But the game has you do more than just kill. You'll also need to find bits of alien technology (pieces of their ship, etc.) scattered across the levels so you can dissolve them from existence. Unfortunately, any sense of exploration is squashed by a map screen that pinpoints the exact location of all these chunks of alien refuse. The game holds your hand just as tightly as you advance through the levels. Any time you need to smash a weakened wall or turn a crank to progress to the next area, these point of interest are already marked with a giant, twirling red triangle. You're left wondering why you're playing at all if the game won't let you figure anything out on your own.
That said, the levels themselves do have a nice bit of variety. Early on you'll be prowling through a dense forest, whereas down the road you might find yourself going toe-to-toe with aliens on a basketball court--no, that's not a metaphor for shooting hoops--in the game's high school level. What's more, you get to choose your path in the game. For example, you can make your way through the town by going underground, through the suburbs, or via the industrial buildings. But these branching paths all wind up at the same final level with the same ending. The foregone conclusion of a finale really puts a damper on this feeling of choice. Equally disappointing is the fact that these levels, though varied in setting, tend to look consistently drab and uninteresting with their lack of light and muddy textures. It's not bad, by any means--just really bland. The same can be said for the game's limited sound effects and easily forgotten music.
As mentioned before, it's awfully easy to drift off while playing AvP because none of the game's peripheral elements do much to keep your interest. This is true for the bonus skirmish mode as well as the ad-hoc multiplayer. In skirmish, you're given five minutes to clear out as many aliens as you can in one of the levels from the main storyline. The final score is tallied up in honor points, but nothing really comes of it. No rewards, no unlockables, nothing. The ad-hoc multiplayer is basically co-op skirmish in which you play alongside a friend. Even in this mode, you're still not given anything of value for your efforts, just a meaningless score and the feeling that you've wasted the last five minutes.
In the end, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem isn't a terrible game; it's just really mediocre. It's hard to say if it would be more interesting if it weren't so easy, given that so much of the game fails to grab your attention even when you're not taking difficulty into account. What's easy to say is that there are far better action games on the PSP than this one.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (PSP):
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