Boomer Shooter December Misses and Misfires: Aliens Versus Predator (1999)

I remember playing Aliens Versus Predator multiplayer in the early to mid-‘00s, but I barely remember even touching the campaign. Boomer Shooter December felt like the perfect excuse to finally dive in after overlooking it for so long. I mean, it’ll surely deliver. …right? Wait a second, I just re-read the title of this one, oh dear. Aliens Versus Predator was released in 1999 by Rebellion Developments and is a crossover of the.. uh.. Alien and Predator franchises. The game is split into three separate campaigns, each are individual stories following three factions: Aliens, Predators and the Marines. I don’t really have any issues with the stories themselves. This is a boomer shooter after all, the story is usually take it or leave it. The issues I do have with the game run a bit deeper than the plot.

Now, about those stories. As the Alien, you’re trying to protect the hive. You end up as a stowaway on the Marines’ ship, the Ferarco, self-destruct is triggered and you escape to rampage through Gateway Station and board a shuttle on its way to Earth. The Predator, you’re hunting Marines across three planets to recover a captured Predator ship. You escape a military base overrun by Aliens and a Alien-Predator hybrid, fight your way through Fury 161 and finally, a Marine-controlled Alien hive where you take on cybernetically enhanced Aliens, or praetorian Aliens, until you arrive at the final battle with the Alien Queen. The Marine campaign begins on research station LV-426 which was built to study the derelict spacecraft where Alien eggs were first encountered. You then fight through that same derelict ship, the surrounding Alien colony and trigger an explosion to wipe them out. Battling through space stations in orbit and the Tyrargo ship, we come up against Predators, Hybrids, Praetorians and ultimately an Alien Queen. Honestly, none of the storylines are bad and I think they do their job well enough. But again, the plot is not why it’s a swing and a miss.

Alien Versus Predator cemented itself in my head as a deadset classic, but sometimes your memory just isn’t that reliable. I think I might just be remembering the multiplayer, which is still great even for an older game. There are some positives here though. The facehugger jump-scares still hit like they used to. That blip on the Marine radar when an Alien is closing in remains iconic. Maybe not to the same degree now, but back when it first released that sound genuinely instilled fear and panic. Now, it’s more of a reminder of that feeling rather than something that truly delivers it. Graphically, the game looks exactly how you’d expect for a 1999 boomer shooter. Blocky, chunky pixels that honestly still look good today. Each race features a pretty simple, no-nonsense HUD and that presentation is consistent across all three campaigns. The tools, abilities and attacks vary pretty wildly between the Alien, Predator and Marine, but all of them fit their respective roles really well. Even if the overall experience doesn’t live up to the memory.

Unfortunately, regardless of which campaign you choose, the gameplay in Aliens Versus Predator feels pretty bland and uninspired. It almost presents itself like a series of unimportant events while you make your way to the end of each level. The levels themselves are mostly well laid out and I didn’t really have any trouble getting around, but the campaigns themselves are also fairly short, if you don’t include the bonus levels. Outside of the Marine campaign where getting overrun by Aliens can create some genuine tenison, there’s not much challenge to be found. Those once iconic jump-scares slowly turn into mild inconveniences rather than engaging or fun gameplay. The Predator campaign is slightly more interesting thanks to it’s variety of tools, but it still falls into a pretty rigid ‘go to A, use B, exit via C’ structure. As for the Alien campaign, I actually couldn’t make it all the way through. The moment speed along with constant, extreme angle wall climbing is a fast track to motion sickness. Unfortunately, it just isn’t the deadset classic that I built up in my head.

Verdict:
Returning to Aliens Versus Predator left me underwhelmed and pretty disappointed. Its three campaigns all kinda blur together into a largely bland experience, with the Alien campaign standing out for inducing motion sickness. I still have fond memories of the multiplayer, but the single player has ended up as one of the clear lowlights of Boomer Shooter December.

Deck Compatibility: 10/10
Overall Game Rating: 4/10 – This One Stinks