A classic first person shooter

When I first played the demo for Aliens Vs. Predator I was astounded. The gameplay was fantastic, the graphics were nice, and best of all, you got to chose 3 races. Since I am familiar with first person shooters, the learning curve wasn't very hard. But, if you only have a little experience you might be confused. Each race has its own controls, view modes, and weapons. This makes this game unique from other shooters.

The 3 races are the Marine, Predator, and Alien. All 3 races are pretty well balanced. For example, the Marine has its strong weapons, and its motion tracker which can detect enemys, but it's speed is a little slow and its durability is a little low. The predator has some good weapons and its the most durable race, but it is dependant on Field Charges which are used to power their weapons. The Alien's advantages are its speed and its ability to climb walls and ceilings, and its disadvantages are its weapons (claw and tail) which have limited range.

In terms of graphics and sound, they were amazing. The graphics engine was built from the ground up and the sounds were very good. If you saw the Alien movies, you would be familar by lots of sounds like the Alien's hiss or the Marine's smart gun.

The single player is pretty good. The action never stops and you can never know where a enemy will show up due to the random enemy placements. I found dropping on a human from the ceiling as an Alien to be quite fun. But what really shines is the multiplayer. If you play species deathmatch, you get to choose one of the 3 races and kill all opposing races. There is also Alien Tag, Predator Tag, and normal deathmatch.

But not all games can be perfect (well maybe Half-Life). There were only 6 single player missions for each race but they were fairly long (and 5 bonus levels which are levels from a different race with different mission objectives). Another bug was that with the new multiplayer code, you were unable to play with it on Mplayer.com. Also, if you owned the orignal Aliens Vs. Predator you have no need to get Aliens Vs. Predator gold because all that is new is a save feature, 2 new weapons for marine, the new multiplayer code, and 7 new multiplayer levels.

Bottom line:
Great game but the multiplayer bug needs to be fixed. A must for all first person shooter fans.