Aliens vs Predator: Requiem review

When we received AVP: Requiem we admit to being slightly disheartened that its not a follow up to the old FPS titles. Instead what we found was a third person action adventure title thats released to tie-in with the movie sequel next month. But as far as movie tie-ins go this one isnt bad. Its not necessarily good either.The cool thing about the old AVP games was that you could control either an Alien, Predator or human, this has been thrown completely out of the window and instead youre just given the Predator to play with. Sure, he may be the best character, but a little bit of variety wouldnt go amiss. Rebellion have managed to perfectly capture what makes the Predator great. Thermal, tech and alien vision are all present and while theyre pretty useless and not necessarily needed at all to complete the game, theyre still cool to activate. Not as brilliant as the cloaking though which becomes a crucial part of your arsenal. Using it to sneak around the humans is great, just dont get it wet though because like the movie that means it wears off. The story is split into three different routes, but all follow the same path of going through to the end destroying your own technology (so the humans dont find it) and exterminating the Alien threat. It becomes laughably easy too. As the story progresses you level up your equipment and the only one that is really useful is the spear and once this gets fully levelled up (which only takes about three levels) you decimate all enemies in your path. It makes AVP a very short lived experience.Gamestyle's main complaint with AVP: Requiem is that you cant kill the humans unless you want to be penalised. Honour points are earned by dispatching the Aliens and destroying evidence of your existence, but you lose these points when you kill the humans. We love the first Predator film, and even the much lauded sequel, which portrays the creature as a rather angry killing machine. For the AVP movies however they seem to be turning the Predator into some sort of cuddly anti-hero, which has been transferred to this game. Its not as if we could help killing them either. Often you see them being dragged away by Aliens and as you go into save them you accidentally strike the human killing him or her instantly. Its hard to really get irate with the game because while its obviously your standard licensed tat its really not so bad that we didnt feel like playing it till the end. Its certainly a good looking game and makes good use of the PSP technology. Even the controls (which we are always wary about when approaching a third person game on the handheld) are good, giving you easy control over the camera. Aside from the main story there isnt really much in the way of content. You can replay levels in order to raise your honour score or you can play the skirmish mode where you just do battle with numerous Aliens. Theres also a multiplayer, but not many people are actually playing it (which doesnt surprise us), so we are unable to actually review this side of things. Though judging by the fact that its just Predator vs. Predator and the combat is passable that it probably wont raise this reviews score much.Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem is what we like to describe as a mild diversion. Certainly not worth your hard earned pennies its nevertheless a fairly competent movie tie-in that will entertain for about half an hour.