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81%
Lots of weapons and upgrades
Play as three species
Levels can get repetitive
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Dust off your pulse rifle and load
your grenade launchers because there's trouble about to break out on LV-742.
This time the action takes from a top down view point in real time, new
ground for the Aliens vs Predator genre. The aim is very simple.
Use team work and tactical positioning of your units to carry out the mission
objectives while the other alien species attack you. You get the option
of playing as either the Colonial marines, Aliens or the Predators, each
with their own set of upgradeable units and firepower. Of the three, I
found the Marines by far the most enjoyable. While co-ordinating facehuggers
and sneaking around cloaked is pretty cool, frying xeno butt with some
serious Weyland-Yutani Corporation firepower is great.
Control can be tricky at first,
but once you've mastered the tutorials, selection and grouping units is
a doddle. Additonal units, upgrades and equipment is obtained by credits
achieved from successful kills, repairing of structures or in the aliens
case impregnating hosts. You'll learn fast that some upgrades are better
than others and good deal of attention and foresight is needed when planning
new missions.
A map and motion tracker-like interface
provides information on the surrounding area, but this isnt as useful as
it should be while navigating your teams across the level. The big problem
which I noticed quickly was the shear speed at which attacks happen. One
second your marines can be walking through a canyon and then a whole pack
of aliens could jump on top of you bringing about a complete indecipherable
crowd of firing and explosions. The culprit is the somewhat over-emphatic
fog of war around the players view. Enemies seem to know exactly how far
your units can see and simply wait, retreat, wait, retreat into the fog
of war until one of your stray units get close enough. While this is an
admirable tactic, in high speed gaming it gets boring quick.
While the games storyline holds
its own, the games conclusion happened a little too abruptly for my liking.
A final end-movie sequence would've polished off a pretty enjoyable game,
but Aliens vs Predator: Extinction still has its charms for those who love
real time tactical simulators.
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