"You still don't know what you're dealing with do you?”

There have been some epic battles between franchises over the years: Robocop versus Terminator, Marvel versus Capcom and of course the age old Pepsi versus Coke dilemma. There's more on the horizon too, with Freddy versus Jason appearing on the silver screen right now, and even perhaps one day, Superman versus Batman. A few years ago Aliens versus Predator hit the PC in a big way to both critical and popular acclaim as a multiplayer first person shooter. In 2003 though, the battle enters uncharted waters...Real Time Strategy.

Extinction consists of three campaigns with seven missions per species, and includes a few different objectives ranging from protection to extermination. Also included are a few general tutorials and one specific for each of the sides. The missions vary greatly in difficulty, but overall strategy gamers and experienced players probably won't find too great a challenge here, and the average player should be able to beat the campaign in about 20-25 hours of play. If the par mission-times are any indication though, the developers expect you to be able to knock it over in closer to 15.

"If it bleeds, we can kill it!”

Extinction plays like your standard top-down RTS game, and rather than allowing for a fully rotatable camera, you have three pre-defined angles at your disposal: close-up, normal, and zoomed out. Most screenshots from the game that you've seen are from the close-up, where the action looks great. Unfortunately, it is totally impractical to play the game that close, and one of the greatest problems with the game is that even on the zoomed out mode it can be a nightmare trying to keep track of events and battles. It doesn't help much that the A.I. can target you from shrouded areas either, and many a time you will find yourself frantically scanning the surrounding black looking for whatever is attacking you.

Nevertheless, Extinction can be great fun to play. The three species are all extremely varied in their operation and strategies, and it is easy to compare the game to a more squad-oriented version of Starcraft. The humans are pretty fragile but pack a heavy punch, the aliens are cannon-fodder but can swarm in huge numbers and overwhelm their foes, and the Predators are very powerful but less numerous and more expensive than the other sides. Each species has a unique income method and construction system, and mastering each can be quite a rewarding challenge.

The graphics in Extinction are quite good, but being a cross-platform title, they don't really push the Xbox to its limits in any sense. Up close, all the units are quite detailed and vivid, the only downside being that you will spend most of your time zoomed-out so you can't drink in the details. All the trademark effects and designs from the Aliens and Predator movies are present, including the invisibility shimmer and triangular targets of the predators, to the bright green alien acid blood and the fold-out wings of the USCM drop-ships. The units are distinct enough to be easily recognisable, but there is no skin or model variations between same types, so all smart-gunners look identical.

Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?

The A.I. in an RTS makes or breaks the gameplay, more so than in other types of games, as you need to be able to rely on your troops following your orders while at the same time expecting challenging behaviour from computer controlled opponents. Unfortunately, Extinction is quite hit and miss in this department. The enemy A.I. is usually great, and even on normal your opponents should provide a decent challenge. But unit movement is at best workable, and at worst downright awful. Your troops will quite often wander off in the opposite direction to where you want, and frequently get stuck behind scenery and walls. In a game where a lone unit is a dead unit, this can be a costly and extremely frustrating problem. The computer also appears to have a few advantages in the resource department, and is clearly reliant on mission and area triggers...for example if you destroy a Predator anti-air turret in one of the later Marine missions, virtually every computer controlled Predator unit will swarm to your location and the situation fast becomes an unwinnable battle.

As if to further reinforce the image of your troops as mindless idiots, each unit only has one acknowledgement and one affirmative, so expect to here a lot of "yeah?” followed by "I'm on it.” As you can imagine, the speech gets irritating very quickly. The rest of the audio effects are well done, and all are authentic to the respective film licences. The motion-scanner's ominous click-click-click will grate on your nerves, but as soon as it turns into the contact "beep” the adrenalin kicks in and you'll be scanning the area for enemies in a hurry! Overall though, while the effects aren't bad, there's nothing particularly noteworthy about them either. The musical score varies depending on the species you are playing with, and the tracks sound great, but as with the rest of the audio there just isn't enough variety to keep you interested, and the default volume is quite a bit lower than the audio which makes it harder to hear, but easier to ignore if you don't like it.

"It's game over man, game over!”

Without a doubt the biggest letdown for this game, and if not one of the most grievous oversights in recent memory, is the total and utter lack of ANY multiplayer options in this game. With Xbox Live compatibility this game would have fast become a favourite, and the lack of other RTS titles would have ensured its dominance for many months. Even a system link option would have doubled the lifespan of the game, but sadly neither exists, and so AvP Extinction is a single player only title.

Perhaps this could have been forgiven had some type of random mission generator or skirmish option been included, but regrettably this too was omitted, and is the nail in the coffin for Extinction. Once you finish the relatively short campaign, it's game over with nothing left to do but trade or sell the title away. Words simply cannot express how badly the lack of multiplayer or skirmish hurts this title, and it makes the game very hard to recommend to any but diehard fans of either the Alien or Predator franchises.