Disappointing
User Rating: 6.1 | Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction XBOX
This game has truly earned it's place in the pantheon of strategy games with massive amounts of unrealized potential. I'm a big Aliens fan so I thought the whole idea of basing a strategy game around it would be awesome, only to be let down. First of all, Aliens has the potential to be an excellent incubator for a strategy series, and in some areas the game does capitalize on the basic framework of such an idea (as far as the aliens' hive system is concerned). Where it fails, however, is in the overall gameplay and the general lack of any actual strategy. The game doesn't implement much of a "rock, paper, scissors" formula (or at least if it does, it's not that important), since your goal is essentially the complete extermination of the other species, pretty much all you'll want to do is create as many standard troopers of your species as you possibly can as fast as you can and attack the enemy in mass. (Kinda stupid, huh?) For example, the colonial marines have units like snipers and flamethrowers, but these units can't really kill mass amounts of enemy units effectively so you won't really be inspired to waste time and points creating them. You'll pretty much just want to stick to making heavy infantry and smartgunners so that you can hurry up and rush the alien/predator "base." "Base" is in quotation marks because their really isn't any such thing. Since you can't construct any buildings in Alien vs. Predator: Extinction, you basically just pick an arbitrary location to start a hive (if you're the aliens) and just have your queen start laying eggs; or, you'll just wander about the map nomadically (if you're the marines or predators) in search of the aliens' hive. This gets boring and downright irritating really fast. The same thing could be said of most of the missions. Usually it's something simple like "move this thingamabob here" or "secure this place over here" and to be perfectly honest it all seems kinda irrelevant. The one place where this game does manage to truly shine is in the sound department. The sound effects are superb and fully deserving of any accolades awarded to them. The pulse rifles, the screeches of the aliens, and the roar of the predators are all spot on. This all makes for some truly exciting firefights. Unfortunately, these firefights start to get repetitive and the sound alone just isn't enough to pull it all together. In the end, AVP: Extinction feels like the developers started out with some great ideas, constructed a skeleton for it and packed it with some neat bells and whistles, but never filled it with any real meat. This isn't a horrible game and it might satisfy some AVP die-hards on a certain level, but to most gamers it will just feel lacking in a lot of essential areas.
