When a predator ship containing alien facehuggers crash lands near a sleepy Colorado town, you are sent in as an Elite predator to destroy all traces of the alien outbreak while avoiding the locals.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is essentially an exploration action game. To aid you in your task you have three predator vision modes beyond your normal eyesight: Tech, alien and thermal. You will use these modes of vision in to find and destroy bits of predator technology and alien facehugger husks left along the way. By eliminating these pieces of evidence and destroying the aliens you come across, you gain honor which unlocks more powerful weapons for you to use.
Each mission offers little variation of the same theme with the added attempts to save locals from being eaten by hungry aliens. Maps tend to be too dark and hard to see, and the repeated necessity of going to alien vision mode to get hard to find alien artifacts begins to wear on the player. Fighting becomes banal after the first level as it becomes a rinse repeat process of locking on to oncoming foes and blasting them with your shoulder cannon or melee attacking them if they happen to sneak up behind you. The only moments the game gets interesting is when multiple enemies attack you at once, causing you to use a little bit of caution lining the enemies up in such a way so that they don’t flank you.
The game is ridiculously easy, and the fights barely worth it, and the score system is based on “honor points”. These honor points are supposed to allow you to upgrade your weapons, but there is no choice involved, nor any clear indication as to when you are close to said upgrades, they are just randomly given as you progress the story. Tagging aliens is supposed to give more honor, and letting humans get killed subtracts, but neither matters as the addition and subtraction of points doesn’t really affect the honor score greatly.
The graphics are not so great on the PSP; the predator and alien models are decent but the terrain is blocky and the lighting is horrendous. Most of the time the camera works in your favor, but when engaged in a fight, it quickly devolves as you can’t lock on to a flanked enemy chewing on you from behind. And while the vision modes do offer a good effect for the game, they are equally as hard to maneuver in causing frequent changing of modes and general frustration.
Beyond the story mode there is a timed attack mini-game that lets you wander a game map while killing as many aliens as you can for five minutes. Once again there is a score that must mean something to someone, but since it is not saved, it just happens to be some sort of metric. Multiplayer uses the same mode with both PSP’s fighting as one of four predator characters, while each kill aliens and get a score at the end. Each PSP doesn’t even register the other score so if there is some kind of cooperation or competition element I still haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it is.
Overall AVP:R is a ho-hum game that delivers little action and less thrills, and while I wouldn’t call it a horrible game, it has enough poor qualities to it that I would only be able to recommend it for die-hard AVP fans who have the capability to rent it.
