Which can take several minutes at a time.
Yes yes it's nice to see that actions in one campaign can affect another, but when all the Marines and Predators do is move between waypoints killing stuff, who cares? Aliens are fun because they're a bit different, but it can take ages to build an army of any size or diversity - and doing so is particularly frustrating because their protracted life cycles are regularly halted so drones can forage for hosts. It doesn't help that the game's 21 missions themselves are almost uniformly boring, with only the Alien options really worth playing. Aliens need huge numbers to win, yet their reproduction is hideously complex (Queen lays eggs, eggs become face huggers, drones collect humans so face huggers have something to infect and become chest bursters, chest bursters cocoon, cocoons deliver drones - with their vulnerability going up at every turn) Predators are just ridiculously powerful due to their countless weapons and technological upgrades, like being able to see units shrouded by the fog of war and Marines are somewhere in the middle. Gung-ho Marines are good at a distance with a large range of units, but need to be firing on all cylinders with Medics, CommTechs and Synthetics undamaged to prevail Predators are costly to reproduce, but highly adept individuals and Aliens are strong in numbers and not unlike StarCraft's Zerg in many ways, but fall foul of their enemies if they aren't within slashing or hole-punching distance.īut when you get more than a few missions into proceedings, it becomes clear that the balance just isn't there. The first few missions for each of the three races (Colonial Marines, Aliens and Predators - duh) demonstrate a reasonable balance, despite the diversity of forces on offer. Which is a pity, because in many respects Extinction shows a lot of promise. It's the game's biggest fault: units constantly bounce off tiny obstacles and then decide a better route involves all four corners of the map, units stop moving when they bang into one another and then wait to die, and units flagrantly disregard orders and stand around getting slaughtered. It's like C&C never happenedĪctually, for "sloppy AI", please read "inexplicably cretinous AI". AVP: Extinction isn't about to rewrite history, but apparently it is happy to re-enact some of the genre's most frustrating crimes of the 1990s: sloppy AI and path finding, dodgy low-res visuals, and unbalanced units.
This is probably because as a genre, RTS games thrive on high screen resolutions, mouse control and online multiplayer options. Historically speaking, consoles haven't done very well with real-time strategy games.
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