Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (PSP)

Back in 2007 when the film Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem was released, I actually saw it in theaters, but despite featuring a battle between two of science fiction’s deadliest icons, I didn’t really retain much of anything about it. I have the faintest memory about what might have been a chemistry lab or science classroom at night, but any other aspect of the film quickly was forgotten. The tie-in PSP game for the film didn’t seem like it would have to do much to salvage the appeal of crossing over an intergalactic hunter species with the acid-blooded xenomorph aliens, but unfortunately, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem on PSP could possibly be a worse experience than watching the film.

 

Taking place in a small Colorado town, the player finds themselves on the Predator side of the conflict. This alien warrior has taken it upon himself to try and wipe out the xenomorph population that has begun to infest the area and reproduce through its gruesome parasitic ways, the Predator trying to prioritize honorable hunting and minimal disruption of human lives as he tracks down and eliminates his prey. While individual level goals will shift in slight ways during the adventure, the story mostly seems to be the Predator protagonist finding himself in a new area and continuing his clean-up campaign, but one major problem with this simple story framework is both how boring it is to be the Predator and how awfully bland the Alien forces reveal themselves to be.

 

The Predator’s main key to success in any form of conflict will always be his melee attack combo, the player able to perform a simple three strike sequence that is enough to repel most any foe quite effectively. Aliens, no matter where you are in the game, will always mindlessly approach the player’s character and fail to accommodate for this most basic of attacks, the player easily able to hammer the attack button until the xenomorphs are all gone. At worst, if these creatures come in a group you’ll need to rotate a little as you attack to ensure that you smack an alien before it can think to pounce or use its blade-like tail, but even as the game throws the more durable and tougher variations at you to try and make a fight less straightforward, your enemy will still fold to persistent mashing of that attack button. Even if you just wanted to break up the monotony for your own sake, your other attack option can’t compete with the simple default claw swipe. Your shoulder cannon fires a projectile that is required for the final boss alone since they’re out of reach otherwise, but during regular level navigation or combat this cannon is surprisingly weak and its imperfect aim means it is often wiser to just walk up to the alien menace that is never too far off to begin smacking them around. You might try to equip different projectiles like the shuriken that still have the same issue of being slow and unwieldy for almost no reward or you could try to equip a weapon like the spear that slows down your melee attacks without providing enough of a benefit to counterbalance that, but the attack sequence you have available from the start can carry you through most moments of the adventure without much issue. When a weapon like your handheld gun is effective enough to whip out from time to time though, it’s only because it’s dealing damage with ease as well rather than adding some new layer to combat that could have easily been tackled with the basics.

Even if you let some aliens surround you and start dealing some real damage, it’s incredibly hard to die unless you do so willingly. Defeating enemies not only naturally repairs your health meter some, but even in the midst of battle you can pause and activate a Health Boost, the enemy aliens often quite accommodating in letting this nearly instantaneous healing power do its job without interrupting the process. There are extremely rare moments where the game tries to include the other equipment and tools the Predator is famous for using such as the special vision options like heat vision and night vision, but besides finding special items or highlighting enemy silhouettes it has almost no justification for its use. However the items and enemies can be eyeballed easily without them since the game often moves at a slow pace, draws your attention to the few things that break from the monotonous backgrounds, and even just has the important data already marked on your pause menu map if you’re looking for something like the optional alien husks that you can break for points.

 

Points will further turn your already all too powerful Predator into an even tougher foe, but the idea behind them would be sound if the upgrades weren’t so poorly laid out. The Predator species is made up of honorable hunters who want a fair fight, so if the Predator kills these hostile xenomorph creatures, they’ll earn points for ever kill. However, the many humans running around the game world are usually noncombatants, the player penalized if they kill these innocent bystanders. Some of these humans are soldiers or otherwise have a gun they can turn against you if they spot you, and the game seems to allow killing of gunmen without penalty at times but they’re often easy to ignore and bypass. In general the game wants you to at least act like you’re adhering to the Predator’s goal of hiding the existence of alien species by sneaking around and avoiding detection. You can turn invisible for a time to potentially sneak past humans, but their detection range and sensitivity seems to be arbitrary and easy to trigger by mistake, the minor score penalty for being spotted not damaging enough to really make this worth bothering with. The points you get at the end of a level are usually enough for the game to automatically upgrade your available tools by at least one stage of the available three anyway, and since most of your other weapons aren’t useful enough to worry about their upgrades, the moment your basic bladed gauntlet and health have achieved their maximum power early on you’ll be set and the honor system feels like a pointless feature you won’t need to concern yourself with.

The different levels of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem are laid out in a branching path from the first mission, the player able to pick which route they take to the final few missions. These paths are referred to as Underground, Industrial, and Suburban respectively and you can play every mission if you so wish or switch paths if one isn’t holding your interest, but they all make their settings and objectives quite dull. Underground is mostly a set of sewer levels, Industrial consists of rehashed interior spaces, and the Suburban levels, despite having the greater diversity with their use of neighborhoods and city streets, will quickly grow repetitive as well due to the lack of mission variety. You may be standing inside a school, exploring a forest, or walking through a church’s graveyard as you explore these stages, but besides lowering water levels or navigate mild mazes there’s a lot of moving from objective to objective where the challenge is just reaching the designated spot. You’ll need to grind to a halt often and smack some xenomorphs to death constantly, but even if you’re blowing apart the remains of Predator technology or just trying to safely get around human military equipment, it rarely feels like anything being asked of you demands a shake up to your approach. There’s one segment where a tank will fire on you if you don’t take the obvious paths to your next objective and sometimes human patrols are tight so you need to turn on invisibility and easily get around them, but there’s practically nothing pushing you to play in any new or creative ways so the entire experience sinks into this morass of repetition and simplistic gameplay.

 

Perhaps completely unaware of how lacking in depth and enjoyability the action is, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem includes a mode called Skirmish where you are placed in an area and told to kill as many xenomorphs as you can in the time limit. You can play this in multiplayer if you wish to share your suffering, but even in the mode devoted to the combat alone it won’t overcome the raw efficiency of your basic attacks and the problems with trying to use anything but those simple and unexciting options to succeed. Even if everything worked better, the enemy tactics and attack methods aren’t particularly varied and your own alternate weapons don’t really expand your options so much as lightly alter the aspects of the melee attacks of gun fire, so why the game thinks it can lean on its combat to try and carry most of the experience remains baffling. The enemy aliens just have no intelligent tactics and the human gunmen are very kind in not opening fire on you too much so you can run off or heal if need be. Even with the camera struggling to follow you at times through the dull game world, you won’t ever find yourself tested beyond how much you can commit to an experience that isn’t providing anything engaging or entertaining to try and keep you on board. The absence of almost any challenge may make this game easy to complete instead of grueling, but the absolutely repetitive nature of every fight and the game’s inability to conjure up a single compelling moment of gameplay means that it is still intensely boring to play through despite having avoided any frustrating design traps.

THE VERDICT: While the Predator is definitely meant to be an impressively skilled hunter from another world, the incredibly efficient creature seen in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is definitely not the right manifestation of that premise. The basic attack combo with the claw gauntlet is able to almost single-handedly take out any opposition with there hardly being any incentive to diversify your attacks since all of the alien opposition folds so easily and the game doesn’t want you to engage with the human characters beyond running off once they’ve spotted you. With unimaginative objectives that make all of the levels feel the same despite some aesthetic differences, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is a game that is far too easy to be entertaining on top of its design never encouraging any form of play outside of easily slicing your way through boring baddies who barely pose a threat.

 

And so, I give Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem for PlayStation Portable…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Usually when some method of attack or some weapon can completely invalidate the difficulty of game’s combat system, it’s not the default attack method you have to use to even complete the tutorial. The aliens you face almost never wise up on how to avoid your basic claw swipes even when working in groups or coming with a bit more durability, and since humans aren’t meant to be directly engaged outside of a few rare moments, the enemy type that could maybe ask you to actually use your other weapons isn’t meant to be attacked. You’re encouraged to ignore them and they’re designed to be unobstructive enough that you can easily get around their gunfire even when they’re grouped up in greater numbers. Removing the healing boost from the pause menu could at least lead to the player maybe having to consider self-preservation at times, although it would certainly not be enough to make the regular gameplay any more interesting. An overhaul to enemy intelligence and how your attack options can potentially overcome foes is necessary since, as is, the aliens are all too happy to move up to your character and place themselves perfectly to be smacked around without putting up much of a fight. Even when the game sets them up to pounce on you it’s afraid to let you be hurt in the game’s current form, the Predator packing a counter if you press the right button in advance as well as the means to easily force the xenomorph off without sustaining damage yourself if you fail to counter. While adding more interesting objectives than going from location to location to activate a console or blow up alien technology would do a lot to help the game rise out of its overwhelmingly dull sequence of events, making the combat actually have some depth or danger to it feels more important to its greater presence during the adventure, the fights needing something to make them rise above the brainless button hammering that makes this such a slog to push through.

 

While I can’t remember why the movie this game is based on was so forgettable, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem’s video game feels like a good match for the film I can’t really recall much about. Like the fact I remember one scene’s background details a little, most of what I recall about the game are the environments that aren’t particularly relevant to how the game plays, and even with alien creatures facing off against each other with humans in the crossfire, the utter lack of interesting elements to spice up those fights makes the actual battles in the PSP title disappointing and lifeless. The xenomorph species is already derided quite often for being made weaker than their appearance in the original Alien film and the Predator franchise often finds the intergalactic hunter wading through schlocky plots and mindless action, but this video game finds them both at their worst as the xenomorphs and their hunter are both participating in perhaps the least exciting battles they could have ever found themselves in.