Hey guys, i don't really know why im bothering expressing my thoughts about this, but i bought AVP on friday and i wasn't really impressed as much as i thought id be. The game itself was awesome but i feel it could have been much much better if they had added things from the previous games like weapons and maybe added the ability to customize things like how your character looks so you can play online and offline with a neat looking character (like they did with Vegas 2). It just seems like the dev's have got the game to a "ok" standard then released instead of polishing it thoroughly with things the game really needed. I think the game would have been tons better if they included original Pred gear like: spear gun, net launcher, comb stick and more vision modes, and more equipment the marines had from org games. I think with the Pred, they should have had more animations on the stealth/trophy kills and maybe combination kills e.g trophy kills with weapons other than wrist blades and bare hands.... maybe if they had more weapons and they could have added more animations to make the game have more variation like maybe with a net launcher (trap humans/aliens to surfaces to perform different types of trophy kills etc). Aliens also have very few stealth kills and finishers, you can get a stealth kill from a ceiling, but rather than it doing something like putting a tail through them and carrying them up into the ceiling for a head bite, it just jumps down and does the same old kills. You should also be able to spit acid at your enemies like the AI aliens do in the game which could also be used as a nice gruesome looking finisher kill (grab someone and spit acid in their face melting their skull or something lol). I just wish there was some way to get game dev's to look into idea's, they say they design the games to what we would want, in this case they really havn't done what we would want and love to be in this game. If i had the budget and the know how, id design the game myself lol.

Based on the demo on the PC, the game was already fucked up with the existing content. Bad controls, console FOV, uninspired art design, a very limited understanding of what made the vision system and the single player good in the original, and a close combat system that reeks of designer desperation. Adding stuff would not have helped at all. It looks like they basically tried to made the series palatable to the console audience, and butchered the PC version(/port) in the process, but I'm not sure if the console audience is biting either.

I agree that it seems rushed and lacks some polish. Animations aren't all there, and the stealth kill system is a little too shallow, but I'm going to come down on the other side of this one. I loved the demo, even though it was just the one suboptimal gametype, and I adored all three species of playable characters. I recently rented the full version, haven't had a chance to get very far into it, but my fears about the campaign mode have been confirmed. I consider it to be a multiplayer game, with a campaign serving more as a tutorial and fanservice short film, like in Halo or Call of Duty games.

AvP is just what every fan wants it to be: A brawl between balanced, yet distinct factions. It's like an FPS version of StarCraft, and I love a lot of what it does. The relatively few weapons and vision modes keeps you at 100% effectiveness without cluttering the interface or introducing more balance work than Rebellion's likely capable of. The sounds are spot-on, the environments are legitimately tense and the game recreates emotional reactions from the movies, rather than just feeling like a homogeneous field of soldiers.

When I'm a marine, and my flashlight catches the tip of a xenomorph's tail, I'm spraying lead all over that wall trying to get a bead on him. The little shimmer of a predator's cloak doesn't fill me with fear and uncertainty, like the movie characters, but even knowing what I'm up against, seeing a red laser reaching out of space I'd disregarded as unoccupied leads to a great "oh shit" moment and usually my death. As an alien, you flip back and forth between extreme, single-minded confidence and shrieking, panicked flight, depending on whether or not the other guy sees you, and you can either have a solid one-hit kill if you outsmart your target or be faced with a desperate wrestling match if you mess up your stalking. Predators fill their "hunter" archetype well enough, always having to think ahead about position and possible paths of enemy travel, so they can set their traps and choose the right view option or field of view.

I like the melee. It's simple enough that you can do it in real-time without having to think about it, as easily as you throw a grenade in Halo, but it has a pleasing balance to it, a paper-rock-scissors that's different based on what you're fighting. My alien can often kill a marine with the pounce/tail whip combo, but he can break it by blocking the first hit or sidestepping the second, at which point I'm forced to decide whether to try to charge through his hail of gunfire and kill him or just dive into a vent and catch my breath.

Stealth kills are well-implemented, in my mind, because it's a guaranteed point, but it costs you a few seconds of defenseless waiting, so you can't just spam them and expect to win a match. I don't mind the lack of variety in these, but a sweet ceiling grab or two would be rad, yeah. My main beef with them is that you can't rescue a buddy who's being grabbed.

The problems I see with the game are just issues of polish. Alien control is almost as good as can be expected, but the fact that your facing direction restricts how far up or down you can look is a problem for me. I want the alien to feel more fluid, where looking past 90 degrees up causes it to spin around and look the other way, especially when I'm on the ceiling. The flamethrower's terrible. Alien animations are weak compared to those in campaign, it looks like David Bowie from Labyrinth going around some tight vertical corners. Some mobility restrictions, like the inability to perform the focussed leap without having a landing spot designated, have inconvenienced me. The model they chose for the pulse rifle is lousy.

But really, the feel and equipment of each species is enjoyable and authentic, and it delivered me just what I'd expected. I'm not going to buy it or anything, but I'm glad I rented it.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Not to bag on you ravageuk but your attitude is VERY confusing. Why should they add any of this stuff? You bought the game already! You've just sent them a loud and clear financial message that improved graphics, less interactivity and fewer features is what you want as a paying customer.

There's a trend in game design toward common denominator simplicity or so called "streamlining." I would wager that the attitudes of customers such as yourself is an act of voting for this because we all "vote with our dollar." As asset costs rise and there's increasing demand to make the same game work on multiple platforms (in order to help guarantee diminishing revenue streams among more and more competitors) game makers have to make critical choices. Customizing faces in what's basically a shooter? Adding miscellaneous weapons? Trivial, move specific animations?

Why bother if the customer will buy what the developer made?

Coming up with lots of different features the game could have had is fine and maybe even fun. But getting "the game dev's to look into ideas" is not very useful. I'd wager they had more ideas than they could implement-- most devs do-- and when you have a player base that's willing to rush out and buy the game without looking at demos or combing review sites (maybe buying solely on the strength of the licensed property) it creates a great deal of pressure against exactly the sort of thing you want.

I bought the game because of obviously being a fan of aliens & predator franchise and thought "well since this is a next gen game it should be exactly what im looking for". I expected the story to be kind of short, since most games these days have a fairly short story/campaign, but i didnt expect it to be that short. All the hype about it made me think "this demo is insane, id bet they have even more stuff in the full game". Again i was very wrong.

Maybe they will release more gear in the game as part of the DLC, i dont know, but in my honest opinion the game didnt have enough in it to make it a game id call a fave.

I truelly enjoyed the earlier games of AVP for the PC during mid 2000. When I saw the commercial for this new game I was thinking " Cool, Looks cool to play again. I was also thinking that the dev's added new levels or something to even think of brining back AVP once again. But reading everyone's posts so far everyone is saying that the game is short? or what?

I haven't purchased the new version game yet. I will let the price come down in a year or two just to remember how the ame was in 2004.