Aliens Versus Predator 2

aka: Aliens Versus Predador 2, AvP 2
Moby ID: 5493
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Description official descriptions

On planet LV1201, ancient alien ruins have been discovered. The Weyland-Yutani corporation sets up a research facility in the area, to study and unlock the secrets of the excavation. When xenomorphic (alien) eggs are found, Dr. Eisenberg is assigned command of the scientific progress. Weyland-Yutani also hires a band of mercenaries, under the command of discharged General Rykov to act as security of the facility. As time passes, observation pods are set up to observe an artificial xenomorphic hive. The xenomorphs however manage to escape containment and the resulting chaos sends out a distress call, which attracts the attention of the "Predator" alien species, as well as dispatching a colonial marine vessel, the USS Verloc, to render aid. Three intertwined campaigns tell the story: that of human marine Lt. Harrison, a newly hatched xenomorph and a Predator clan leader.

Aliens Versus Predator 2 is a first person shooter. Players can choose to begin a campaign as Alien, Predator, or a Colonial Marine, each with their own unique abilities and weapons.

The Marine plays as a standard FPS, with the player needing to pick up weapons, ammunition and health items. The screen shows the player's health percentage as well as armor. Some of the weapons include flamethrowers, miniguns, grenade launchers, rocket launchers and smart guns. The marine also carries a motion tracker which displays movement around the player. To see in the darkness the marine uses a shoulder-mounted flashlight or night vision, both of which drain battery power (which recharges on its own after a time). The marine can also toss flares which burn for a short time. In the single player mode, Harrison is a technician and handles a wielding torch and a ComTech Hacking Device which can be used to "hack" certain circuit boards.

The Alien plays much more stealthily, requiring the player to hide in the darkness and choose its moments of killing carefully. The alien has various stages of its life cycle, all of which tend to leave it with no weapons beyond its own claws and teeth, although some alien forms also feature a tail which can temporarily stun enemies. Depending on the alien's stage of development it can jump 6 feet, switch between normal and night vision modes, climb up most surfaces, pounce forward at targets in a fury of claws and bite the head off defeated foes to regain health.

The Predator on the other hand features superior weaponry and abilities but also uses its stealth to properly hunt opponents. It can jump several feet, use a cloak generator, regain health by using the medi-comp in the wrist, recharge energy quickly using the Energy Sift, and switch between several visual tracking and zoom modes built into the hunting mask. Many of the Predator's abilities use energy, which is displayed on the screen along with health. The Predator's weapons are designed for hunting and include: wrist blades, the combstick tribal spear, a spear gun, a plasma pistol, a shoulder cannon which fires balls of plasma, a bladed disc, remote bombs and a net gun to entangle the enemy. In single-player, the Predator is also able to hack certain circuit boards using the Charge Emitter.

Aliens Versus Predator 2's multiplayer mode lets the player select any of these three species in various "classes". Game types include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch Species and Hunt.

Spellings

  • Alien Vs Predator 2 - Alternate spelling
  • 异形对铁血战士2 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

176 People (125 developers, 51 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 62 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 94 ratings with 6 reviews)

If you love the FPS genre, or Aliens the film for that matter, pick this up now!

The Good
Do you remember the first time you watched Aliens? Remember when the colonial marines are just entering the colony complex, and they're splitting off into squads to scour the complex for survivors? Remember how tense you were as you tried, vainly, to spot movement in the hallways and abandoned rooms? Remember the constant beat of the motion trackers? The first human mission of Aliens Versus Predator 2 eerily recreates those moments of the film right down to the smallest detail. I couldn't believe that I was exactly getting tense playing a computer game, something that had never, ever happened to me before. When I finally spotted movement in the game, I was so charged up I fired wildly at it with my pulse rifle, decimating what turned out to be a large beetle.

To be fair, I was playing the game on the hardest difficulty setting, which doesn't allow you to save during a mission. This, combined with the game's naturally dark, humid tunnels and confined spaces, creates a truly frightening atmosphere that dares you to poke your head through that open doorway. I counted half a dozen deaths that literally made me jump in my seat. Impressive, to say the least.

AVP2 features three distinct races, each with its own weaponry, tactics and so on. This is a very nice option, and I wish more developers would exploit the potential inherent in this game design. Unlike Starcraft or Warcraft III, which feature a linear storyline that develops as you play each race, AVP2 tells the same story from the distinct perspectives of each race. Thus, each time you play the game through, you get further insights into the dark dealings of the game's doomed research complex.

The weapons are just as cool as you would expect them to be (provided you're a die-hard Aliens fan like myself). The colonial marines are the most traditional, featuring everything from small arms to heavy automatic weapons. The predator must be played more stealthily, sniping at enemies from the cover of its cloaking. The alien is a blast to play, whether you're scuttling along the floor as the facehugger or pouncing on your next meal as a full-grown xenomorph.

Everything else, from graphics to sound design, is top-notch and rivals anything being done with the Quake III engine.

The Bad
I only have one nitpicky gripe against an otherwise excellent game. You'll occasionally come across design gaffes which force you to know what the programmers were thinking in order to win. The most glaring of these comes at the end of the marine campaign, in which you are attacked by a pair of praetorian aliens while standing on a precipice with a dropship behind you. I died at least four or five times trying vainly to kill the onrushing praetorians before I learned that they were invulnerable, and that the only way to win is to jump into the dropship (which I hadn't really paid attention to since it was behind me). I hate that kind of game design, and wish that developers would design endgame segments more logically.

The Bottom Line
It's your standard FPS done right. Plus it's set in the Aliens universe, so you can't go wrong.

Windows · by Lucas Schippers (57) · 2002

It's like playing the Aliens movie, with a special guest star...

The Good
Dr Eisenberg's experiment is totally out of control, even though he won't admit it...
The mysterious incident no one seems to know much about had something to do with the xenomorphs, I would bet both arms on that... I mean... Pod Number 5 has been totally destroyed!! What kind of cataclism can be so powerful as to take down such a monumental structure?
...
And now we lost all contact with the exterior. We can't even communicate with the Primary Observation Complex...
Yes, the xenomorphs were involved somehow. We had it coming. Some things should be better left uncovered.
...
And now I'm definitely sure there's... something else out there.
*
<font color="#3366CC">The Eisenberg has stolen a number of eggs. The Eisenberg wants to make things to them. I have been born in captive. I must escape. The Eisenberg has built an artificial Hive and fooled the Mother into spawn broodlings inside it. The Eisenberg wants to capture the Mother. I must save the Mother.</font>

Here we are, once again. The dumb marines of the VERLOC, always underrated and criticized by civilians and politics, but we are the first to be called when it comes to to put off fires.
The Weyland-Yutani Corporation has problems with one of their colonies again. They lost contact, and we have to find out why. Another raid over some multi-millionaire installation that must not take any harm, which means no heavy stuff.
Again, sent to war armed with a fork.
I only hope this isn't another bug-hunt.

**
<font color="#006600">The prey is here. It's my chance to prove myself a worthy leader.
And there's something else too. I seem to recognize them.
Nevermind.
Time to hunt.</font>

Aliens vs Predator is a name that speaks for itself in lenghts. The franchise is the physical manifestation of a fantasy that grew in the minds of most of us who were teenagers during the late 80's and early 90's, those nerds who argued for hours about "who would win a fight between...?"
Aliens vs Predator 2 is in general lines a great improvement over the original ALIENS VS PREDATOR. Not that the first game was bad at all (in fact it's an excellent game) but this one's much more of a cinematic adventure, with an actual story to follow, and a lot of technical enhancements.

Gameplay-wise, both games are the same: a first person shooter (FPS), with some very light adventuring to do —the pull the lever to open the door at the other end of the building kind of adventuring.

This second game is powered by the Lithtech engine, which grants a smooth and good-looking gameplay, providing you have a generous amount of RAM and a powerful video card. A graphics chip with a Z-Buffer is greatly appreciated, since the game features extremely large outdoor environments.
In this regard, the scenario graphics are amazing. Outdoor environments are not only massively huge, but also very well designed, full of life and details in their grim loneliness. Indoor scenarios are certainly something: they're perfect recreations of the buildings we've seen in the 'Aliens' movie.
Characters feature a much higher poly-count than in the first game, higher resolution textures, life-like skeletal animation, and what all not. Some particular characters we got to see in the first game will show up again, like the predalien and the praetorian alien, and they look much better and way more menacing.

Regarding the sound, we've got an immersive music score which matches the action perfectly, getting to enhance the atmosphere very nicely with its changes of pace; we've got a very acceptable voice acting which matches the game perfectly; and —above all— we've got every single one of the sounds we've heard in 'Aliens' and 'Predator' movies. The other day I watched 'Aliens' for the Nth time, and I noticed that even the noise of the doors opening and the elevators is the same.

Like it happened with its predecessor, the most interesting feature of AvsP2 is the possibility of playing three different stories: Alien, Predator, and Marine. This gives the game a lot of interest, since every character needs to be played in a very different way according to his particular abilities/limitations.
Playing as the predator is just as fun as it was in the first game. It's like the guest star of the movie, but at the same time it's the most interesting character to play. Here, it has a few new weapons and the ability to perform HUGE leaps, which sets it quite apart from being just a marine that can get invisible.
The alien —as cool as always, with its ability to walk on walls and ceilings, and feed on enemies' heads— now can pounce on an enemy from a large distance, and has one added trivia attractive: the first level we will play a facehugger in search of a victim to infest, and the second level we will play the newborn chest-burster, looking for food and safe hiding in order to get to evolve into the real thing.
The marine missions, like it also happened in the first game, are the most horror-inclined ones. In AvsP2 we have a radio through which we are in contact with the team, and even though it's not a real useful feature, it really adds to the atmosphere, specially when after a while of nothing going on, suddenly there are xenomorphs all over the place, and as we try to fight our way out, we hear our desperate comrades, the gunfights, and the aliens chilling screams. The whole lot is like playing a scene from the 'Aliens' movie. Furthermore, there are a few bonuses that every 'Aliens' fan will greatly appreciate, like the possibility of using one of those exo-skeletons that Ripley used to fight the alien queen.

The multiple-character device in AvsP2 has yet another piece of interest, since it not only involves gameplay: as the three stories are set in the same timeline, playing each character will let us watch the same story from a different perspective, so only by the time we finish the game with all three characters we'll have the whole thing figured out.
This way, even though the storyline is nothing to write home about, the way it's told really is. This is one of those games in which a smart storytelling makes interesting an otherwise rather simple storyline. Note that even though I say the story is not that great, it IS much better than in the first game, featuring a few plot twists in which, for example, the marine will have to fight other human beings as well as aliens and a predator.

To spice the game up, there are multiple winks for the player who pays attention. One of the greatest things is, there are several moments in the game in which we will meet ourselves.
For example: there's a stage in the marine missions in which we open a door and, incidentally, we release a predator who's being held captive in some sort of cryo-capsule.
At a certain point in the predator missions, we'll get setup, caught, and contained in some capsule. Upon waking up, we'll see a marine passing by and releasing us before escaping through some hole in the floor.
Playing as the alien we'll pass by some laboratories, and we'll see a captive predator being released by some dumb marine...

The Bad
In the first place, I found this game too short. I played it right after I finished DEUS EX —one of the longest experiences a person can go through- and maybe that distorted my perception of what a long game is, but I think there's definitely something wrong in the game, that left me with the impression that something was missing...
As you can guess, the marine missions end in a confrontation with the alien queen; but the thing is, it happens too soon, and it's not as... spectacular as it should be.

The atmosphere, although pretty chilly and immersive, isn't nearly as scary as it was in the first ALIENS VS PREDATOR, specially in the marine missions. Strangely, I fail to tell WHY is this, but I found lots of people saying the same thing: even though AvsP2 is technologically WAY superior to the first ALIENS VS PREDATOR, the first game was WAY more scary.

The taunts! What ever happened to the taunts? In the first game, it was quite amusing —playing as a Predator- to invisibly sneak behind a marine, suddenly yell at him, and watch him run around horrified.
Here, the taunt key doesn't do a thing!
I know, it's not a useful feature, and let alone useful, but... I want my taunts back!!

And finally, what I think is the biggest flaw of this game: there are some special effects, like the visual modes of the Predator, the marine's motion tracker, or even the blood-shot whenever we sever a head, that were MUCH BETTER done in the first game.
The marine's motion tracker is awfully designed, with some horribly silly blue colour, and it isn't nearly as useful as it was in the first game. Maybe part of the lost atmosphere I was talking about relies in the fact that the first ALIENS VS PREDATOR made us much more depending on this tool, which we needed just as badly as we got to hate, with its nerve-breaking beeping. In AvsP2, on the other hand, you can forget about it quite easily.

The Bottom Line
Aliens vs Predator 2 is a must for every 'Aliens' fan.
The first game was a really cool experience, but it was more of a typical FPS with a scary twist —granted, REALLY scary.
This game, on the other hand; is REALLY an 'Aliens' game. It IS another FPS, but it features your typical 'Aliens' plot, with all the characters and events you would expect from an 'Aliens' movie.
Plus, there's the Predator, who adds a whole new dimension to the package, specially gameplay-wise.

I'm usually a storyline-driven guy, and pretty picky about the games I like, but this (as it happens with the 'Aliens' movie) is one pure-action game which I just can't stop replaying.

Windows · by Slug Camargo (583) · 2003

Alien Movie. Predator Movie. It's all Weyland-Yutani's fault that I'm so scared!

The Good
First off let me mention that I have never played the first Aliens VS Predator game. I did however watch 4 Alien movies and 2 Predator ones... but I've never tried pursued any comic books, breakfast cereals or other spin-offs other than the movie and this game. Now, on to the review...

I basically picked this one up because it was on sale and I was in need of a FPS thrill. Well, I got it. The single player campaign opens up in three ways... a Human Marine... a hunting Predator or a ravenous Alien... each of the three choices comes with it's own plot (which intertwines and makes references with the other two plots), levels, situations and most importantly... gameplay. Playing as an Alien is completely different from a Marine. Having to rely on ammunition may be a problem for the humans, but the Predators recharge their energy.... you get the idea. I'll summarize it with this: Whomever you pick it will be COMPLETELY different than the other two...

Okay, once you start the game, you'll feel like you are in an Alien movie (specifically Aliens (2nd movie) and Alien3). The same familiar undertones are there.... a station unprepared for the Alien menace, the involvement of the Weyland-Yutani corporation, the failing machinery and equipment, the Exosuits, the large ominous looking cranes... and you'll be scared like one too. Quite simply, the action switches very quickly from "nothing happening, where are they?" to being attacked at all sides and having your heartbeat racing. Occasionally you can prepare yourself a second or two beforehand by listening to the music... but often it's quite sudden and Aliens particularly can come from any angle...

I've talked all about the Aliens so far because atmosphere-wise... this is their game. They could have left out the Predators entirely and it wouldn't have made a dent in the "feel". But they didn't... the Predators are like active killers that lurk just out of sight and hard to kill when you finally find one (by that same token, playing as a predator is usually a game of cloak and dagger... or more appropriately, spear gun). Whereas the Aliens often appear in swarms and attack hastily... the Predators are cold, calculating and just waiting to get a good shot off. And the Predators do get a some "familiar" setting (referring to the movies) a couple of times with outdoor jungle and rocky areas..

The Bad
What didn't I like about this game? Not very much. It succeeds where it is supposed to.

One complaint... while Playing as a Predator, you have three vision modes... 1 of them (Spectral) is simply too dark to navigate with and light optimization makes too many enemies transparent. As a result, simply not seeing things in time has resulted in my death more than anything else. These limitations are used to balance out the Predator (who has some great technology!)... but it's still a frustrating point

The level design is right on... however IMO there are just too many 'vertical shafts'... I think this might be a personal preference however, since I don't mind the horizontal ones and I'm pretty sure I've run into just as many of those if not more.

This is one of those games where you don't want to play in the dark, and yet at the same time... don't want any excess glare to spoil the darkness of the game and levels.

The Bottom Line
Let me tell you, I tried Unreal 2: The Awakening a few months ago... and this is a LOT more fun and well-designed. Even better it doesn't suck the life out of my videocard to do it.

But onto the real point.... If you're a fan of the Alien movies... GET THIS GAME NOW!... If you're a fan of the Predator movies... YOU PROBABLY WANT IT TOO... If you're a fan of FPS in general, this is as interesting as Half Life was... and the game itself is going to make you a little more afraid to enter dark rooms...

Windows · by Shoddyan (15001) · 2003

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Shot enhanced Geamandura (2326) Feb 16, 2010
What's in the box? Judicator Sep 17, 2009

Trivia

German version

In Germany, the game was released both as original English and censored German version. Most differences are removed blood and splatter effects; including level decor and cutscenes. Also changed are the animations of the scientists the player encounters. A detailed list of changes can be found on schnittberichte.com (German).

Inaccuracies

When the Alien-episode is selected, an intro movie will play and show us some nasty happenings in a Weyland Yutani-base somewhere. However, we see Eisenberg lying and shaking in fear on the floor in some nasty looking room. Note that he has red blood around his mouth. But in outro movie when his arms and legs are ripped off, we see that he is an synthetic judging by the the white blood-looking liquid that is stained on his clothes and the wires from where the limbs should be. Did Monolith forget how they created the Eisenberg-character?

Multiplayer servers

The official multiplayer servers (which were hosted on GameSpy) were shut down on 1 November 2008, but a community master server has been online since late 2008. (Available here)

Save feature

The original Aliens vs. Predator was universally criticized for having extremely long and difficult levels and no in-mission save feature (eventually, Fox and Rebellion released a corrective patch). The back cover ad-blurb on AvP2 includes a statement that would seem silly on any other game:

Save your progress at any point during the mission

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 2002 (Issue #213) - Best Action Game of the Year
    • April 2002 (Issue #213) - Best Multiplayer Game of the Year
    • April 2002 (Issue #213) - Best Gaming Moment of the Year (being a fledgling alien)
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/2008 - Named as having one of the "10 Coolest Levels" (for "Unwelcome Guests" because it manages to scare the player without confronting him with enemies for a long time.

Additional information contributed by ClydeFrog, Ghostbreed and Sciere

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Related Sites +

  • Alien vs. Predator Central
    Lists and lore explanations about the AvP series, including information about Aliens vs. Predator 2.
  • Aliens vs. Predator 2
    Official Community Discord for Aliens vs. Predator 2 - Skins - Mods - Maps Discussions Tech support.
  • An Intergalactic Battle Royale
    An Apple Games article, archive on the author's website, about the Macintosh version of Aliens Versus Predator 2. The article provides a descriptive overview of the game, with comments from MacPlay President Mark Cottam, as well as a guide to the background of the Aliens vs. Predator universe, an introduction to the game's races, and a collection of cheats (September, 2002).
  • AvP Unknown
    fansite about the game with various resources including servers, skins and maps
  • NZMac Review
    A (largely) unscored review of the Macintosh version of the game by NZMac, a New Zealand Apple site. The review is ultimately positive, though with some qualifiers (Sep. 01, 2003).

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by aaron minjares.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Entorphane, JPaterson, Shoddyan, Mata-Cavalo, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Janno Varja, AVPUNKNOWN ..

Game added December 17, 2001. Last modified March 3, 2024.