Recommended retail prices on PC games are usually slashed for online stores but at less than half the price of the 360 version, the brand new boxed copy of Alien Vs Predator on PC has been cut with samurai precision. We’re sure this has something to do with the fact that Rebellion’s long-awaited, unofficial third episode is also available on Steam. But as this is the first experience many console gamers will have with the series, they’re not to know that the original AvP games Rebellion made around the turn of the new Millennium are better than this bland and relatively characterless return to the licence.

This one will make an excellent bog-brush handle

We’re sorry to disappoint fans, but the gruesome trophy retrieval of the Predator and Alien finishing moves, vilified by the Aussie classification board, doesn’t rescue AvP from being a bit on the dull side. Admittedly, it is fun to grab a marine then yank his head and part of his spinal column out through his chest, even if you do stand there for a precious few seconds caressing it while half a dozen of his squad mates unleash hell. And AvP does have the benefit of providing three different, very ephemeral first-person shooter experiences, so you barely have time to realise you’re getting bored before you’ve completed one third of the story mode.

Let’s take our biggest disappointment, the Marine campaign, and juxtapose it with the intense experience of the 1999 classic. When boarding the research station in the original game you couldn’t advance a single step without your heart skipping a beat, even though you didn’t see a Xenomorph for the first half hour. It was pitch black apart from the polarised beam of your flashlight and dead quiet apart from the intermittent pulse from your motion detector, which occasionally emitted a dreadful ping that sent you swinging your reticule wildly in all directions in an effort to illuminate its source.

This time round your Marine career has neither the atmosphere nor the pacing. It’s too light, the Xenos are too easy to kill, there are too many of them and they’re just too ponderous, sometimes pausing dramatically in front of you as they line up a heavy attack. If it was one of these Xenos that boarded the Nostromo in the 1979 Ridley Scott film, the crew would have called in Rentokil to do the job. It feels like you’re fighting the same enemy throughout the campaign and it becomes blasé about it within the first hour of play.

Got you in my… oh-oh

There is a plot in there somewhere, but caring about it seems at complete odds with the run-and-gun nature of the marine campaign, especially as someone made the idiotic decision of forcing the player to pause the game and break any immersion they might have been experiencing to listen to the audio diaries found along the way. Rebellion could have learned a thing or two from Irrational and Gearbox in this respect alone.

… continued