Welcome passengers to LV-426, the locals are very much looking forward to meeting you.
Surprisingly this "old" game captures many of the elements that made the Alien and Aliens movies so popular, foremost the dread of venturing out into a hostile environment as the Colonial Marine, even though you are equipped with some daunting weaponry. The sense of dread is achieved through playing in areas of limited light, the ambient sounds and particularly the tension laden soundtrack that captures the urgency of the need for the Marine to "just get the hell out of here". I would put AVP Gold up there with F.E.A.R. on the dread scale. AVP2, which I am currently playing, is equally scary but somehow the soundtrack in AVP Gold gets the pulse rate up a lot more often.
For the record this review is based on several playthroughs, on varying difficulty levels, and is specifically for AVP Gold (2000), which includes the Millennium Expansion pack, however this game is essentially an update to vanilla AVP released in 1999. I expect that my review will be applicable to vanilla AVP as the missions are essentially the same. My limited research indicates that the most obvious change in the genesis of AVP to AVP Gold is the introduction of in-mission saves. Make no mistake AP Gold is a challenging game, especially when playing as the prey, errr, I mean Colonial Marine character, and it's difficult to imagine playing this on anything but Easy without a save feature. The other characters while challenging have unique abilities that make them seem easier to play in terms of taking down their enemies and progressing through the single player missions comprising each campaign.
I'm currently playing AVP2 (2001), having completed the Marine campaign, being halfway through the Alien campaign and only having dabbled with the Predator. On a number of levels it is a far better game, especially graphically. Many of the gameplay elements with the different vision modes will be familiar to AVP Gold players. As the Marine the sense of dread is still there, more through ambient sounds this time than the stirring, pulse raising, soundtrack of AVP Gold. AVP2 is very much a case of taking the best elements of AVP Gold and improving them and providing a story arc that interweaves through the three campaigns. For example, as you journey through the ducts as the Alien you will listen to various discussions and better understand what happened and why when you were the Marine. A well executed plotting device. But I digress, back to AVP Gold.
AVP Gold allows the player to experience LV-426 through three separate campaigns as a Colonial Marine, an Alien (that is a xenomorph) or a Predator. Most first timers coming from a FPS background will automatically try the familiar gun armed Marine character. The missions are of varying length and at times do not seem overly intuitive as to what you need to do despite the mission instructions that flash up as you progress. The three campaigns are separate but there are common maps and it is interesting, particularly as the Alien, to explore these maps as when you are the Marine you often wonder, while muttering "game over, man", just where did they come from. There are innumerable ducts and tunnels which make it relatively easy for the Alien to sneak up and eliminate the marines and civilians.
If like me you have AVP Gold on the original CD-ROMs and have an XP or more recent OS you may have challenges getting the game working smoothly and indeed being able to enjoy the excellent orchestral soundtrack. I provide some tips based on the benefit of my experience (below) so you can get up and running. Believe me it is worth the effort and you too will praise the efforts of sirlemonhead in developing fixes to keep this great game alive. For those without the game I understand the Steam re-release (known as AVP Classic 2000) will run without major hitches on newer systems. Thankfully AVP2 runs without problems on XP out of the box with a single patch.
*Playing as the Colonial Marine:
Being neither a xenomorph nor a predator I decided to venture out as a Colonial Marine in my first play through of AvP (Gold Edition). On entering the first mission the first thing I noticed was it was very dark and I was alone and disorientated, just like in the Alien movies, but thankfully my motion detector [MD] showed no aliens about. Then I turned on the image intensifier (think night vision goggles, [NVG]) I could see all about me in shades of green but the MD was temporarily disabled. While flares are less effective in illuminating large areas and are limited in number and need to be replenished like ammo. I recommend using flares from time to time so you can see the maps in their glory ... there's quite an attention to detail, albeit in 2D, you will never see if you only use the NVG. That said NVG can bring back nostalgic memories of those early PC games when everything was on a green screen VDU.
Playing as the Colonial Marine is a pretty tough challenge on any setting and even Training (easy) will test your FPS skills on your first outing. I played on Realistic (medium) difficulty and it was tough enough for me.
Basically you spend most of your time "somewhere" in the various installations that comprise the colony, in the dark, surrounded by eerie sounds and "lost" (as you have no map or compass to guide you). You get a garbled (due to, at times, poor voice acting, fortunately F1 brings up the text) set of instructions and your off outside to find another part of the installation to do such and such ... and then THEY come ... the dreaded aliens ... lightning quick and billowing acid when you take them down. Be afraid, be very, very afraid. Equally deadly are the scuttling face-huggers, best dealt with using the flamethrower or smart gun set to auto.
I've read that playing as the marine in both Sierra AVP games is meant to be the toughest as you are essentially the "prey" and tend to be continually on the defensive rather than being proactive ... if that makes sense. In fact the most effective way to take on aliens is to use your MD, line them up start shooting while backing away as they advance so you minimise acid splash. You need to "stay frosty" but eventually, especially in skirmish mode, you will be yelling "game over man, game over" every few minutes. Remember the motion detector is only showing what is in front of you, not behind and there are numerous ducts, acid burned holes and places the xenomorphs can appear from. Against the predator you will have a better chance mainly because you only ever come up against one at a time, but you need to keep your distance and moving so they cannot lock onto you. Like most FPS games the Marine character can pick up armour and ammo which are scattered around each level in limited quantities.
The "narrative" of the marine campaign in AVP Gold is pretty slim, for much of the game you are "somewhere" in an installation on LV-426, in the dark, surrounded by eerie sounds and "lost" (as you have no map or compass to guide you). You get a garbled set of instructions and you are off outside to find another part of the installation to do such and such ... and then THEY come ... the dreaded aliens ... lightning quick and billowing acid when you take them down. Each marine mission follows a similar with the marine needing to go from place to place and activate various mechanisms to ultimately escape the level. Your character forever seems to be on the run as the alien infestation takes hold. Note that unlike the Alien and Predator the Marine can die if you fall from a height.
A "quirk" of the Gold Edition of AVP is that Rebellion staff remade the intercom voice overs and computer screen videos. Alas this is not quite successful and I recommend you over-write the new Rebellion staff FMV work with the original (non-Gold Edition) FMV files that can be found at moddb for a better experience (more below).
While lacking in narrative AvP delivers in atmosphere. Once you get used to the darkness and the eerie ambient sounds, if you ever do, you will find AVP is a rather tense FPS, especially when you play as the hunted ... namely a Colonial Marine. While you may not want to encounter the aliens, especially the xenomorphs, they seem to want to meet you and are usually in a hurry with no time for preliminary pleasantries. These guys are out to kill you and are lethal, especially as they move very quickly along floors, walls and ceilings so they literally will attack you from any direction. Like Private Hudson in "Aliens" you too will often be shouting "game over man, game over". So you'll need to channel your inner Corporal Hicks (or Ripley), dig deep, "stay frosty", and soldier on. Even on the medium difficulty AVP an extremely challenging FPS especially as often you don't really know where you are or indeed where you are meant to be going. Like Hudson I often ended up spraying the entire room with my pulse rifle trying to hit those fast moving aliens.
The marine "campaign" consist of 6 episodes (missions) with the ability to open up bonus missions based on the difficulty chosen for the campaign. Thus if you complete the marine campaign on Training (Easy) difficulty you can access the first 2 bonus missions, on Realistic (Medium) you access 4 and on Director's Cut (Hard) you can access all 5 marine bonus missions.
*Playing as the alien:
Playing the alien is initially very challenging, especially mastering the controls. Your special skills require you to think well outside the traditional FPS box. You can pretty much walk/climb on any surface on any map. Consequently, you will likely be disoriented as soon as you climb the walls and walk on what is for others species the roof. You will get used to it but it takes time to appreciate each map, with a myriad of tunnels, passageways and layouts. As the alien you use this to your advantage and the game proceeds at a more leisurely pace when playing as an alien compared to the non-stop horror/defensive mode of the marine.
The alien character is quite powerful due to its ability to launch quick attacks from any angle that will eliminate even squads of marines quickly without taking too much damage. Claw attacks work best. Head-bites are equally effective and work more readily against unarmed civilians. The tail attack is best for taking down machinery, control boxes, and remote sentry guns. A wounded alien can quickly restore its health with head-bites and clawing dead humans which works very well against squads as there is lots to claw (eat) after taking down such a group.
The aims of the alien's various missions is somewhat vague but often requires destroying the infrastructure resulting from the "human infestation" on LV-426 and escaping back to the hive. Listen out for the sentry guns as you cannot take these on from the front. Look around for ducts or tunnels as there are several pathways that are only open to the alien character to take out enemy positions and sentry guns.
The alien "campaign" consist of 5 episodes with the ability to open up bonus missions based on the difficlty chosen for the campaign. Thus if you complete the alien campaign on Training (Easy) difficulty you can access the first 2 bonus missions, on Realistic (Medium) you access 4 and on Director's Cut (Hard) you can access all 5 alien, bonus missions.
*Playing as the predator:
Playing as the Predator, with the various vision modes, is pretty cool and a lot less stressful than being a scared Marine and totally unlike the Alien, which can makes your head spin as you run around on floors, walls and ceilings.
The Predator is a one mean fighting machine with an array of weapons many of which lock on automatically if the correct vision mode is in use. The Predator however seems more ponderous than either the Alien or Marine, but this is offset with the ability to cloak when battling marines. Against aliens the cloak offers no protection. The ability to make big jumps and be uninjured after falling from heights and the grappling hook open up a range of options in terms of out maneuvering your faster opponents. The Predator can self-heal with its medi-comp but this ability is limited.
The alien is the Predator's main antagonist as defeating the Colonial Marines, even in numbers, is relatively easy. The Alien remains a formidable opponent when attacked simultaneously by a number of them and ammo quickly depletes. The main things to avoid and treat with respect are the remote sentry guns and the Xenoborg (think xenomorph with Star Trek universe Borg implants).
The predator "campaign" consist of 6 missions with the ability to open up bonus missions based on the difficlty chosen for the campaign. Thus if you complete the predator campaign on Training (Easy) difficulty you can access the first 2 bonus missions, on Realistic (Medium) you access 4 and on Director's Cut (Hard) you can access all 5 predator bonus missions.
*Getting the game running smoothly and glitch free on XP and later systems:
Your first port of call to running AVP Gold on your newer systems should be here: homepage.eircom.net/~duncandsl/avp/ which is a webpage run by sirlemonhead, a skilled computer programmer, who seems to have worked almost single-handedly to keep AVP Gold (CD-ROM version) up to date with the various Windows OS changes. If you find any issues that need to be fixed you can contact him via the Vogons forum, here: vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=28621
On the webpage you will find the latest installer for AVP Gold, which contains all the fixes you need to run smoothly. The fixes comprise a new executable AVPX.exe and other files to get textures,sound, etc working properly. Some of you may be familiar with the earlier 80% successful myAVP.exe fix (which adopted an alternate blue star-field titles menu rather than the pulsating alien egg), which is the predecessor to AVPX.exe. Also on the webpage is a "how to" to get the excellent orchestral soundtrack working properly on your system using ogg files. Note that you should also replace the original bink32.dll and smack32.dll files with updated versions from the net to make the movies work correctly.You will also be able to enjoy the rather good, but short, intro and outro videos (the .bik Bink files) for each character if you use AVPX.
About here I should mention the Aliens Versus Predator Redux mod at moddb.com by Mad_Max_RW http://www.moddb.com/mods/aliens-versus-predator-classic-redux While the mod is ostensibly for the Steam version there are some very useful add-ons that also work with the Sierra CD-ROM version, most importantly the original in-game FMVs. To the layman these are those audio visual bulletins from HQ that pop up on the VDUs in the colony. Unfortunately the voice work and videos in the AVP Gold version, by British Rebellion staff in British Red Beret airborne regalia, are in my opinion not so well done and of course the accents all wrong for United States Colonial Marines. But it is arguably a matter of taste, but it's worth giving the original FMVs a try to form your own opinion.
Finally, I would recommend all past and future players of AVP visit this website, http://www.planetavp.com/avp/, which has a full suite of patches, walkthroughs, guides by species and maps.
*Overall impressions:
If, like me, you've mainly played historical or "real world" based FPS games then the REAL big thing about AVP is that you do get to climb into the skin of an alien or predator species. The species are heavily differentiated, in their fighting and movement capabilities, from their human, Colonial Marine adversaries. It takes some time to get used to this, especially the alien, with its unique vision and ability to "walk" an any surface in its 3D environment. Playing the alien, at least initially, is quite disorientating as you can quickly lose sense of "which way is up". I wasn't initially enamored of the alien character but grew to enjoy playing as a fast elusive killing machine.
What I found rather disappointing was the storyline or rather the lack thereof. Arguably if you have seen the various Alien and Predator films the environments and character-types will be familiar. However the game missions are stand-alone segments of an overall story for each character BUT there are no inter-mission cut-scenes to explain what is going on. The instructions received as a marine for example, via the video screens, can be difficult to understand and pretty vague ... so you'll be using the F1 key often to re-read the last communication. I tried each mission without referring to the walkthroughs but when the objectives were unclear and/or all paths to progress had seemingly been exhausted I did refer to them.
When commencing your AVP "journey" the most important decision is which character you will play. The choices are marine, which is most akin to normal FPS gameplay, predator, which is similar to the marine in someways, and alien, which is the most tricky to play well, especially if you are easily disorientated.
The second most important decision you make when embarking on playing any of the characters is the difficulty level. There are three levels of difficulty in playing the game, whether as marine, alien or predator, as follows: Training (Easy), on Realistic (Medium) and Director's Cut (Hard). Apart from the obvious impact of choosing the difficulty with which you play the selected campaign it also sets (a) the number of saves per episode, 8 on Training, 4 on Realistic and 2 on Hard, and (b) the number of bonus missions you can be unlocked at the end of a successfully completed campaign.
Playing as a marine you get video, audio and/or text updates from your human controllers on what you need to do in the campaign missions and (in my experience) only text instructions in the bonus missions. When you play as an alien or predator you will need to make do with, what can be rather vague text instructions. My strong suggestion, irrespective of your character, is to study a walkthrough or two for each mission after a few attempts to progress or even before you play. Believe me any "spoiler" impact is far outweighed by knowing what you are meant to be doing.
Reading the walkthroughs, even for the marine character, does not really diminish the "surprise" or "terror" of a rapidly advancing alien ... everything happens very fast and most aliens will respawn in different locations. Indeed AVP is the first time in years of video gaming that I have had to resort to a youtube video walkthrough especially playing as an alien text walkthroughs which rely on directions are all but useless given the alien's wall and roof walking/climbing abilities and the numerous ducts. It is easy to get lost in the maze-like installations as any of the characters but I'm assuming this is a design intent. Again like the dark and the sound the sense of being "lost" adds to the tension level. That aspect of the game's "scariness factor" is very well delivered.
Given the different capabilities of the three characters I initially found it easier to transition to the more harder difficulty (less saves per mission) settings for the Alien and the Predator than the Colonial Marine. However a few playthroughs will be required to familiarise yourself with the maps and the mission requirements. So if you find it too hard step down to Training play through a few times until you learn the map and where/when scripted events occur so you are prepared. Incredibly the original (pre-Gold Edition) AVP did not have a save feature ... now that would be hard.
Those new to FPS, or who just need help with a particular mission, should refer to any of the three well written walkthroughs hosted here at GameSpot. Of these Stijn Bolle's is probably the most comprehensive and offers some useful insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the alien, marine and predator and the recommended tactics to either win as that character, or take down that character. The walkthrough by crazedgiggles includes the text of the garbled communications briefings that when read with the walkthrough creates a sort of narrative.
Finally I should mention the Skirmish mode in which you can play as either a marine or predator against an onslaught of aliens. You can adjust the difficulty, to a degree, by adjusting the speed between 70-100%. 70% speed provides a reasonable challenge as the aliens increase from one, to two, to hordes quite quickly and you will encounter predaliens and praetorians aplenty on some maps and these take quite a bit of damage before going down. Skirmish mode is a fun way to while away the odd half hour between other games, much like the Start Trek Elite Force holomatch maps.
OVERALL: AVP (1999-2000) looks dated but still delivers plenty of raw sci-fi FPS action. If you can't find a pre-loved CD version of AVP or AVP Gold then you can find "Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000" on Steam which apparently runs well on the latest systems.
That said, for me so far AVP2 presents a better overall gaming experience especially given there is an underlying narrative which is weaved through the three character campaigns and of course the better graphics.
I'll shortly take Aliens versus Predator (AVP 2010) for a run. After a great deal of pre-release rating and censorship debate in Australia, by most accounts AVP 2010 failed to deliver. Alas it seems that the much hyped Colonial Marines (2013) is also seen as a failure.
UPDATE (22 June 2013): After some testing it appears that the latest version of AVPX (http://homepage.eircom.net/~duncandsl/avp/) does work quite well, at least in my experience, with the Aliens Versus Predator Redux 2.0 mod by Mad_Max_RW (http://www.moddb.com/mods/aliens-versus-predator-classic-redux) so if you have beaten the AVP Gold before and feel the urge to go bug-hunting again and want to see all the enhanced environments and character models give it a try. That said the Redux mod seems more stable in the skirmish maps than the campaigns.