Alien vs Predator: The Hunt Begins Review

**Please Note: Review is of Alien vs Predator: The Hunt Begins (1st Edition).**

The Alien film franchise is the single most influential sci-fi horror series of all time, and for good reason; nothing has scared more people so profoundly, or for so long. It has sired more than its fair share of offspring in film, literature, games and other media - some of which is phenomenal, others of which are middling to exceptionally poor. The next of kin is Prodos Games’ Alien Versus Predator: The Hunt Begins. Being a huge fan of the game, I acquired it at its full face value, and I cannot possibly express how outrageously foolish I feel for doing so. It’s abundantly clear that Prodos tried to be all things to all people, because there’s several distinct sets of rules beyond the generic, quite forgettable rules, but the basic rules have parts that are indescribably puerile and were quite obviously included to give the illusion of depth to an otherwise very simple game. If you get into the advanced rules, most of which revolve around army building, it becomes an over-convoluted mess that’s wrought with fiddly rules, too many dice modifiers, and pocket situations which have caused me no small amount of suffering and consternation.

The production is beautiful, which is what sucked me in like a shrimp to an anglerfish. It is so, so pretty, with such detailed, beautiful, fragile little miniatures and wonderful, evocative art that manages to ride the fine line between dark and crisp like a champion tightrope walker. Obviously, the miniatures are the draw, though, because they are exactly what guys like myself have been dreaming of for decades. They are crisp, highly detailed models that look exactly as you’d imagine they should, and invoke images in my mind of the film series just as I hoped they would. In short, the production value of the game is phenomenal, despite having a wonky sized box which is far heavier than it looks. What kills me is that the game really needs to have about twenty more miniatures in the box to really get the most out of what it is, and thus it’s the typical Kickstarter game that builds in a bunch of rules that don’t apply to you unless you have a full complement of miniatures. Basically, I think they assumed that you’d be going all in on the game, and you end up with a bunch of options you can’t use unless you did.

It’s not that the game is bad, per se, as much as it is trying too hard. It has all the bells and whistles of a deeper game, but the bells substitute complexity for depth and the whistles are simply distractions from the core concepts of the game. Basically, the game is a typical, asymmetrical force-on-force setup, with each model having a point value and each force built using an agreed upon force value. The basic game has generic, pre-fab members of a faction trying to accomplish their faction-specific goals, but the advanced game and campaign rules are far more satisfying, with custom options for squad builds that are very interesting and thematic, but the way they’ve made them work, you’ll end up wanting to have a slide rule handy to keep track of all of the modifiers. If you’re playing a three-player game and both of your opponents have cards played which modifies your actions, and you played a card too, at that point the slide rule goes out and you’re going to need to rent mainframe time from WOPR. It’s just too much work to play the game when you’ve got all these opposing cards and special rules going on at once.

Card play is a huge component of the game, where each faction has its own deck and can play cards to augment their own skill checks or hurt other factions’. If there’s any triumph here, that’s where it is, because I found the card play to be the one redeeming factor in the game, despite the additional, extraneous mathematics required to figure out target numbers for skill checks. If you’re playing the basic game, with no special rules or custom characters, it actually works as intended and delivers a richer, more strategic experience. It’s actually really, really smart.

Unfortunately, since there’s only two kinds of Xenomorph and three kinds of Colonial Marine and Predator models that ship with the game, the game is actually almost unplayable in the advanced mode due to the limitations of the Alien builds; they don’t use guns or Predator weapons, and they all look the same, more or less, so you’d be hard pressed to ‘upgrade’ one model on your list and be able to tell what it is. To top it off, the game uses a Space Hulk type blip token system, and the base game doesn’t come with any of the tokens for upgraded Aliens, so you couldn’t proxy them easily even if you wanted to. Basically, what I’m saying is that you’re stuck with what you buy on the Alien side, and that sucks.

Another gripe about the Alien faction is that there’s an infestation mechanic for the tiles, which give you yet another modifier to deal with when Aliens have control of a tile. Worse yet, you have to physically swap the tile with either a “full infestation” or “partial infestation” tile, meaning you have to take all the miniatures off, find and replace the tile with the correct matching one, lock it into place, and then put the miniatures back on. We dumped that on the first play after the third time the same tile got flipped, instead placing a green or red cube I had lying around in my parts bin to denote the tiles’ states. Worse still, every time a figure wants to enter a tile, you need to add up all the values of the base sizes on the tile, of which there’s two in the box and three possible with expansions, each of which has its own value, just to determine if you’re even legally allowed to place it there.

The long and short is that there’s a lot of stuff in the game that works pretty well, but it’s outweighed by the massive burden of bullcrap that you’ve got to endure to play it. I’ve house ruled the hell out of the game just to make it fun to play, but at the end of the day, to get the most out of the system, you kind of have to buy a bunch of expansion material. It may be worth the extra expenditure because there are some things to really like about the game, but I’m not sure the price is justified.