Genesis

Predator 2

Though you may not have heard of it in discussions about classic Genesis games, rest assured you'll get a quality experience from Predator 2. If you've ever felt the pressure in Smash TV or the classic Robotron, you'll feel even more at home here. Action games rarely reach this pinnacle and the only thing that may distract players is the awkward control scheme.

Take Smash TV and give yourself the freedom to move around and you've got Predator 2. While not a bad game, I found it to be a little too average from beginning to end. The best part was watching the hostages get toasted!

The original Predator is memorable in creating an enduring sci-fi villain with a rather fresh twist. He's not a mindless drone or persistent robot, no, he's a fairly clever intergalactic hunter with humans as his prey. Predator 2 hasn't handled the test of time quite as well, and is remembered mostly for its odd casting of Danny Glover in the hero role, and the scene where Gary Busey gets sliced in twain. Predator 2 the game is the expected cash-in of equivalent quality.

While many times the little details can turn a good game into a great game, a noticeable lack of them are often enough to turn a mediocre game into a bad one. Definitely part of this latter group, Predator 2 suffers from the same affliction that plagues most modern licensed games: laziness. Although Perfect 10 Productions took a step in the right direction by creating the game as a top-down shooter when side-scrolling platformers were en vogue, their entire project was scuttled by primitive graphics, terrible music, and tedious, frustrating gameplay. A bit more effort could have produced a game nearly on par with the film that inspired it, but instead it plays almost as a sneering taunt towards the series before it was absorbed completely into the Alien franchise.