The weapon also featured an attached grenade launcher, but the grenades were tricky to use and often had an extreme blast radius that often caught the user in the blast zone itself.
#Avp extinction upgrades series
The first series of Pulse Rifle, the M41 was issued to Marines stationed on LV-429 during the events of the first Aliens vs Predator was accurate when fired in bursts but jammed frequently when fired fully automatically. It also features a retractable stock and an underslung four-round 30 mm PN grenade launcher. The Pulse rifle has a small battery-powered digital readout screen that displays the number of rounds left in the magazine, with the battery located in the grip. The magazines can hold 99 rounds, but were usually underloaded by 4-6 rounds capacity to avoid a spring-tension overfeed jam. Made of light alloy plates, it fires 10x24mm Armor Piercing Caseless Rounds from a 100 round U-bend magazine in either semi automatic, four round burst, or fully automatic rates of fire. The predator side gains honor points from taking the skulls of their enemies, with certain skulls being worth more than others.The M41A Pulse Rifle is an air cooled, fully automatic, short- to mid-range combat rifle. Predators are called down from orbit at a shrine, a mobile base of operations with a self-defense cannon and energy recharging capability. They also have the fewest amounts of possible units on the field and worst point-collection methods, ensuring a good play balance for the game. Predators have the strongest units in the game, all with cloaking and self-healing abilities. For the most part, the host determines what kind of alien you'll end up with, so choosing your battles and playing sneakily is crucial. Such upgrades include acid spitting, improved facehuggers, etc. Their upgrades are purchased from the queen, who gets infestation points every time you infest a host or kill enemies.
Aliens would be a lot more fun to play if they didn't require your constant attention all over the field. You can fix this by tasking drones (who hatch from large animal hosts) to gather bodies and drag them back to the queen, but even that needs to be micromanaged. This would be fine if the aliens then rallied somewhere (no rally points in the game!), but often what happens is, after clearing a battlefield and having potential hosts, you end up with a smattering of corpses and scattered aliens all over the place. This continues as she grows eggs, facehuggers have to infest hosts, become aliens, and then evolve. You often start the missions with no queen at all, and have to evolve your eggs to praetorian eggs, infest a host, and then evolve that alien into a queen. Playing as the aliens is an exercise in micromanagement, even more than the other races. However, it's clear that the game is just not pushing the Xbox very hard, so don't expect to be overly impressed. The graphics are better on the Xbox than the PS2, with a real smoothness and fluidity. There are the usual RTS conventions of same-unit selection, an attack-move option, and a mood setting to determine how aggressively your units pursue enemies. Other than that, however, the controls work well for managing units. It's a real problem when trying to work with a limited number of units. Predators can take the high ground to rain down bolts, but you can lose units under those same outcroppings. Aliens can crawl over rolling terrain including hills and valleys, but you can never rotate the camera to get a better view of them. The largest pain is the fact that AvP: Extinction is a 3D game with no camera rotation whatsoever. I say "shouldn't" because at times, micromanaging units tends to be difficult. With a well thought-out interface mapping to the controller, and the ability to re-map keys to your liking, the RTS controls shouldn't be a hindrance to play. A mini-map rests in the right corner, a HUD at the bottom for information and updates, and everything else is a cinematic view of the action. The game is played on an isometric map familiar to most fans of the genre. Being that the Fox franchise has, in the past, been firmly rooted in the FPS genre, the likely question on the minds of most AvP fans is, "How well did the series survive the translation to RTS?"
The PlayStation 2 shows its slight lack of graphical sheen in Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction compared to the Xbox version, but it delivers every bit of the same action and strategy.Īliens Versus Predator: Extinction is a real-time strategy game in which aliens, predators, and colonial marines face off in a to-the-death struggle over the course of three campaigns and 21 missions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the release of multi-console titles. The PlayStation 2 continues to be the juggernaut in the console wars, though its hold on the market continues to be nibbled at by other contenders.