Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

January 24,2008 - Editor's Note: This Review Was Written By Fernando Melian

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is obviously based on the sci-fi movie of the same name. So, let’s face it, the word “mediocre” will be haunting this title for numerous reasons. One being that it was released on a handheld system. That’s not to say there are no good games for handheld systems but, come on. It’s hard to think of good an “official game of the movie” title to begin with. Now one that was worth playing on a handheld system?

Anyway, AVP: Requiem will place you in control of the Predator sent to earth to investigate the crash of a Predator spaceship containing numerous face-hugger aliens. All these aliens broke loose and are now starting to multiply in the nearby town. All hell breaks loose and eventually the National Guard is called in to help regulate things. If you saw the movie then you kind of have an idea as to what’s going on because this game follows pretty closely to the events of the film. Your character, the Predator, will be armed with all the cool alien weaponry and equipment featured in the film. You’ll have the shoulder mounted canons, disk blades, and different vision modes among other things at your disposal. It’s just a shame the combat gets real boring real fast. This is all thanks to how simple and easy the actually gameplay is.

Throughout most of the game you’ll be blasting enemies away with your canons and dissolving all evidence of extraterrestrial existence, such as, pieces of the spaceship that crashed and dead face-huggers. This gets pretty repetitive and so does the actual combat with enemies. As mentioned earlier it just looses it’s luster real quickly. You’re never truly in any real danger and you need not apply any strategy to the disposal of enemy aliens and soldiers. You can literally stand still and blast away at oncoming enemies with your shoulder mounted canons from a safe distance. Then there’s weapon upgrades, but that’s really just a joke ‘cause you never have a choice as to what you’d like to be upgraded and really you could beat the game just fine with the weapons you started off with. The upgrades are acquired by “honor points” these are kind of like experience points gained by not targeting enemies with your canon or not killing innocent civilians and etc. but, what’s funny is you’ll find yourself racking these points up even if you’re running through the game recklessly. One other thing worth mentioning, everything that’s required of you to interact with is marked on your map so there is no real exploration of the games environments.

Although, it’s not that big of a deal since the games environments are really dull and boring to look at but, it all just adds to how easy the game is. An interesting thing about AVP: Requiem though is that you can actually choose what paths you’d like to take to get to an area. For instance, you could choose to travel underground rather than above ground through the town to reach your destination. There’s at least a decent variety of levels in the game.

The games audio is roughly the same as it’s visuals, not impressive at all. The visuals are a bit rough and dull and so is all the audio work. The music to the game doesn't catch your interest or help to immerse you at all within the game. The character textures and animations are also unimpressive. They are however, slightly better then the surrounding backgrounds.

Well, there’s not much else to be said about this game except the multiplayer and skirmish mode seem to be loosely latched on. The multiplayer mode is basically a co-op ad-hoc version of the skirmish mode and the skirmish mode just places you in an area with a constant flow of enemies to destroy.  There is no real reward for playing either mode, just a score that doesn’t even get recorded. So, why bother? Now, with all that said, this game isn’t awful but, really isn’t worth playing and is extremely hard to recommend since there are much better handheld titles out on store shelves.

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