Alien or Predator in their movie form was never been something that appealed to me, so now that Alien vs Predator: Requiem is coming to the cinema and therefore unsurprisingly a console near you (in this case the PSP), then you can forgive me for not getting excited.
Given that I don’t really know much about the previous movies, the game itself made it pretty easy to understand what was going on, however this could be down to the practically non existent story.
Basically you play the game as a Predator who is investigating how one of your races spaceships managed to crash onto Earth, unfortunately for you though, the ship which crashed was carrying a cargo of facehuggers, is the plot becoming apparent yet? Anyway, as you arrive on Earth you soon discover that the facehuggers have escaped and therefore it is your mission to wipe them out.
Your Predator has all of the things you would expect in order to aid him in his task, weapons such as hand cannons, throwing discs come in very handy as does the thermal and alien vision.
The premise of the game is pretty simple really, work your way through each of the areas, killing each wave of enemies that come at you, sometimes you are diverted by having to dissolve spaceship parts and dead facehuggers, however other than this there isn’t much else to it.
Combat itself is very simple but thanks to the camera it is also frustrating. In each level Aliens will come at you and the easiest way to kill them is just to stand there, locking on to them and blasting them to death with your cannon, however the camera proves a lot of hard work. As Aliens come at you trying to rotate the camera and get them in your view is a task in itself, often the Alien will get quite a few hits in before you actually manage to get them this.
Overall there are 15 missions to get through in the single player mode, there is also another single player mode called Skirmish, here you get five minutes to get through the levels of your choice while killing as many aliens as possible. At the end of this mode you will get an Honor Point total, but it doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose.
Graphically Alien vs Predator: Requiem is nothing spectacular, there is an overall darkness to it, the textures don’t really offer any realism and there are some moments where you can get stuck in the environments, the characters themselves look ok, but there is just nothing here that sticks out.
Alien vs Predator: Requiem is one of those games that you could easily give a miss, anyone who is a fan of the films may enjoy blasting Aliens with all of the weapons that the Predator has to offer, but to me well, I just don’t see the appeal, especially when there are better games out there.
