This game is over a year old now but I’m going to review it anyway. I just bought it off of Steam when it was on sale for $4.99 and I want my goddamn money back.

I’ll preface by saying that I love both the Alien and Predator franchises. Yeah, Predator 2 sucked and there hasn’t ever been a good Predator game that didn’t also have Aliens in it, but the first and third movies are good enough to make up for all of that.

Meanwhile, there has yet to be a bad Alien movie—and if you say "Resurrection" I’ll fucking hit you. It may be the weakest movie in the series but that’s just a testament to how good the first three are, and it’s still better than anything you like. Go watch The Nightmare Before Christmas and cry about how you’ll never find true love like in every goddamn Tim Burton movie.

Even the Alien vs. Predator movies were all right considering they were directed by Paul Anderson, the guy who is systematically butchering Resident Evil as though it raped his only daughter. But Aliens vs. Predator, released in 2010 as a reboot of the original game series, should have been aborted immediately after conception. Fuck the pro-lifers. This entire review is their fault.

Aliens vs. Predator is a technical piece of shit, running just as terribly as it looks. Every character looks like a lifeless, plastic doll and the textures are blurrier than the entire Nintendo 64 library, yet it stutters on my new computer even with everything in the video settings turned off or as low as it can go.

For comparison, I could run Dead Space on my old PC (which hadn’t received an upgrade since 2005) with all of the visual settings cranked up. Dead Space may be two years older than AvP, but it still looks a hell of a lot better and is generally a much better game. In fact, you should really just be playing Dead Space right now instead of worrying about AvP. Go on. Shoo! Have fun! I can finish the rest of the review without you.

You must look at least this good (or be Anne Hathaway) to ride.

Actually, some of AvP’s performance issues may be due to the camera system and not the frame rate. There’s no mouse smooth option in the game’s settings even though looking around causes the screen to jitter like your character has cerebral palsy, and while there is an option to reduce mouse lag, Sega has admitted that this causes the camera to jerk around even worse than without it. I don’t know how the developers at Rebellion managed to screw up the camera in a first-person shooter, but they did it. So kudos to them for that.

I was only able to force myself to complete the Marine’s singleplayer campaign, which ended after just a couple of hours anyway. If that’s one third of the game, then I figured that I could finish the entire thing in about six hours. So I rewatched Weekend at Bernie’s parts one and two instead and still had time to jerk off twice before supper. It’s called effective time management, and it’s why I’m so good at what I do.

So Aliens vs. Predator is ugly, short, and plays like a game of Operation where all of the players are epileptic and watching a Pokemon marathon. It’s gotta have a good story to make up for all of that, right?

Well, like I said, I only played a third of the game before uninstalling it and masturbating, but I can tell you with utmost confidence that the story is also shit. I’d illustrate to you exactly why this is so, but that would require that I had actually paid attention to and committed to memory what was happening. If, when someone asks you whether a story is good or not, you can reply with "I dunno," then the answer is automatically "no." A good story commands attention, whereas the only thing that AvP commanded was that I stop playing before I suffered the misfortune of experiencing the entire game.

Returning to my abortion metaphor, Aliens vs. Predator should only be sold as a lecture on why it’s important to use proper birth control. If Rebellion and Sega had just remembered to use a condom before engaging in a drunken orgy of bad ideas, AvP might not have been born as the mentally retarded burden to society that it is.

-86 -- Why, God? Why? (-86s are like having your dick microwaved in five-second increments. You would be better off shooting your own dog for entertainment than playing this game.)