Aliens Versus Predator

aka: AVP, Aliens vs. Predator
Moby ID: 1127
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Description official descriptions

Aliens Versus Predator is a sci-fi first-person shooter based on the associated two film franchises. The game has three playable species, and each has its own single-player campaign with different missions and plotlines.

  • Aliens - Their only weapons are their own body parts: claws for close combat, their deadly tail, and their inner mouth that can crack through an enemy's skull (for an instant kill) if close enough. They are deadly at close range, and can heal by eating corpses or the heads of unsuspecting enemies. They can't be hurt through falls, and an alternate vision mode allows them to see clearly ahead through darkness. Their strength lies in flexibility and speed, and an ability to cling to walls and run along any surface - allowing a skilled player to escape or ambush from literally any 3D direction.
  • Humans - U.S. Marines, as portrayed by Michael Biehn in the film 'Aliens'. Marines have strong firepower that ranges from the self-tracking SmartGun, all the way to rocket launchers and devastating six-barrel miniguns (as seen in 'Predator'). The Marines are the most familiar species to play as, with the gameplay style of typical FPS hero. However, their frailty at close range, and missions that leave them stranded, alone, surrounded by bloodthirsty extraterrestrials, make their experience closer to survival horror.
  • Predators - Their power is their strength, and their sight. They have at least four ways of seeing the environment - standard vision, heat vision (highlighting Marines), electromagnetic vision (highlighting Aliens), and "Pred-Tech" (for highlighting fellow Predators and their technology). Their weapons are the most precise, deadly, and ranged of those in the game, being ideally suited to stealth-based gameplay. Predators also have the ability to zoom their view in and out when seeking someone, thus allowing them to snipe from afar. Their cloaking ability also renders them nearly invisible to enemy Marines.

There are several multiplayer modes. For a difficult game, you can pit all the players against the horde of computer creatures (which includes experimental robotic Aliens and tough Predalien hybrids). Alternatively, players can choose their favorite species and face each other in an arena-style deathmatch.

Spellings

  • 异形对铁血战士 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

116 People (64 developers, 52 thanks) · View all

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Average score: 86% (based on 38 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 69 ratings with 6 reviews)

Get past the message-boardish title, and you'll find possibly the best movie-to-game conversion ever.

The Good
"They're all over us...get that transport here now! There's to.....any of them! They're swarming..... What the?! Why are they....treating!? Shi........" The above static-filled radio message illustrates two things. First, the dramatic, sweat-drenched tension that defines both the movies (Alien, Aliens and Predator) and the game. Second, of course, a chance encounter of the game's three sides; the xenomorphs (aliens), marines, and the predators. Although the game's title may sound like a never-ending message board debate (or gamespy grudge), these two famous sci-fi universes blend together almost seamlessly. Main changes are that now the Corporation’s genetic experiments now include the vicious predator, creating the somewhat slow but unbelievably durable PredAlien. Besides that is the addition of the minigun the marine's arsenal, and a few logical modifications. Now, on to gameplay. The game is divided into three campaigns, one for each race. Each is about five or six missions long (doubled in the gold edition, which includes a save feature and added missions for each race based on missions from one of the other races campaigns). The missions are fairly large and the game is long enough overall to be quite satisfying. They are also well constructed, properly re-creating the claustrophobic, almost maze-like environments of the movies. They are, naturally, quite dark (light wise), but, thankfully, each race has an appropriate solution. Speaking of the races, each is authentically recreated from the movies with a few logical additions to allow for fps play, but all are designed to be appropriate for the race. This quality also applies to the HUD/interface for each race. The alien interface is extremely simple (just a blue-white health bar at the bottom of the screen), helping with the natural killer feel. The marine's is more conventional, sporting health, armor, and ammo meters in the usual spots. Finally, the predator has a sort of tribal feel to it, but still sci-fi. But how do the races play? Very well, thank you. All of the weapons are here (from alien head bite to predator shoulder cannon), plus a few extras. They are both well modeled and well balanced. The races themselves are fairly well balanced, but the predator is naturally the easiest, followed by the marine, and finally the alien, with their (relatively) delicate nature, can challenge even the most experienced fps player. Gameplay style varies appropriately for each race, along with mission styles, which are strung together in a loose but still interesting campaign. Finally, the graphics. They are excellent for the era, and still look good today. All of the special effects are quite good, especially the different visual modes. The colours and textures are pretty drab, but I suppose they fit in with the environment.



The Bad
Without in-mission saves (you have to download a patch or buy the gold edition), it can be extremely tough to beat. Also, the FMV mission briefings are indecently bad, particularly the marines ones, which give the distinct impression the Lister from the sitcom Red Dwarf is your CO. The enemy AI is tolerable, but the predator tends to just stand there and attack intermittently. Aside from that, there really isn't much to complain about.

The Bottom Line
Bottomline: A good game for anyone, but a great game for any serious fan of the two movie series.

Windows · by Ben Swan (2) · 2002

A truly pulse-pounding gaming experience.

The Good
Aliens Vs. Predator captures perfectly the feeling of the Aliens movies, especially when played from the perspective of the Colonial Marine.

I still recall the first few times I played this game, in the Marine demo version I downloaded from the net. It was intense. For the first time since my rookie days as an FPS player, I was really just trying to survive. As I entered the darkened corridors of a wrecked human colony, my pulse rifle at my side, I truly felt the complete lack of security the Marine would. I saw the intermittent blips on my motion sensor. I could hear them, the aliens. They were everywhere. In the half-dark, climbing over walls and ceilings, hunting me. I felt alone and weak.

By the same token, as an Alien, I was given the sense of the stealthy beast of prey infiltrating the human strongholds. And as the Predator, I was the ultimate combat force, cloaked from human vision and armed with lethal and precise weapons. I gave only passing interest to their gunfire, which concerned me little unless it was particularly fierce. Only their toughest weapons gave me pause.

And right there is reason enough to buy AvP. Even at full retail price, though you needn't pay that much now that it has aged some. You can easily get the Gold edition at around $10 or $20. This game's atmosphere, the experience of just being each race is done artfully well.

But other aspects of the game rock as well. As the Marine, your range of weapons is very nice indeed. You have access to the smartgun, flamethrower, grenade launcher, mini-gun, pistols (single or dual), and a couple of rocket-launching devices. But the highlight weapon, which you will use the most in the game, is your standard pulse rifle with built-in grenade launcher. This sweet and versatile weapon will get you through almost any scrape and ranks, in my opinion, as one of the coolest sci-fi weapons ever conceived.

The Predator's weapons are awesome, too. The wrist-blade will be your work-horse weapon, taking down most enemies with a single swipe. But other weapons such as the spear-gun and the lethal disc are well implemented, each with a real strategy to its use. And, of course, the med-comp for healing those nasty wounds is great and essential when combating aliens.

As The Alien, you are a weapon. Period. The implementation of this and the Alien's wall climbing abilities is near flawless.

Other cool aspects, like different vision modes for each race would take to long to get into. But, suffice it to say, there's still more to this game, and it's good. I leave it to the reader to find out for themselves.

The Bad
There are minor problems. Mainly, the plot, such as it is, can be rather thin. That didn't bug me much, though.

I know some people will complain about the limited saves (and, if I recall, it originally had no in-mission saves, which was fixed for the Gold Edition apparently). I understand where that can be frustrating. But I personally found that it aided the desperate atmosphere when playing as the Marine.

The Bottom Line
An experience for any fan of sci-fi. This game is one of my favorite FPS's and I recommend it without qualification.

Windows · by Steelysama (82) · 2002

One of the scariest and most atmospheric games ever made

The Good
"If it bleeds acid, you can kill it!"

First, a little disclaimer: This game is not based on the horrible 2004 "Alien vs Predator" movie (if anything, it's the other way round, but the distant origin of the franchise is an otherwise unrelated comic book of the same name). Stylistically, the game rather draws inspiration from the original "Alien" and "Predator" movies, most notably James Cameron's excellent and more action-oriented "Aliens" sequel that introduced the "United States Colonial Marines" who play the third faction in this three-in-one game.

It is probably the intense, heart-attack-inducing marines campaign this game is most famous for. However, each faction introduces a whole new style of gameplay, often revolutionary for the first person shooter genre at its time (and sometimes, unprecedented since).

First, there is the Alien campaign. You control one of the nightmarish, survivalist creatures as it defends an ancient alien temple from human intruders. The most unique feature of the alien is its ability to climb every surface, including walls and ceilings, a freedom of movement that is as breathtaking as it is disorienting. Your speed and stealth are your biggest advantage, all attacks are powerful, close-range punches, bites and scratches. Especially gruesome is your ability to bite off an enemy's head when getting close enough and eat your enemies for health (the only HUD element is a white, glowing bar at the lower end of the screen, representing your health points). In normal vision, you can "smell" humans in the dark, represented by a blueish aura. The secondary vision mode is a kind of close-range night vision displaying everything in negative colors. Destroying lights around you (most light sources in the game are dynamic) can turn out to be a good tactic as it makes it easier for you to sneak up to your targets.

While humans are no match for you in close-range, there is a variety of especially annoying long-range weapons (flame throwers and Molotov cocktails set you on fire, for example). The most dangerous opponents, however are not humans but androids (who, by the way, are bleeding the famous "white" blood like in the movies). Androids do not have the "aura" that makes humans easy to spot. They also show no signs of fear and wield their weapons with deadly accuracy. If you bite of an android's right arm, for example, he might pull out a second pistol with his left hand and continue shooting you.

The second creature you get to play is the most powerful of them all: The predator. His motivation is not fear or survival, but honor and the joy of a good hunt. When a group of human scientists captures a fellow predator and his ship, you move out for a bloody trail of revenge. The predator has 3 (!) different vision modes, including the iconic thermal vision from the movies, a red "electrical" vision mode that makes it easy to spot alien creatures and a third, green night vision mode that highlights predator technology. You also have the ability to cloak yourself, which drowns your energy fast. The HUD uses the "predator digits" as seen on the predator's hand-console in the movies, which is a neat little touch. You start every mission packed with a large arsenal of weapons. A powerful wristblade, a speargun (the only weapon with limited ammo from start), the famous auto-targeting shoulder cannon, later a pistol and a homing throwing disk. You also carry medical equipment with you that lets you heal between battles. Basically, the only resource you have to care about is the recharging energy battery. Playing as the predator is probably the easiest mode in the game, but with all the toys you have at your disposal, it also has some of the most fun moments.

And last but not least: The Colonial Marines. I am not exaggerating when I say that the marine campaign features some of the scariest content I have ever encountered in a computer game. Forget mindless gore or Japanese ghost-house games... This game has its own brand of fear. An adrenaline-pumping, heart-attack inducing, in-your-face kind of scariness that goes beyond the mere frustration of games that are just "difficult" (although it is brutally difficult as well, especially in "director's cut" mode).

Your main enemy is the classic alien, attacking you in hordes of screeching, clawing monsters crawling out of every vent shaft and dark corner, in front, above and behind you. Aliens can smoothly climb around walls and ceilings in this game, so you never really know where to look. And they're fast. Like, really fast! Often you just hear one of their heart-piercing screams, see some pixels flickering a mile away, and before you know it an alien is dropping from the ceiling in front of you, jumping 50 meters in a second and landing right in your face. And lets not forget that shooting them doesn't immediately kill them. If you just shoot their arms or legs, they will continue crawling and attacking you. Only a headshot or half a pulse rifle clip will truly kill them, which makes them explode in a fountain of frickin' acid blood that is often more dangerous than the creatures themselves. The most terrifying enemy of them all, however, even more terrifying than the almost unbeatable predator creatures you meet as final bosses towards the end of the campaign, is the facehugger. Crawling on the floor to a distinct sound that will soon make your neck hair stand, those hard-to-spot creatures can kill you in a single blow by jumping right at your face. I have spend entire magazines of ammo, grenades and frantic flame thrower sprays, shooting every corner of a room preemptively, if I just heard the slightest glimpse of a "facehugger sound". It doesn't help that enemies spawn randomly, so you cannot rely on seeing the same enemy at the same spot every time you play. Having a facehugger jump on your screen is probably my #1 most terrifying moment in gaming history. It's absolutely brutal.

Besides the actual opponents, the biggest enemy you face as the marine is light. If you see things clearly, your powerful arsenal of pulse rifles (including the iconic "drhrhrhrhrhrh" sound), grenades, smartguns and flame throwers (later in the game rocket launchers and miniguns) is perfectly sufficient to defend yourself. But most of the time, you just can't see a damn thing! The dimly lit corridors of space stations, colonies and research labs are constantly flickering, going out in the worst possible times or get destroyed by your panicky grenade spams. Now you can either use flares to light up a room (they tend to make a similar hissing sound to facehuggers... which can turn out to be deadly since sound is an important tool to spot enemies) or you switch to night vision mode. Night vision mode is how you spend much of your time in the marines campaigns, but of course, there is a catch: The dimmest light source can blind you nearly completely, which is especially annoying for the many places that aren't lit equally. You also have a slight grain effect on the screen, which makes far away movement of the camouflage-colored aliens hard to spot. You also cannot use night vision and the motion tracker at the same time. Oh yes, the motion tracker... not only does it display everything that moves, so you can never be sure whether it's an alien or just the flare you threw a second ago, the slow, nerve-wracking pulse sound that accompanies the little white dots on the tracker display can drive you crazy and mostly just grant you a split second advantage before the alien comes storming right in front of you.

It's crazy. The marines campaign might use the most classic FPS gameplay out of the three campaigns and most of the actual goals consist of switch-throwing... but at the same time, it is probably the most intense FPS experience ever created. It's quite fantastic!

The campaigns are rather short for a late-90ies game (although probably longer than most of the blockbuster games released today). They are only loosely connected and the story mostly consists of a good reason to get the hell out of wherever you are. But let's not forget that the original Alien movie is nothing but a survival story aboard a big space ship, either. The game is "pure" and intense, capturing the atmosphere of the movies perfectly without trying to spin too much of an "epic" game story into it (I just recently did a review for Half-Life 2 where I criticized how the "epicness" of the story damaged the straight-forward atmosphere of the original game). I actually like the intentionally minimalistic approach, which shows in other aspects of the game as well, for example the text-only game menus.

Aesthetically, the game is a masterpiece for its time. Countless details from the Alien and Predator universes can be found in-game (such as the Predator's glow-in-the-dark blood and various locations from the original Alien movies). The settings are mostly inspired by H. R. Giger's original designs, ranging from derelict space stations to ancient alien temples. Some of the rocky outside levels from the predator levels are looking a little stale, but mostly, the sharp texturing and masterful lighting create an atmosphere that just sucks you in.

Music and sound design are exceptional with a theatrical score that exudes atmosphere and all the original alien and predator sounds perfectly recreated. From the constant "blip" of the motion tracker to the devilish hissing of the alien to the exotic gargle of the predator... it's all there and sounds just as good as in the movies.

I never really had the chance to test the (peer-to-peer hosted only) multiplayer much, but the short time I spent with it was fun. You can play as any of the species in a variety of game modes that let you, for example, have a team of marines fight against a single alien or predator. As I'm writing this, Rebellion is also re-releasing this game with several updates as a "Classic 2000" version, including the promise of proper multiplayer support.

The Bad
The game has no in-game saves originally, which is plain insane. You shouldn't play the game without the patch which introduces saving among a variety of other fixes. There are still occasional bugs, like you or your enemies getting stuck in rare places.

The cheesy briefing videos displayed on monitors in-game do little to improve the near non-existent plot (and are apparently replaced by properly acted ones for the "gold edition" and the "Classic 2000" release). While there are bonus missions from beating the game at higher difficulties, many of the campaigns are really short.

You might also say that some parts in the game are ridiculously difficult. Or plain unfair. Not finding a switch or object to destroy at the right part in a mission might leave you wandering around aimlessly for half an hour since some of the missions have a rather maze-like design. Sometimes, it's to easy to fall of a ledge, which can occasionally kill you in the last 10 meters of a game.

The Bottom Line
You can feel how much fun the developers had putting this game together. Or maybe it drove them nuts... I don't really know. All I do know is that AvP quietly revolutionized many aspects of FPS game design, introducing an array of smaller and bigger features that were unique for its time and, in many cases, unprecedented to this very day. Crawling around walls and ceilings as the alien is pretty amazing. As is cycling through the vision modes as the predator or feeling your heart stop beating for a full minute after a facehugger jumps at your screen during the marines campaign.

AvP is also one of the rare games that prove that movie licensed games do not have to suck. This game is in the same category as Goldeneye or The Cronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay. Like all games that can fill a movie license with creativity, it both perfectly captures the atmosphere of the movies while, at the same time, not falling for meaningless gimmicks. It also feels like a game developed in the tradition of Half-Life, Unreal and other late-90ies FPS games: A design process where programmers and directors could roam free, creating features that sound fun and exciting and then build a game on top of it. Very different from modern gamedesign where everything is built around a definite, perfectly balanced feature-list that does not leave any room for experimentation.

What an unfairly overlooked game. AvP, after all, might actually be one of the best FPS games out there, better than many more popular competitors. And while Monolith's sequel, AvP2 provides more of an actual story, the original sure beats it when it comes to atmosphere and presentation. I'm curious how Rebellion will do with its 2010 reboot of the franchise.

The recently released "Classic 2000" version of this game, available at a bargain price, is sure worth a look for any action or horror enthusiast. It truly is a classic.

Windows · by Lumpi (189) · 2010

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Trivia

1001 Video Games

Aliens Versus Predator appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Demos

There were three different demos released for the game before it was released, a seperate demo for each of the three species.

German Version

Banned in Germany for extreme violence.

Multiplayer

Unlike most First person Shooters at the time, Aliens vs. Predator uses a peer to peer system for multiplayer instead of a client / server system. This particularity has been known to cause quite a lot of problem with online gaming, even if the game played fine on a LAN.

Predator Vision

The game's system for the predator's multiple vision modes, where they can see humans or aliens but not both at the same time, was eventually adopted into the feature film Alien vs. Predator.

Soundtrack

The second, "soundtrack" disc of AvP is actually an expanded version of James Horner's soundtrack for the movie Aliens. In addition to several unreleased pieces, there are also alternate and extended versions of tracks that are on the official movie soundtrack. The full listing for AvP disc 2 is:

1) Main Title (4:01)

2) Bad Dreams (5:28)

3) Dark Discovery/Newt's Horror (4:10)

4) LV-426 (5:11)

5) Combat Drop (5:03)

6) The Complex (4:45)

7) Atmosphere Station (4:33)

8) Med. Lab (5:42)

9) Newt (4:17)

10) Sub-Level 3 (3:56)

11) Ripley's Rescue (5:33)

12) Face Huggers (3:45)

13) Futile Escape (5:39)

14) Newt is Taken (5:11)

15) Going After Newt (4:35)

Information also contributed by ClydeFrog, Cochonou, Kalirion and phlux

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Game added by MAT.

Additional contributors: Trixter, Alan Chan, Cochonou, Unicorn Lynx, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added March 23, 2000. Last modified March 31, 2024.