Konami knows what gamers want, and they want a Devil May Cry/Bayonetta style game by the makers of this year’s Aliens Vs. Predator game, Rebellion. That’s what you are going to get in NeverDead. Why is it called NeverDead? Because you can reattach limbs lost in battle. Yup. The concept was originally dreamed up by members of Kojima Productions and is now being used in NeverDead. Are you prepared to fight off waves of unholy enemies with a butterfly design inspired sword? You better be. No word on when the game will be released, but when it is, it will be out for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

You can tackle the three species in any order, but the chosen order is Marine, Alien, and finally Predator. Beating each species’ missions in that way gives you the complete story, in the properly paced order. The story is much the same except that Rebellion has chosen to bring some of the elements of the AvP movie franchise into the fold. There are literally thousands of comic pages that detail the AvP universe, but they decided to choose the much weaker movie properties as the basis for some of their storytelling. This would be a sign of things to come.

The Marine campaign is easily the strongest because it plays to Rebellion’s strength, the fact that they have none. It’s a cookie-cutter shooter with the design sensibilities of the late nineties. Most levels consist of wide open spaces that have been turned into mazes by debris that you cannot climb over. It’s less “claustrophobic” and more “just annoying.” This setup mixed with stiff, and occasionally awkward, controls makes for even more annoyance. Now, there are some truly genuine scare-moments throughout the Marine campaign, but they only serve to highlight the game’s central flaw: The AvP license does the majority of the heavy lifting in this game. If you were to swap this license with an original IP, the game would fall apart. You aren’t terrified because of how the level is set up or because of the game’s pacing; you are terrified because you know what hunts you. The Marine campaign prospers on the back of three decades worth of movies and comics, not on its own ability.

Things really start to fall apart during the Alien campaign. Because the Alien has no guns, the game had to transform from a run-and-gun shooter into something more xeno-friendly. It adopts a half-hearted stealth gimmick that doesn’t really work. But that’s mostly ok because the enemy A.I. is so bad that exploiting it becomes the more efficient way to finish levels. Worse yet, Rebellion managed to make the Alien nearly impossible to control. When AvP 2 came out, Monolith perfected the art of Alien control by making wall transitions seamless and increased the players field of vision to accommodate the lack of peripheral vision during those transitions. Rebellion ignored these mechanics. Walls have a strange stickiness to them, and the transitions between them are clunky, giving you a better chance of being killed than helping you escape. If you do happen to make a smooth transition, go ahead and do it with your eyes closed. Don’t worry, your on-screen counterpart won’t be able to see either, so it’s fair. Rebellion has managed to transform human controlled Aliens from alacritous killing machines to cumbersome pieces of mobile tissue paper.

But surely it all comes together for The Predator campaign, right? Rebellion can’t screw up the feeling of playing as one of the fiercest hunters in the galaxy, right?

Actually…

By the time The Predator campaign rolls around, you have already been through the game’s meager offering of levels twice, so another go around seems like too much to ask. But, if you were to push forward, you would find that The Predator is the worst of the bunch. The clunky controls from the Marine campaign are mixed with the stupid stealth portions of the Alien campaign. Aside from partial invisibility, your only other stealth gimmick is a method of distraction that occurs nowhere in a rationally minded world. Basically, you click on a marine, then you click on a point far away so you can kill him away from his friends. The marine walks directly to the point you clicked on, no questions asked, as if you were playing a real time strategy game. Imagine the fun and enjoyment to be had in a room with 15 or so marines that you have to take out one by one.

Of course, you aren’t just fighting marines. Alien combat is handled through a ham-fisted hand-to-hand combat system. You have a hard and light attack in addition to the ability to block. One by one — because the AI won’t allow two hostiles to engage you at once – remember this, it will be important later — you engage in cross species fisticuffs until you clear out all the Aliens. The whole system feels like an afterthought even though it becomes your main means of combat, and it doesn’t come close to the competence of other games’ (Condemned 2, Godhand) implementations.

When it comes to The Predator’s toys, they run from useless to game-breakingly good. On the left hand of that scale, you have proximity mines. These would be decent in a game like Splinter Cell, where the stealth element is executed properly. In AvP, they are completely useless. The only time you should select it is by mistake. A bit further to the right is the famous razor-disc-thing from Predator 2. It is useful for just one thing: breaking a pipe for a mission objective. More useful is the shoulder mounted laser cannon, able to pick off enemies from further out. Its only problems are limited ammo  and that the act of firing it also drops your camo. Finally, there is the Combi Stick, a weapon so useful that once you get it, you won’t use anything else. It doesn’t drop camo, has infinite ammo, and is a one-shot kill. The overarching problem with all these weapons is that there aren’t many levels, and the levels are all short. Since you are doled out each weapon gradually, you never get enough time with any of them. Luckily, this is the shortest campaign, and the pain is over only hours after it began.

That brings us to multiplayer. I wish I could say that multiplayer saves this game from being terrible, but the retail multiplayer experience is as half assed as the single player. I dedicated four hours over two days to really get a feel for the multiplayer, but that feel never came. In the seven deathmatch games I was a part of, all of them ended in “connection lost” messages. I did all sorts of diagnostics on my connection and tried on two different days, all to no avail. The other modes are fun enough, but it takes five to ten minutes to even get a game started most of the time. Even survivor mode (the AvP version of Horde Mode) is a crappy photocopy of its inspiration. When you are in a game, you realize why Rebellion forced the AI to attack you one at a time in single player: it’s nearly impossible to combat multiple foes, regardless of species. While that is certainly something you can chalk up under “realistic,” it isn’t something you can also put under “fun” as most competitive multiplayer games turn into a “give-and-get” in terms of kills. No sir, this is not a good time.

The only things left to critique are the sound and graphics. You will notice that I mentioned earlier that neither of them do anything to enhance the gameplay, and that is not something that changes as the game plays out. While the graphic and sound design isn’t as dated as the level and encounter design, they aren’t up to current gen snuff. Graphics especially look like something out of an Xbox launch title rather than a title five years removed from that.

What else can I say? I wanted to love this game. I even got to like it for a little while, but it didn’t last. Rebellion couldn’t seem to shake the design ghosts of the late nineties and gave us another remake of their Atari Jaguar game. If it looks dated and feels dated, then it is dated. Dated and bad. As much as it pains me (and has potential repercussions to my precious Aliens: Colonial Marines’ fate) I have to say, when it comes to Aliens Versus Predator, don’t bother.

Pros:

• Aliens! You remember how scary Aliens were
• Oh hay, that’s the voice of the guy from Pumpkinhead

Cons:

• Graphics are dated
• Voice acting is terrible
• Everything else

Destructoid is reporting that on Xbox Live it said there was a demo for Aliens Vs. Predator coming on the 4th. Then AvP Galaxy took that one step further and said the demo was also going to be on PSN and Steam the same day! The game is due in stores on the 16th, giving you roughly 2 weeks to demo the game and decide whether you’re going to buy it. You are going to buy it aren’t you?

UPDATE: Not only is it coming tomorrow, but it’s a multiplayer demo featuring the refinery map.