Aliens need huge numbers to win, yet their reproduction is hideously complex (Queen lays eggs, eggs become face huggers, drones collect humans so face huggers have something to infect and become chest bursters, chest bursters cocoon, cocoons deliver drones - with their vulnerability going up at every turn) Predators are just ridiculously powerful due to their countless weapons and technological upgrades, like being able to see units shrouded by the fog of war and Marines are somewhere in the middle. Gung-ho Marines are good at a distance with a large range of units, but need to be firing on all cylinders with Medics, CommTechs and Synthetics undamaged to prevail Predators are costly to reproduce, but highly adept individuals and Aliens are strong in numbers and not unlike StarCraft's Zerg in many ways, but fall foul of their enemies if they aren't within slashing or hole-punching distance.īut when you get more than a few missions into proceedings, it becomes clear that the balance just isn't there. The first few missions for each of the three races (Colonial Marines, Aliens and Predators - duh) demonstrate a reasonable balance, despite the diversity of forces on offer. Which is a pity, because in many respects Extinction shows a lot of promise. It's the game's biggest fault: units constantly bounce off tiny obstacles and then decide a better route involves all four corners of the map, units stop moving when they bang into one another and then wait to die, and units flagrantly disregard orders and stand around getting slaughtered. It's like C&C never happenedĪctually, for "sloppy AI", please read "inexplicably cretinous AI". AVP: Extinction isn't about to rewrite history, but apparently it is happy to re-enact some of the genre's most frustrating crimes of the 1990s: sloppy AI and path finding, dodgy low-res visuals, and unbalanced units. This is probably because as a genre, RTS games thrive on high screen resolutions, mouse control and online multiplayer options. The lovely thing about backwards compatibility is the more powerful machine slashes the load times for these games, making them much more time efficient to play as an adult, as opposed to the past when I was a kid without real responsibilities and could sit around all day watching load screens.Historically speaking, consoles haven't done very well with real-time strategy games. I will feel stupid doing it, but I will purchase all of these games again if they'll run on Xbox One. I very much hope this ushers in backwards compatibility for: Even had a game with 7 people in it at one point. I even played some multiplayer, and that was a good time as well. This still doesn't improve upon AvP (1999) or AvP 2, but it's a worthy entry if you ask me, if only for the human campaign. Overall this is still fun and worth playing, and maybe it has aged well because of how bad ACM is. There also isn't a satisfying crunch sound when executed, but that might be nitpicking. It ends up being a stealth type kill instead of something activated when the human heads are in the center of the screen. I'm also still bitter that the headbite isn't one of the primary attacks playing as the Alien. The AI also don't respond realistically to finding their dead friends. Their verbal responses to these are lazy and cut out all the tension of the moment. Distracting the humans w/ Predator's voice mimicking is hilariously unrealistic. The Predator and Alien campaign are fun, but the human AI is still notably awful. Very cunning enemies they make the ACM Xenomorphs look like a joke, and that game was released later. The Xenomorph AI in the human campaign is what continues to impress me about this game. The human campaign is easily the best and most atmospheric, except for the 2nd half of the final level which really takes you out of the game in favor of a grueling lead up to an underwhelmingly designed boss fight. The Predator campaign had a couple moments where I got stuck on hand-to-hand combat with the Xenos, but it was all doable after a few tries. I played the three campaigns on hard in about a day's worth of time I felt they were pretty easy actually, so I must have improved at FPS games in the time this was released, because I remember feeling more challenged on the normal setting when it was released. This game has actually aged pretty well if you just want to run through it. However, it seems to be astronomically expensive on Amazon if you want to get it new, so $20 isn't all bad. Unfortunately, since my hard copy of AvP on 360 was given away or sold at some point, I had to buy this again on the Xbox store for $20.
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