What went wrong with AVP 3

So it's two weeks after AVP 3 was released onto the intertubes. Two weeks after everyone looked at it and thought:

"...is this it?"

They were working on that game for two years. We got a very short, very generic single player campaign which I consider to be nothing but a waste of bandwidth. Everything else in the game is lifted straight from AVP 2, with the exception of the co-op survival mode. Which is pretty rubbish.

The only fun game modes are Infestation - where everyone starts off as a marine, one person is randomly selected to be an alien and every marine killed turns to a xenomorph. There's also Team Species deathmatch, which is fairly amusing.

There are many vids and articles on the internets going on and on about what's wrong with AVP 3 so I won't go on about it. To sumerise:

1) The single player is shit
2) Marines can block the aliens attacks which is as stupid and game breaking as it sounds
3) The predators are gimped
4) The focus jump system for the predators is a good idea, but it's broken
5) It's worse than the original AVP, let alone AVP 2
6) The multiplayer server system is broken

We should have all been somewhat suspicious in the lead up to AVP 3's release. Why? Well, all the articles were comparing it to the original AVP, not AVP 2. I know that's because both 1 & 3 were done by Rebellion but why is that a good thing. I've looked at the list of games they've developed and it's a sorry sight. Aside from the original AVP, their games range from bad to utterly terrible.

I wasn't even really a fan of AVP when it first came out. Sure, it was okay but it got completely eclipsed when Monolith released AVP 2.

So how did AVP 3 end up in this sorry state?


1) Rebellion tried to re-invent the wheel

This blocking stuff is ridiculous. To sumerise, Rebellion tried to impliment a melee combat system, politely ignoring that fact that this has only ever worked in ONE fps before. There is no reason for this to be there at all. If a predator or an alien gets close to a marine, that marine should be dead, no questions asked. The whole point of the humans is that they're deadly at long range but vulnerable up close.

You could just about post-rationalise this stupid decision regarding scraps between the predator and alien if you'd forgotten that the reason the predator/alien scraps worked so well in AVP 2 was that the predators almost never engaged in close combat. I spent all my time in AVP 2 as a pred using the Speargun to kill marines and the pistol to kill aliens. I kept my distance, knowing that if an alien got close to me, I was dead.

In changing the predator from a ranged fighter to a close range fighter by removing their weapons (you can pick weapons up but they're gimped and you can only carry one at a time) Rebellion essentially created one ranged character - the marine - one close combat fighter - the alien - and a bullshit hybrid that was as effective as neither.



2) At the same time, they hardly changed anything

It's really odd, this. Rebellion changed things that didn't need changing - like the melee system and introduced a lot of stuff that didn't really work - like focus jumping but they didn't really change the game.

The single player is the same series of cliches plagued by every aliens/predator itteration since Aliens. The stories are these:

Marines - Aliens and predators are scrapping. They kill all of your friends before you get to them, forcing you to fight on your own. There is an evil corperation trying to profit from the alien technology. Somehow.

Alien - you are a captured alien. You escape. You eat people.

Predator - humans are dicking around with your mayan temple. You kill shit.


I'm begining to wonder if it's possible to do an Aliens story without having a bullshit generic evil corperation capture an alien queen and perform experiments on her offspring. The number of times this has happened in this universe seem endless and it *never ends well for anyone*. You'd think the corperation would have noticed some sort of pattern.


The multiplayer shows a similar lack of originality. All the good bits are lifted straight from AVP 2 - and these are hampered slightly by the fact that the game is just that bit worse, despite being made nine years later.





I'd like to give Rebellion points for trying but I'm not entirely convinced that they even tried very hard. I didn't see any evidence of real effort anywhere. There were no briliant weapons, there were no incredible levels which spoke of hundreds of hours spent in designing and playtesting...

So yes. I'm going to re-install AVP 2 and play that with my friends over Hamachi. Fuck you Rebellion, Fuck you Sega.