The Alien faction is probably the best faction from a design standpoint, as the campaign's conceit is pretty much a perfect fit for the Aliens: you want to have legions of enemies all over the map, so you can harvest them as Facehugger fodder. (Which, mind, is a really fascinating approach to a detector mechanic, but it's still a factor in why the Predator campaign isn't very raid-y) You can approach with more of a raider mentality, but it's not often necessary, and often not very effectual: Aliens in particular have a mechanic where any of their units that can see through cloak at all makes the cloak essentially worthless for several minutes afterward, because units seen by Alien detectors can be seen wherever they go even if they're under cloak.
Just as the Marine style of play tends to be 'form up on an Atmosphere Processor, build up, move out, repeat', the Predator style works out more often to something like 'head out, kill things, harvest all their skulls, and have the Shrine roll up and recharge you while ordering in units/upgrades, and then repeat'. They don't produce small teams to raid, instead tending to throw massive hordes at you.Īnd even more disappointing, playing as the Predators yourself doesn't really support the raiding style either. They don't try to retreat to a Shrine so it can rapidly recharge their energy, heal up, and come back to fight again. They spawn waves, the waves approach under cloak, and they just relentlessly attack until you or they is dead. When you're fighting Predators, the AI doesn't even try. Of course the Predators wouldn't want to perform open combat if they can avoid it, and of course they'd be so good at killing from the shadows and escaping to do it again later.Īnd then the gameplay only kind of bears it out. I've seen RTS games that shoot for a raider faction, but never anything with quite so much clarity of vision in this regard, and it makes perfect sense for a Predator faction to be a raider faction. They'd be a raider faction, using a small crew of early-game Predators to pick off isolated enemies, harvest their skulls, and then retreat to a Shrine to rapidly recharge, then buy some troops with the 'honor points' earned and head out and do it again. The Predator faction is the easiest example to talk about: it's so obvious what the developers intend for the Predator dynamic to be, and it's a really interesting one. The game is actually kind of fascinating, in that it's very clear the developers have a reasonably solid grasp on critical RTS principles, but then the execution doesn't really end up bearing things out. The gameplay dynamic for Marines is pretty clearly that you call in troops, maybe secure an Atmosphere Processor and as it runs down buy upgrades and purchase more troops, and then seek out the next Atmosphere Processor while using Medics and Commtechs to undo all damage between skirmishes: you don't really have the resources to be able to afford casualties, particularly in the early missions. The Marine faction is the only one that can generate resources or troops without having to kill anything, and even then Atmosphere Processors only give a fairly limited amount of resources before giving up the ghost. The fact is, Extinction's gameplay is just fundamentally oriented toward a singleplayer type of experience where the player mows down hordes of mooks.
Once I saw the gameplay in action, this made a bit more sense, though it just emphasized the weirdness.
It's an RTS made exclusively for console systems, which is already a bit oddball, but it also has no multiplayer, no skirmish mode, nothing but three seven-mission campaigns, one for each faction. Aliens vs Predator: Extinction is a weird game.
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