What’s a really long running horror-sci fi franchise that’s spawned a crossover with a stupid Arnie film? That’s right, Alien! And for bonus points you should guess that the crossover is with Predator. So Aliens vs Predator! Hey, I think I remember a demo for the multiplayer of that game being made available recently. Maybe I should do a preview of it…

The first thing I noticed after I’d booted up the demo was that it takes FOREVER to join a match. You have to wait for all eight players before even joining a lobby, so you’re stuck staring at a loading screen for the best part of two minutes. Come on, this is just stupid. When you finally get into a match, you’re automatically assigned a random species, and you’re gonna have to be fast if you want to change, since everyone seems to stick with what they have, and you end up being a marine. Woo.

The game plays out like every other FPS, so really it’s all about how the different species play. Marines are, well, marines, so you’re given a machine gun and sent on your way to blast at a bunch of really powerful aliens. The marines are given radars that get progressively louder (and more annoying) when a threat is nearby, although sometimes it doesn’t go off and you get raped from behind. In fact, my experience as a marine was a lot like my experience at a gay bar; any man without his back to a wall was probably gonna get screwed. The guns are pretty weak, particularly the machine gun, and the melee button effectively does nothing. That said, I noticed one guy win the game as a marine, so maybe I just suck as them.

Predators are the second most interesting species to play as. The focus as an alien of any kind is melee combat, which is done with the bumper buttons, LB being used for a heavy attack and RB for a light one, or both to block. The problem with the Predators is that they’re big, easily noticeable, and their melee strength doesn’t appear to be up to much. A head on assault against a marine is likely to end in death, so you’re left to try and sneak around, which is no easy matter. Apparently you can go invisible, but I never managed to do this, as I had no idea how it was accomplished. Again, a clear example of how bad I am at games.

Still, the aliens are great fun to play as. You crawl around the floor at high speed, and can scrabble along the walls and ceiling too, allowing you to hide from enemies easily and then sneak attack them. The great thing about sneak attacks is that it’s a one button action, and you teleport to the enemy you’re killing, so as long as you press the X button as the walk past, you’re going to kill them. That said, the animation takes so long that any nearby enemy can walk up behind you and line up their own sneak attack, and so on and so on, until at one point four people died in the same spot from being sneak attacked.

The graphics in the game aren’t exactly disastrous, but they like the sheen found in most modern games. Sure, everything’s dark and dank and horrible, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to notice the fuzzy edges around some of the objects. Another strange thing I noticed was just how bad it looked during an alien stealth kill that required it’s second mouth to spit acid on an enemy. From a first person perspective, you actually see the whole mouth come out, which makes absolutely no sense and looks stupid. Also, the gore only seemed to appear when playing as an alien species. So, humans can’t see blood anymore? Uh huh, sure.

The sounds on show are weak and boring. The machine gun sounds tinny and horrible, which detracts from the experience considerably. The hissing of aliens does sound cool, but the likelihood of hearing one is very low. Aside from that, there’s the metallic clank of foot on floor, which sounds all right, and the screams of marines, which are stupidly over the top or just not well done at all, depending on their death. Pretty shoddy work here Rebellion!

Overall, Aliens vs Predator is shaping up to be a pretty mediocre title. It lacks the polish of much better multiplayer shooters, features some ridiculously overpowered species and is generally just uninspiring. That could be the choice of Deathmatch for the demo, but still, you’d expect it to be more exciting than this. Still, if you’re a big fan of Aliens, or Predators, be sure to check this out when it scuttles onto shelves on the 16th of February.

Loved killing people from behind? Got a tad offended by that joke? Let us know in the comments!