A fun, if a little strung out, package. Great for fans of RTS or the Alien & Predator franchises.
Gameplay:
For most people who have played a decent pc strategy game, RTS on ps2 tends to stress and bore to death, but this game trys its best to keep everyone intrested whether you have a more tactical approach to strategy gameplay or more of a kamikaze style. There are three differant campaigns in this game, one for each faction, and a fairley informative training mode. Each of the campaigns has a decent ammount of missions and the developers, although trying to keep the gameplay combat based, try to vary the missions too. Many of the Alien missions for example start off with a couple of drones and an egg and maybe, if youre lucky, a praetorian. The aim of their mission is to spread the hive and help your colony grow. Predator missions tend to revolve around a hunt and the marine missions like too well....um......well they are like a mix of both styles. Also how you earn points is differant for each faction. Each team gets a bounty for each kill but to earn more as predator you have to take the skull of youre fallen foes to earn honour points. As marines you earn credits for fixing these machines called atmos and for aliens you facehug the enemy units to oblivion. These credits/honour points can be spent to purchase unit upgrades and for the alien and marine factions you can purchase units. The units also vary pretty well. The missions tend to drag though so you need a bit of patience to get through the whole game. Also the story dose not seem to be very thrilling.
Graphics:
The graphics are so-so. Not MGS gawgeous but neither Conflict Desert Storm ugly. The power of the ps2 could have made this RTS a pretty realistic game but it didnt. The maps are pretty much downright ugly and the skins are not that good. But saying that the models do have some decent animation. Sound:
The sound I think is definately the worst aspect of the game with some very static shooty noises and dull voices. And there is only one music track! And thats played through once per mission and is really dull. But at least it does have some sound.
If you are after some brain puzzling strategy thatll last a couple of months and some decent AVP action then go ahead. But iff a few bugs and poor sound and mediocre graphics put you off of some sweet gameplay then this is a game to avoid.