Don’t worry, I’m not going to insult your intelligence and explain what exactly Aliens & Predators are or which side of a Colonial Marine’s helmet you should hit if you want their brains to explode. (The right side… at least, that was the case in the original story. You don’t need to worry about such subtleties in the game.) It’s been twenty years since the original Alien movie made its debut, breaking new ground in science fiction, perhaps even anticipating one of the tenets of modern cyberpunk- technology that was not failsafe. 
 

The starship that all the action took place on in the original movie was more or less held together with the chief engineer’s spit. None of that Star Wars swashbuckling here.  This story was dark and the message was one of despair. The mood, indeed, was one of primal terror. Not nervousness or mild fear, but pure, raw terror of the Alien. It’s not for lack of inspiration that this terrifying creature is never named. Not only do they never catch one for long enough to dissect it and give it a scientific name, the Alien is the monster incarnate, the thing in the closet, the bogeyman under the bed, the Alien with a capital A. There is nothing else you could reasonably call it.

“Xenomorph” never really caught on.
 

Why am I talking solely about the Alien here? Don’t the Predators and the Marines rate more than a passing mention? Yes, they certainly do, and we’ll cover them in more depth in the gameplay section.  I claim the right to wax philosophical for a moment in the introduction, however, and what I’d like to wax about is the trinity of races that form the core of this game. First, it must be said that the Predator is only a guest star here, albeit one with a strong presence. The Marines belong here, but they’re just here to be eaten. They may have called it Aliens Vs. Predator (puts the Marines in their place, doesn’t it?), and the game may be fully playable from any one of the three viewpoints, but it’s the Alien who belongs here. This is the Alien’s world; the mood, the theme… the terror.

As for the inclusion of the Predator; this is by no means the first time that these two species have encountered each other in pop culture- it’s been done in games, comics, you name it. It creates complications- what happens when you send an unstoppable hunter against an unstoppable beast? Well, any Colonial Marines standing in the line of fire get fried, for one thing… but hang on, if we drop the jokes at the expense of the Marines for a little, we can see that the Marines are very important to this game.
 

By the by, think of another popular computer game featuring two alien species and humans in conflict? Like the Terrans in StarCraft, the Marines are our foothold on this world. They are the safe, the known. They are our window into the game, a fixed frame of reference against which to measure the fear of the hunter and the fear of the beast.  (Which was, if you recall, the same dichotomy in StarCraft… the high-tech zealotry of the Protoss and the monstrous swarming of the Zerg, with the poor old Terrans caught in the middle and a long way from home. Just my day for pointing out parallels. Think nothing of it.)

The trinity of races in AvP are just as fundamental in creating an in-game worldview very much similar to StarCraft, but much, much more immediate, and much, much more frightening. This is mostly inevitable in the shift from real-time strategy to first-person shooter- you’re not commanding a distant army, you’re running about in the dark corridors yourself. That’s you waving the smartgun at the bogeyman under the bed. Though, as I said earlier, the Alien premise has been incorporated into all sorts of things- books, comics, games-, this may well be the first time that an interactive world based on that premise came along that delivered what it promised. Regardless of anything else (and anticipating the gameplay section a little, but never mind) this game succeeds in dragging you headfirst into the monitor and into the world of the Alien. Very, very few FPS games manage to do it as well. 

You may have noticed I haven’t said much about the actual storyline of the game, more about what is generally known as the “feel” of the game. I’ll let you find out the details of the story by playing it- you deserve the chance to go through the game without spoilers. Today, this section is reserved for philosophy and a more long-range overview. If that’s not what you’re looking for, or (of course) if you’ve already finished reading it, move on to the gameplay and see what playing the game is really like.