise that the designers at Rebellion would strive for more of the same. Did they succeed? Yep. In spades. This game had my nerves on edge within 5 minutes. The light and shadows and overall darkness create an ambiance that heightens the fear to an almost palpable level. Add some scuttling Aliens and cloaked Predators and you better pay attention when you step around that next corner. This is not an easy game; even on Training Mode the pacing is furious. The lack of a mid-level savegame doesn't help matters. This was a deliberate design decision, but is in the process of being remedied due to player concerns.

You'd expect the graphic demands of the game to be great, given the different species and abilities. Fortunately, the rendering engine keeps pace perfectly. The engine was written from the ground up and handles the lighting and textures with ease. System requirements are quite reasonable and anyone with a Pentium and a 3D card should enjoy good framerates. The graphics and textures are solid but not in the same league as 'Unreal' or 'Quake III'. This isn't really a hindrance as the environments are largely close quarter and claustrophobic and it is the light and shadows that really create the feeling of menace that permeates the game. The modeled physics seem unusually accurate as well. Walking through several of the shallow puddles in early levels of the game created the expected ripples. Light sources can also be broken and extinguished in the interactive enviroment. I had great fun playing as an Alien and scampering around smashing lights as I went. It's a nice touch like that make a game something special.

The sound is equally dazzling. The sounds and effects are exactly as I remember them from the movies. How can you forget the guttural clicking of a Predator or the menacing hiss of an Alien? Even the beep of the Marine motion sensor has a sense of impending doom attached to it. The game natively supports EAX and the Creative Labs 'Soundblaster Live' card. Unfortunately, those with Aureal's A3D based cards (like the Diamond 'Monster MX300' or Turtle Beach 'Quadzilla') will have to disable hardware support and go with the vanilla sound. No complaints but it would be nice to see a patch that adds support for the growing base of A3D users.

What really makes this game stand out is the species selection. Each race is distinctive and plays very differently from the others. The Marine is the most fragile. He takes falling damage and has no hope of surviving hand-to-hand combat with either of the other creatures. Gameplay is balanced by turning him into a walking weapons platform. The Marine can carry pulse rifles, smartguns, grenade and rocket launchers, and a hip mounted minigun that absolutely shreds. He is also aided by the motion detector and an Image Intensifier that allows him to see in total darkness but disables the motion detector. Repeat after me, "Check the motion detector... turn around... check the motion detector..."

The Predator is the silent killer. He takes no falling damage and can move faster than the Marine. The battle helmet he wears has three modes: Normal (why bother), Thermal (great for Marine hunting), and Electromagnetic (Aliens image in bright white). His cloak renders him nearly invisible and the shoulder mounted plasmacaster can be used in combination with the battle helmet's autotargeting. The shoulder cannon is a formidable weapon but is limited by high energy use and a slow recharge rate. He also carries a speargun with good stopping power but limited ammo. A personal highlight was a long range sniper shot with the speargun that pinned a Marine head to the wall. Gory, but I had to smile. The disc is another potent weapon available to the Predator. It is best described as a homing Frisbee of Death. The negative is that it can easily imbed itself in a wall and takes considerable energy to recall. It's a one shot kill for anything it hits, though.

Finally, there is the Alien. It has no weapons other than tail, teeth, and claw. It's enough. It also takes no falling damage and can climb on any surface, including the ceiling. This makes for some very different gameplay. It took me about 30 minutes to feel comfortable playing as the Alien. It's sheer speed is staggering and it's easy to find yourself on the ceiling and totally disoriented if you aren't careful. The Alien also has a unique approach to a medkit. If you line up a victim in the center of your view, a set of jaws will appear. Striking a live victim when the jaws are on-screen results in a decapitation and a full restore of health. You can also take a head from a corpse, but with a smaller health bonus. The tail strike is stronger than a claw attack but slower.

My particular playing style lends itself more toward the Predator and his strengths. I like skulking around the shadows with my cloak engaged and assassinating the inattentive. The bruiser that prefers a toe-to-toe fight will probably prefer the Marine and his arsenal and the savage among us will appreciate the simplicity and brutality of the Alien. Your choice becomes especially important during multiplayer. I managed to get a few games in via Mplayer (blah -- let's have some dedicated servers) and found that the Predator is definitely the way to go if you want to do some serious stomping. His cloak and disc are nearly unstoppable. Playing as a Marine, I felt helpless after five or six deaths by disc where I never saw my assailant.

All things considered, 'Aliens versus Predator' is a solid game that does a great job of immersing the player in a dark and forbidding environment that lends real fear to the gaming experience. It's a rare game that achieves this depth of involvement. All fans of 3D gaming should definitely make a spot for AvP on their harddrive.