There’s nothing like a gory videogame fatality to get gamers giggling with sadistic delight. After all, spine-ripping punchlines have kept Mortal Kombat going for nearly 20 years! Aliens vs. Predator knows this tactic full well, too.

Us human meatbags get caught in the middle of a sci-fi adversarial tag-team, and AvP captures the ensuing carnage from a delicious first-person perspective. When you’re playing as an Alien or a Predator, the game’s up-close-and-personal approach lets you press X when behind an unsuspecting enemy to perform an impale, decapitation, throat slash, face bite, or something else equally gruesome and meaty.

This intensity is the shooter’s strength. Across three short intertwining campaigns — from the Marine, Alien, and Predator viewpoints — on a distant colony, you’ll engage in white-knuckle boss fights, dodge annoying Facehuggers, and hoof it through dark corridors. But an unfortunate result of the overlapping stories is that you pass through the exact same areas three times, making the environments feel recycled and stale by the end. The game also relies heavily on melee combat: holding RB and LB together blocks while the individual buttons perform light and heavy melee attacks, respectively. This setup may force you to get face-to-face with these scary creatures, but it ends up making the game too easy because you can simply block and then counter with RB when the screen prompts you to.

Worse, the emphasis on, and ease, of the melee combat — maybe a concession to the controller’s less-precise-than-a-mouse aiming when you’re trying to quickly shoot an Alien racing down a wall or ceiling? — is a design decision that hurts a lot more than it helps. It has the unfortunate side effect of completely removing any and all fear from the experience — something earlier games in the series thrived on. The Marine campaign suffers most. You should be wetting your pants when your motion tracker is beeping like crazy and you hear Aliens hissing all around you. But why waste a perfectly good pair of pants when you know you can just block and retaliate, punching the Xenomorph to the ground for a quick, easy kill? Gameplay aside, just the idea of a human punching an Alien in the face with any success is an absolute crime against the laws of this long-established universe.

The Predator campaign lets you pull the same trick against the Aliens. In fact, only the Alien portion doesn’t feel like it was nerfed for the gamepad, as the Xenomorphs don’t wield guns. They do skitter along any surface, however, allowing you to stalk your prey from the ceiling and even press Y to hiss and lure individuals away from a group for easy devouring. It’s occasionally disorienting to navigate the environment as the acid-blooded baddie, but the experience is refreshingly unique, and as an Alien, fewer of the levels feel recycled.

And AvP largely redeems itself in its multi-species multiplayer mode. Not only do all of the classes feel balanced against the others, but the action is both engaging and party-friendly. Pulling off a fatality move on an unsuspecting buddy is a gift-wrapped invitation for trash talk. Deathmatch free-for-alls that seem vanilla in other games are a treat here, as 18 Marines, Aliens, or Predators all running around trying to slaughter each other is gleeful, controlled chaos. The Firefight/Horde-style Survival mode also stands out.

On the other hand, the humans-versus-a-lone-Predator multiplayer mode — in which the player who successfully offs the Dreadlocked One then becomes him — reads great on paper but is a bore in practice. The designed-for-18-players maps are just too big when everyone’s trying to hunt down one player, leaving most participants out of the action for much of the round. And ironically, AvP lacks a similar “Aliens vs. Predator” mode that probably would’ve played a bit better due to the Xenomorphs’ ability to jet around the map with added haste.

A few more maps, a few more multiplayer modes, a few more unique areas in the campaign, and a few more fear-inducing moments would’ve gone a long way toward making Aliens vs. Predator set off gamers’ motion trackers. Instead, it registers as simply a medium blip on the radar — a second-shelf shooter that falls just short of fulfilling the incredible potential of its license. But hey, those fatalities never get old!

On Xbox 360

+ Engaging multiplayer...mostly.

+ Unique Alien gameplay.

- Emphasis on melee removes fear in single-player mode.

? Would you really, truly punch an Alien if you already had a loaded gun in your hand? Or ever, for that matter?

7.0