Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

With AVP 1, players got to live the dream of being one of the races in these popular franchises, pitted against one and other in bloody carnage. AVP 2 takes what made that game so good and expands on it to the 'nth' degree with, on the whole, a good degree of success.

Unlike the previous game, the storylines of the 3 races in AVP2 are intrinsically linked. For instance, certain events you trigger as the Predator have an effect on the storyline of the Alien. A nice touch is the fact that there are a few moments throughout the game where you see one of the other playable characters going about what you do in their respective storyline. This absorbs you into the storyline and its parallel time-line and makes you want to play as all the other races instead of just your favourite.

Apart from the links in story and location, the 3 single player campaigns almost feel like 3 completely different games. This is of course due to the huge differences between the species you play as. The Alien is fast but weak and doesn't use projectile weapons, instead relying on it's huge claws, tail and the veritable head-bite to dispatch its prey. Alien abilities also include wall-crawling and health regeneration through the consumption of corpses. These are pretty cool abilities and make playing the Alien a savage but fun (for gore-lovers and puppy-killers) experience. It should also be noted that you get to start off as a facehugger, then chestburster before playing as a fully-grown Alien. These are neat, but a little pointless missions and are thankfully given minimum play-time.

The Predator is the hardiest of the races and uses a range of weapons which feed off an energy supply. One disappointment I had with the game was the ability to completely regenerate the Predator's health and energy at every respite, making it a fairly simple affair to get through his campaign. Cloaking and target locking are just a few of the Predator's cool abilities.

The Marine is of course pretty standard with a decent armament, but the ability to tear through hordes of aliens as well as the odd Predator are the real draw of his campaign. Let alone the fact that towards the end of the game you get to control a modified version of the power-loader from Alien 2. The Marine's campaign is also the scariest thanks to some really creepy moments.

The games graphics are pretty solid, and the various options to change the view types (eg Predator Thermo) of the races are a good transfer from the movies and first game, but take away from the decent graphics at work, especially if you have them on most of time. Also the game isn't as dark as the first one was. To most, this will be a good thing, but I really enjoyed the more 'gothic nightmare' feel of the first game.

Whilst each individual campaign may feel a little too short lived, there's 3 of them, so the length of the is a-ok. However, there aren't any unlockable modes etc so after you've completed all 3 campaigns, there is little replayability.

Over all this is a decent game. It will please the fan-boys of the movies and previous game but also manages to function solidly as a pick-up-and-play FPS for noobs and hard-core gamers, with simple controls, brilliant sci-fi/horror atmosphere and a fast-paced but immersive storyline.