Flashes of true greatness

There are moments in each of Aliens vs. Predator's three single-player campaigns where the game flashes some honest-to-goodness greatness that other first-person games can't touch.

Aliens vs.Predator
Rebellion/Sega
PS3, Xbox 360, Windows PC
Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, suggestive themes)

The brightest of these flashes happens straight away in the marine campaign, which outfits players as a standard soldier in a world crawling with aliens and, eventually, the Predator.

AvP drops players into an environment where light is a precious commodity, and the game doesn't waste time with dull shootouts against grunt enemies.

The aliens are the enemy, and each one alone can easily take a player from healthy to dead.

In packs and in darkness, they're a nightmare.

But once the scene changes to less intimidating pastures and the aliens resort to less frightening tactics, AvP regresses to also-ran status.

The fights start repeating themselves, the level designs feel more generic, and when Rebellion recycles an old twist from a previous AvP game and introduces the androids enemy class, this might as well be any shooter.

Unfortunately, AvP's antiquated controls - which lack a lean or even crouch mechanic and rely too much on auto-aim assists to bail out some sloppy aiming precision - ensure it isn't even just another shooter once the scares peel away and the dated mechanics are exposed.

The action is more uninspired than truly bad, but when the game drops piles of enemies in one spot and expects players to avoid making mistakes while it makes so many, it feels pretty cheap.

Fleeting flashes of excellence also seep into the alien and Predator campaigns, which value stealth and melee combat over gunplay.

Disabling the lights, climbing the walls and terrorising humans is a fun thrill early in the alien campaign, and the Predator campaign offers enough trick (albeit with a slightly clumsy control scheme) to leap around the map and massacre humans, aliens and androids alike.

But these two campaigns eventually suffer the same problem: Most of what you see and do will be seen and done within each campaign's opening scenario, and the same flat levels players see at the marine await yet again once the novelty of both campaigns wears off.

None of the three campaigns requires more than three hours to finish, but all manage to wear out their welcomes because of how repetitive they are with regard to design, tactics and enemy intelligence.

Online multiplayer (18 players competitive, four players co-op) fares little better.

The survival co-op mode, which pits player-controlled marines against endless alien waves, is just the single-player game's bad controls and A.I. on overdrive.

Most of the competitive modes, meanwhile, are dampened by player-controlled aliens' and Predators' melee kill animations, which are so excessively drawn out that by the time Player A kills Player B, Player C is halfway finished killing a hopelessly vulnerable Player A.

A few modes that play off the series fiction establish gameplay conditions that mitigate these domino effects, but it's a testament to AvP's overall haphazardness that such a hindrance plagues any, much less the majority, of these modes.