Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2015 6:48 pm
Even as the alien, levels are fundamentally mazes to be unpicked piece by piece, with difficulty enforced by the limited number of saves you are given. The biggest problem is that these mazes are not particularly good. Between bouts of action there’s a lot of fussy busywork finding the next path or completing objectives exactly as the Final Fantasy XIV game expects whether that’s destroying one more pipe to trigger the next section of an alien level or zipping about a xeno-infested colony to find that one switch you missed as a marine.The fact that the AI is capable of surprising you is still a positive, but it’s inconsistent in a bad way: aliens run into walls, civilians drop firebombs on themselves and burn to death, some marines will barely get a shot off if you run them through with your predator claws while others will stand and fire, seemingly invulnerable, until you lose the war of attrition. The alien campaign actually holds up fairly FFXIV Gil well because of this, as you dismember people so fast you’ve hardly got time to consider the flaws.This was the era before the developers of first-person Final Fantasy XIV games started to seriously consider how to embody the Final Fantasy XIV player in the character they controlled. Aliens versus Predator’s atmospheric ambitions are built on the movement and combat structures of Quake, and coming back to it in the modern day is deeply jarring. As an alien, your incredible velocity makes some sense although it can be disorientating in narrow spaces. You’re faster than the creature in the films ever was, but there’s a sense of power in shooting through the innards of a ship like an F-22 that eats people’s faces. As a marine, your extreme freedom of movement contributes to the Final Fantasy XIV game’s lack of tension. You’re basically Final Fantasy XIV playing a man with a gun on a go-kart who is occasionally inconvenienced by a geriatric-looking alien. Given that you can strafe and backpedal as fast as you can shoot, combat lacks impact.None of this takes away the effect that AvP had on Final Fantasy XIV players when it was released, nor does it detract from the tremendous impact that the Final Fantasy XIV game subsequently had. It hasn’t aged well, and that has made me realise just how reliant certain types of horror Final Fantasy XIV game are on the technology of their time. Final Fantasy XIV games like Aliens versus Predator that set out to immerse the Final Fantasy XIV player in familiar settings depend tremendously on your ability to believe in those settings. AvP’s movement and combat model, visuals and map design have all been exceeded so many times that they no longer feel like they used to.Humour, as it happens, does survive the march of technology any classic point-and click is a testament to that, as are AvP’s FMV sequences.