"Cool at first, but a mediocre game at best."
I love Aliens, and I love Predator. Seriously, who wouldn't enjoy blasting apart aliens with a smart gun or plasma caster, or scurrying across walls and ceilings to sneak up on hapless human pray? But once you get past the initial coolness of the game you realise it's actually a pretty average shooter.
There are three campaigns and each one isn't terribly long. You could probably play through a campaign in not much more than a single afternoon. The levels are pretty enough, and slightly varied (colon, one or two jungle or swamp areas and temple ruins) but they are quite small and very linear.
Pretty much all you do throughout the game is fight your way to the end of each level. There will be someone communicating with you and feeding you missions the entire time (your corporal if you're a marine, the queen for the alien, and unspecified elder for the predator), but the missions consist of nothing more complicated than hitting a switch or accessing an elevator to take you to the next area. So it's basically fight your way to the end of the level, kill everything along the way, and hit a switch or smash a control panel or something, before proceeding to the next level. As far as shooters go it's really standard stuff. Slightly sub par actually, if you ask me.
I recall AvP 2 being much, much better. A better story, better levels, much more tense, more interesting game play, and the campaigns overlapped each other better.
There is nothing particularly egregious that would put me off this game. The trouble is there is nothing particularly good about it. It's a decent shooter and fun if you enjoy the subject matter, but all in all a fairly average and underwhelming shooter experience when you get over the initial coolness factor. And nowhere near as good as AvP 2.
Ups; the aliens and the predator are done really well, the combat is visceral (and not to mention very, very violent), the guns and weapons are done well, the health system is handled quite well, the predator jumping system is handled well and allows you to quickly and effortlessly leap from point to point and the alien wall crawling is smooth and quite easy to get to grips with.
Minor downs; the checkpoint save system, underwhelming graphics, the annoying parts in the predator campaign where aliens continually respawn until you activate something, the annoying highlights around pickups and the mission objective highlight which is a big box floating in space telling you exactly where to go and exactly what to interact with, and the annoying verbal prompts constantly prodding you to get on to your objective.