should have done alot more with it but still fun to play
I've never understood gamespots scores sometimes, they give GTA4 10/10 even though to me it felt like a step backwards in terms of what you could do, yes the graphics and engine are better but the actual game itself felt more like an updated version of GTA3 rather than a new exciting installment. In all honesty it was pretty boring and had lost most of the things that had made the previous versions some of the greatest games ever created. Embarassingly I'd say that Saints Row 2 was far superior because it was actually 'fun' to play. Something GTA4 seems to have lost.
So anyway AVP is pretty much the same thing, it doesn't particuliary feel like anything new and groundbreaking, it's pretty much the same as it's predesscessors and every other generic first person shooter but the difference is this game is 'fun' to play.
I think the main problem with this game is that it suffers from a lack of ambition. It's such a big and popular francise and maybe the game has been made by people who just arn't ambitious and creative enough. It's probably quite easy to make a very generic and linear game when you've got such a great licence as you don't have to make the game groundbreaking and innovative, it's always going to be fun shooting aliens and hearing their trademark screech as they explode in a pool of acid. It's always going to be fun being a predator and ripping someone's head off their shoulders with the spine still attached. I personally feel the whole exercise was a missed opportunity, it really would have been better taking some more time over it and making a game with a lot more depth, imagine a GTA type game set in the AVP universe or even maybe the developers remembering what they did with the original version on the Atari Jaguar and doing something similiar to that.
So that's really what the game boils down to, it's another generic first person shooter that's very linear and scripted, you've played it a thousand times before in various other guises but despite this it's still worth a play through at least once which means it's got more going for it than most games these days.
p.s. i didn't really mention the multiplayer as it doesn't really work, hopefuly they'll fix this at some point ;O)