Alien vs. Predator: Extinction

Alien vs. Predator: Extinction is a real time strategy game, or RTS, in which you take control of one of three factions and try to wipe the other two out of existence. You can play as a hunting party of Predators, a hive of Aliens, or a group of Colonial Marines. Each group has different units that you can create throughout several missions on some strange planet. Each group uses their own form of currency which they obtain in different ways to create or upgrade units. There are many familiar faces…or rather forms, such as the classic warrior Alien, the Predator with the wrist blades, the android Bishop, and during the missions’ briefings they mention the Wayland industries to tie in with the movies.

The controls handle pretty good for a consol RTS. On the Xbox controller, you can select groups of units by holding down the button and make an expanding circle to include the units you want, double clicking on a class of warrior to select every member of its class, or by assigning individual groups to different buttons so you can quickly switch between one group to another. There is a map that you can explore, and a mini map in the corner that shows you where all of your units are and will alert you if any of them come under attack by the enemy. You can quickly go to that location by clicking that spot on the mini map rather than dragging the cursor to the side of the screen until you get there. You can also press a button which automatically takes you to a battle once you hear the alert. Unfortunately this alert comes in the form of a sound effect and if you’re the Aliens having a hive node attacked that you don’t care about, the sound affect just keeps repeating until the node dies which can take a really long time if there is just one enemy attacking it. Half the time I sent units to kill the soldier just to shut the game up.

Speaking of sound affects, many of them are recognizable: the marine rifles, the Predator roars, the Alien hisses. The background music does a good job of creating atmosphere, especially when you are playing as the Aliens. Unfortunately during the larger battles all the sounds blend together and get a little confusing, but I guess that’s to be expected. The game’s intro has some great music and cinematic, and every mission starts with a husky-voiced narrator telling you what to do. Each race has it’s own story, but the same number of missions which mostly involve wiping out the other two factions with a few added objectives thrown in as a bonus. Each faction seems to have a different focus which is strange for an RTS, but faithful to the franchise.

The Predators are doing what they do best; hunting. They are looking to make trophies of the Aliens and the humans, and the game even throws in some giant monsters for them to kill. About halfway through the Predators’ missions, you’ll run into a rival clan of Predators that are muscling in on your turf. Now you might think that the Predators would dominate the other races, but they are actually the hardest faction to win with. This is because they are allotted the fewest units, their replacements are expensive, and in order for them to earn the points to buy those replacements, you need to win an engagement so you can rip the heads off of your enemies, and the new units are ordered in by a base platform which is very slow and usually left with minimal guards. The replacements then have to run to where the rest of the group is which makes playing as the Predators a very tedious task. The Predators’ strategy focus is on stealth killing and patience. The spear hunters can perform instant kills while cloaked, and the snipers can pick away at enemies from long range. The problem is that the other two factions have units which see through the cloak, and once exposed, Predators get torn apart by marine gunfire and Alien swarms. Your cloak uses energy which slowly depletes while invisible and recharges when deactivated. This energy is also used by the Predators to heal themselves instantly, so you can heal right in the middle of a fight. My only real complaint with this faction is that they split the Predator abilities between several units. One unit uses wrist blades, one can only use the shoulder cannon, one uses spears. I know that this was necessary for this kind of game, but it really waters down the well rounded warriors that Predators are.

The marines by comparison are a medium difficulty. They earn money by locating and repairing atmospheric processor that generate a steady flow of cash until they expire, so the maximum amount of income for the soldiers is predetermined by the map. The marines are allotted a few more units than the Predators, and their focus is the opposite. In order to survive, they have to defend strategic locations from hoards of enemies and move together as a unit. Like the Predators, the marines have one class which can call in replacements. Fortunately he can move with the group because he would be a sitting duck by himself. He repairs the atmospheric processors and calls in the drop ship for new units which lands as designated landing zones. The marines have a medic which can treat the wounded one man at a time, and only while standing still, so after battle-patch-ups give you a breather. The strategy with the marines is to move from point A to point B in mass and blow the crap out of anything in your way. The marines are all about long-range combat, with riffles, rocket launchers, and even satellite bombardments, they can annihilate the enemy before they get close enough to do any damage.

Luckily the Alien race counters this with superior numbers. The Aliens are the easiest race to win with. In fact, it is nearly impossible to lose with them. Unlike the other races, the Aliens don’t need to buy reinforcements. The queen continuously produces eggs which you can manually hatch and direct the face huggers to go out in droves to attack anything they come across. As a result, the strategy with the Aliens is to have them swarm like ants. Just throw them at the enemy, and turn them into new Aliens to replace your losses. The Aliens spend their recourses on hive nodes which the drone class can produce. These nodes act has healing stations for wounded Aliens and tag enemy units so you can track them on the mini map. You can also spend you infection points on upgrades for your units, one of which allows the warrior Aliens to come back to life after they normally would have died. They crawl on the ground without legs while bleeding to death, but if you can get them to a hive node and heal them fully, they will regenerate their limbs. The runner class regenerates on the run, and the PredAliens heal while fighting. They also get stronger the more they fight until they have more health than the queen. The queen herself is an unstoppable juggernaut. You can disconnect her from her egg sack to fight if the enemy somehow manages to infiltrate the hive, but you’ll have to spend infection points to make a new egg sack. The last thing your infection points are used for is to create praetorian eggs which produce stronger face huggers to create a pureblood Alien which can change into a ravager which is an Alien on steroids, a carrier which carries a bunch of face huggers, or a new queen in case yours dies which I have never had happen while playing this game.

Although this game is fun to play, I do have several complaints which, if corrected, would have made this a much better game. The first, as you may have determined, is that this game is very unbalanced. It is nearly impossible to win with the Predators even on the easier difficulties, while the Aliens are a cakewalk aside from a few special missions which they probably threw in just to give you some kind of challenge with them. Which is something they could do by fixing my second peeve, which is that you only have the story missions with the three factions, and that’s it. There are no secret levels, no customization, no free war mode. That would have added so much replay value to this game. Every level has the same enemy units in the same positions so you know where they are after you’ve played through a few times. My last, and perhaps largest grievance with this game, is that there isn’t an ending. You complete the last mission, it gives you the stats like every other mission, and then you are back at the title screen. It’s like they didn’t finish the game. The opening to the game is awesome. Why couldn’t they throw together three endings for the different factions. Even when you beat the game on hard, complete every bonus task within the missions, there is still no ending. Not even a message saying, “you won.” very disappointing.

Despite those three major flaws, there is something deeply satisfying in having these three races at your command, slaughtering each other. If you are a fan of the franchise, enjoy RTS games, and are looking to add another game to your library, this game is definitely worth at least renting, if not buying.