Product Reviews

It has taken more than two years for Aliens vs. Predator to be released on the Mac, and there were times when it looked like Fox Interactive had given up on the Mac version altogether. It's better late than never, though, because AvP (as it's known to its fans) is an excellent and atmospheric action game.

The game is based on a series of comic books that pitched the bug-like monsters from the Alien series against the creature from Predator. To spice things up even further, it also adds the human marines from the Alien films. The result is 3D action mayhem of the highest order, as all three species blast, bite and tear the living daylights out of each other.

The most intriguing aspect of AvP is that it's three games in one. You can play the game as either an alien, colonial marine or predator. Each character has its own distinct abilities and plays through a different series of levels.

If you play as a marine, your task is to protect a military installation from a group of aliens you were attempting to capture and take back to Earth for military experiments. Marines carry a range of weapons, such as pulse rifles, flame throwers and grenades, as well as a motion detector that picks up any moving object within a 30 metre radius. The game makes clever use of the motion detector to heighten tension. Sometimes you'll register an enemy on the detector, only for it to quickly move out of range. This leaves you scuttling around in the dark trying to anticipate the imminent attack.

Cloak and dagger

If you're playing as an alien, you're trying to see off the marines that have been stealing

ADVERTISEMENT

your eggs for their experiments. Aliens are armed with their claws, whiplash tails and those sticky-out razor-sharp jaws that we all remember from the films. They're the fastest movers in the game and, in a very novel twist, they can climb walls and crawl around on ceilings. When playing as an alien, your sense of balance and direction go completely haywire while you try to master the art of hanging upside-down and pouncing on your prey from above.

Finally, there are the predators, which just seem to have wandered in from an adjacent film set. They see both humans and aliens as prey they can practise their hunting skills on. The predators' biggest advantage is the cloaking device that can render them virtually invisible. However, this prevents them from using certain weapons, which introduces an element of strategy when playing as a predator: you have to decide when to become invisible and when to drop the cloak and come out with all guns blazing.

The plot that links the three strands of the game is pretty flimsy, but it's the genuinely tense atmosphere that makes the game work so well. It uses the same dark lighting and strobe effects as the original Alien film, leaving you constantly peering into the darkness and wondering where the next attack will come from.

Morning gory

You can play in 'skirmish' mode, where you can be either a marine or predator and are dropped into the middle of a horde of aliens. There's also a selection of multiplayer modes for use on a network or the Internet. These include death match mode and co-operative modes where you play as part of a team with other members of the same species. You can only play against other Mac users, but MacPlay is working on an update that will let Mac users play against PC users.

MacPlay has been right on the ball with the Mac version of AvP. The game went to production just before the release of Mac OS X 10.1, but when MacPlay discovered that the game didn't run properly with OS X 10.1, it had an update on its Web site within days. The game also runs on Mac OS 8.6 through to Mac OS 9.2.

It's a shame we had to wait so long for AvP to reach the Mac, but this is one game that was definitely worth the wait.