The End is Nigh: Aliens vs. Predator

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Aliens Vs Predator and the effect of its iconic license.

You see the ending to Aliens Vs Predator three times. The trio of campaigns regularly intersect, right down to the scenery, giving the impression you’re being sloshed around the middle-sections of a Venn diagram.

It often doesn’t make any sense. At the end of the Alien campaign, you maim the Predator you were playing as earlier and get a facehugger to plop an egg inside his gooey bits: this becomes the Predalien antagonist who, confusingly, you were fighting throughout the Predator campaign. Dr Emmet Brown would have an aneurysm just thinking about it.

I can forgive the game of its silly moments because of the revered license. I’ve never been comfortable with the Xenomorphs after sneaking a VHS copy of Alien up to my bedroom when I was of single-digit age, and the ensuing nightmares have guaranteed I feel genuinely uncomfortable looking at the horrible buggers. Giger’s creation is a powerful, phobia-inducing, image.

There’s very little in the game that’s disconcerting in terms of actual design, but the mere sight of those fanged proboscises is enough to make me feel queasy. The initial Marine campaign left me so unsettled I often felt hesitant to progress down dark corridors. In one instance I had to save, turn the console off and take a break to calm down. I’m a wuss, and that’s exactly how the developers want it.

SHOCKED
The team at Rebellion have found themselves under plenty of (deserved) criticism this generation by putting out prize turkeys ShellShock 2 and Rogue Warrior, but it’s clear they understand how their decade-old AvP formula works and how the natural rhythm of the game’s progression turns the player from a cowering human wreck into a remorseless alien killer.

There’s the definite feeling that, when you play as the Predator and the Alien, everyone in AvP is a remorse-free meat puppet. Any possible humanity is sucked out of the characters when they all have the same limited set of faces and repeat “Don’t relax just yet, marines!” a hundred times over, often one after another. You don’t notice such a ‘gamey’ contrivance in the Marine campaign, as the looping hisses and shrieks of the other races aren’t recognisable English and the Xeno’s all look the same anyway.

But, in a more conscious bit of design, Rebellion absolves the player by making the humans a group of insufferable gits: the Alien campaign starts with a pack of evil scientists harvesting baby aliens from human bodies – probably with nefarious intent, too. Any compassion you might have had for these people is quickly eradicated, so you can quite happily skewer them on your tail and slash open their jugulars with your razor sharp claws.

I enjoyed it a great deal; my sentiments are much closer to Phill’s review than some of the more critical judgements popping up. It’s by no means a perfect game, though, and if it wasn’t for the license I’d probably have given up and moved on to another game in the middle of the tedious Predator (the universe’s ultimate hunter comes off as a bit cumbersome) campaign.

But it’s impossible to forget there is a license behind it – it’s right there in the title. These aren’t some crude aliens ripped off from the iconic movies; these are the aliens from the movie. Brand recognition is a powerful force, and it’s why giant food conglomerates frame product lines under specific banners, why so many clothes have giant logos stamped across them and why Bobby Kotick is only interested in games he can farm out annually. It’s impossible to extract the hefty impact of the Aliens, Colonial Marines and Predators from the game, and that’s why I saw the same ending three times. The game also encouraged me to promise myself that, at the age of 23, I could (and will) sit down and watch the whole of Alien in one sitting. By Martin Gaston