Video Game / Aliens vs. Predator (2010)

Aliens vs. Predator is a 2010 First-Person Shooter video game developed by Rebellion as a standalone game for the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. It is part of the overall Alien vs. Predator franchise. Unlike the earlier games in the series, which took plot elements from the separate Aliens and Predator franchise, this game was directly based on the continuity established by the Alien vs. Predator film.

The game has three campaigns: the Predators, the Aliens, and the marines.

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This game provides examples of:

• Admiring the Abomination:
  • In the Alien Campaign, Specimen 6 is saved at birth by Weyland when she shows special intelligence in dodging the traps for the chestbursters. And once more at the end of the Alien Campaign, Six is captured rather than killed due to the 6 brand on her forehead.
  • Karl Weyland also states in an audio log that he seeks to be more like the Xenomorphs, admiring their adaptability and survival adaptions.
• Almighty Janitor: Tequila, a Corporal, is effectively running the entire operation on the Marines' side for the entire game, due to their Commanding Officer having been grabbed by the bugs almost immediately. Where all the Lieutenants and Sergeants went is anyone's guess.
• Artificial Brilliance: On the higher difficulties, but especially nightmare, the Marines and Xenomorphs get a lot smarter. The Xenomorphs will actually try to grab you through the floor grates and air vents in the Marine campaign if you aren't careful, while the Marines will be much more mindful of their surroundings in the Alien and Predator campaigns.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Even on higher difficulties, the Marines, especially in the Alien campaign, will still easily fall for traps in the Alien and Predator campaigns. They will also still go out alone, and while the game does try to mitigate this by creating more obstacles, they can easily be avoided. Enemies are more resilient, but the player is only in real danger if faced with multiple adversaries, especially in the Alien campaign due to auto healing.
  • At long distances, you can easily pick off facehuggers with your pistol, and they'll just stand there and take it while barely moving.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The massive sewer system beneath the colony, which you fight through in both the Marine and Alien campaigns.
• Action Girl: Corporal Tequila, your primary supporting character in the Marine campaign. Katya has to be this as well, given she survived a Xenomorph infestation.
• Adaptational Badass: In the first two Aliens vs Predator PC FPS games, the PredAliens were simply an Elite Mook-level enemy. Here, there's only one, and it's the Big Bad of the Predator campaign and a full-on final boss fight. The Praetorians have likewise been upgraded, going from an Elite Mook in the first game, to a Boss in Mook's Clothing in the second game, to a full-on boss fight in this game. Facehuggers, while still difficult in the prior games, were easier to handle due to the fact they stuck out like a sore thumb, actually make attempts to ambush you. The actual Xenomorph warriors are actually tougher, taking more bullets and actually trying to get around you.
• Adaptational Wimp: Any Xenomorph not named Six that gets burned will eventually blow up. The Alien franchise has indicated that fire does not harm adult Xenomorphs, they are just repelled by it.
• Alien Blood: Runners in the Marine and Predator campaigns will spit it at you, and there is an achievement stat in the Marine campaign for not getting hit by it. Good luck with that.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Obtaining ranks in multiplayer unlocks skins for each faction that can be used in multiplayer.
• Another Side, Another Story: The Human, Xenomorph, and Predator campaigns coincide with and overlap one another to tell a single narrative.
• Apocalyptic Log: Several Audio Diaries ranging from central characters to ordinary colonists, scientists and Marines will often give backstory on what happened before everything went south.
• Asshole Victim: Six massacres Weyland Yutani scientists who branded her and held her kin as test subjects, as well as sacrificing employees to study her. And what she does to Groves is more than justified. On a similar note, the vast majority of Marines and civilians she can potentially kill are shown to be jerks at best, and have no trouble sacrificing their comrades at worst if they have to.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • Weyland comments that the Aliens are a "true meritocracy." Given what Aliens do, this trope applies to the entire species. The Predators go by this, too: if you want to get anywhere in this society, you have to prove your combat chops in the hunt. Preds often settle disputes in bare-knuckle brawls as well for the viewing pleasure of their fellows.
  • This is proven at the end of the Alien scenario, where Six "evolves" into a Matriarch. Unless you realize that at the end of the Alien scenario, there's pretty much nobody else to 'promote' to the position in question.
  • The Praetorians lead a large amount of Xenomorphs in both of their boss fights and you will really have to be careful in fighting against them.
• Attack Its Weak Point: To have a real chance of beating combat synths as the marine, you need to hit them in their weakpoint — their legs. No, really. Knocking off their head just blinds them and makes it harder for them to hit you, their torso can take absurd amounts of punishment, and although their arms would theoretically work too, they're too hard to hit in practice as they're holding guns. Aim for the legs.
• Authority Equals Asskicking:
  • Karl Bishop Weyland; in the final shootout of the Marine campaign he can kill you in just 2 shots and can survive even more damage than an elite Combat Android, taking almost a full 99 round magazine from the pulse rifle to bring down, although he still goes down after about 14 shots from the semi-auto sniper rifle or 5 good shotgun blasts.
  • Six also is this in that other Xenomorphs defer to her when near her, and she ultimately becomes a Queen.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The kill moves in the multiplayer demo are awesome looking, but leave you vulnerable for some time; its not that uncommon to see an alien grab a marine, with another alien behind him, etc., forming a conga line of blood and gore. This applies in single-player too when fighting multiple enemies, too, though the enemies are usually too slow unless the player has it done literally a few feet away.
  • The Marine's flamethrower, as it retains all the flaws of the version from the 1999 PC game, eats ammo for breakfast, and now a burning Alien can grab your leg and kill you instantly when it explodes.
  • The Predator's plasmacaster auto-locks onto enemies and can gib a xeno or marine with a single charged shot... and you can only fire about 3 or 4 charged shots before running out of energy and being unable to fire until you found an energy pickup.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Six's morph into a Queen is treated as this with her roar of victory and a triumphant chorus at the end of the Alien campaign.
• Bad Boss: As is the norm in the Alien franchise, Weyland Yutani who choose to sacrifice the colonists and their own employees in order to study the Xenomorphs.
• Badass Normal: The "Rookie", who gets stranded alone in alien territory at least once per scenario and he still manages to fight his way out, including at one point getting captured by the Aliens and having to escape through the hive. It's worth noting that nearly every character in the game expresses disbelief that he has somehow managed to survive. He also kills a Predator on his own, keeping in mind he was not trained to fight them, butchers three Praetorians, and kills Weyland himself.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • No matter what you end a mission with in the Marine campaign, you always start the next one with a Pulse Rifle in one slot. And at one point you lose that, too.
  • Averted in the Marine's final battle; there's a cutscene which seems to imply the Marine has lost all his weapons except his pistol, just before he has to fight some of the toughest enemies in the entire game. In fact his previous weapons are simply holstered, and he can pull them out at any time.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: While the Xenomorphs encountered in the Marine and Predator campaigns have some form of ruggedness and have bona fide fangs, Specimen Six is completely pristine and has human like teeth, indicating that she is the main protagonist.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: In the Alien campaign, some civilians that see Six will shoot themselves in the head to prevent her from harvesting them. Several Marines also do this when they are impregnated.
• BFG: The Smartgun is so big it takes up both primary weapon slots.
• Big Bad: Karl Bishop Weyland, the head of Weyland-Yutani, is the main villain across all three campaigns, and is at the center of every conflict. Alhough the Matriarch and the Abomination complicate things by killing off the colonists and propagating a Xenomorph infestation, the former is taken out by Rookie early on and the latter doesn't factor enough into the overarching plot to become a real hindrance to his plans.
• Big Good: The Matriarch serves as this in the Alien campaign and Spartan takes the role during the Predator campaign.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Marine campaign ends with the player marine and a xenomorph-infected squadmate being "rescued" by a dropship... crewed by Weyland-Yutani mooks, who are having a nice chat with a Weyland android about how now they know where the Xenomorph homeworld is.
• Black Dude Dies First: Averted. You control a black dude in the Marine campaign.
• Blood Knight: As is always the case, the Predators love getting into fights.
• Book Ends: The Alien campaign begins with Six being held prisoner by Doctor Groves. At the end, the roles have been reversed.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: The Predator has to use some unfortunate guy's severed noggin to open doors locked by retinal scanners.
• Boss Arena Urgency: The battle between the Predator and PredAliens takes place over walkways slightly above lava. As the battle goes on, the PredAliens will start to cause a cave in, wrecking the walkways so that the player has to both make tricky leaps between platforms, and at the same time fighting the PredAliens.
• Bottomless Magazines: Played with; the pistol has 18 rounds but an unlimited amount of reloads.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Doctor Groves thinks it is a smart idea to insult and mock a creature that he knows is more intelligent than the average Xenomorph that he has just witnessed kill three people without any trouble. Needless to say, Six spares him when they meet again and cocoons him.
  • Weyland thinks it is a nice idea to try to mock and ridicule the Marine who has survived going through an Alien Hive, killed a Predator, and slaughtered his combat androids and whose comrade he just condemned to death. Needless to say, Rookie kills him. And that is not getting into his dismissal at Dark, who has plenty of motivations, and is an Elite.
• But Thou Must!: Several instances.
  • In the Alien campaign, even if you know how to sprint, attempting to escape before the power goes out will result in the vent doors closing.
  • Thanks to the fact there are no Facehuggers, the civilians in the research lab have to be killed.
  • The only way to get through some areas is to use a human head, and that means killing the human needed with a special prompt. Killing the human any other way is a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • Wanna try getting all of the audio diaries in the Marine campaign? That will have to involve fighting with Facehuggers.
• Casting Gag: Willian Hope is once again involved in dealing with the Aliens, given his utterly disastrous attempt to stop the infestation back in 1986. Here, he is researching and mistreating the Xenomorphs, and indirectly creates a catastrophic Xenomorph infestation, at the behest of Weyland Yutani.
• Canon Immigrant: The game incorporates a few elements from the first AvP movie (the Predator pyramid, Alien Vision mode being green instead of red, Charles Bishop Weyland) as well as from the AvP 2 game which was made by a different developer (Combat Synth Elite Mooks, Runner aliens, a shotgun and sniper rifle, and a Corrupt Corporate Executive Big Bad who turns out to be an android).
• Checkpoint Starvation: Nightmare Mode disables the checkpoint system, meaning you get bumped back to the very beginning of the mission if you ever die (which, given the enemy's increased damage output, happens a lot).
• Chestburster: Weyland Yutani is harvesting people to create Xenomorph specimens. You see it quite a bit in the Marine campaign.
• Clone Degeneration: This is an in-game theory presented as to how, over the course of several hundred years, Weyland went from a reasonably Reasonable Authority Figure in the present day to the Card-Carrying Villain he is in the far future of this game.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!:
  • The Marine campaign does this rather a lot; Tequila tends to be the one constantly reminding you that you need to hurry up and get your ass to the place you do not in fact have to hurry up and get your ass to.
  • This leads to a bit of Hypocritical Humor later on, when Tequila joins you and Katya takes over as Mission Control. Tequila complains about Katya always interrupting with mission objectives, after spending a couple levels doing nothing except interrupting you with mission objectives.
  • Spartan will also prod you to continue your objective during the Predator campaign, though he is far more reasonable, not constantly yelling at you like Tequila.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: It is heavily implied that some of the experiments that were inflicted on the Xenomorphs involved torturing them, in order to find out more about their biology.
• Cranial Processing Unit: Averted. The combat androids can have their heads completely shot off, and continue to not only function, but attack as well. Presumably, they have sensory devices that are also not on their head.
• Cutscene Incompetence: At one point in the Marine campaign, Rookie looks at a Marine who has a facehugger attached to him, and then an egg opens and a facehugger comes after you, in a hallway that is pitch black, and can easily take a third of your health off since you cant see the thing. This effectively sends a strong message to the player to shoot facehuggers at range so they cant attack you, and blow up or avoid eggs if at all possible.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: If you play as one race for quite a while, you may forget the controls are different for the other two, resulting in you doing something you did not want. It's far too easy to, for instance, get into the groove of playing a Marine and then give yourself away while playing another race from trying to reload as an Alien (which results in you loudly hissing) or turn on your flashlight as a Predator (which instead toggles your Invisibility Cloak).
• Darker and Edgier: The first two Alien vs Predator games already have everything go to hell, with the experiments only hinted at and never shown. This game however shows the whole horror show of what happened. The first five minutes of the Alien campaign show people being harvested to create Xenomorphs subjects, followed by Specimen Six being branded, before a Time Skip that heavily implies that she has been tortured. You get to see civilians be murdered on Weyland's orders in the Predator campaign, and the Marine campaign emphasizes just how often these incidents happen, along with how petty and sadistic that some Weyland Yutani executives really are. While the comics and the films have indicated this before, this is the first time all of this has been shown explicitly.
• Deadpan Snarker: Some of the Redshirt Marines utter very snarky lines.
• Determinator:
  • Specimen Six is explicitly stated to have an iron will by Karl Bishop Weyland, given that he notes that she keeps trying to escape despite his relentless experiments on her.
  • Rookie goes through hell and back to rescue his companions. He willingly enters a Xenomorph hive to try to rescue Van Zandt, and he goes on a one man rescue in order to save Tequila from the Xenomorphs.
• Deadly Lunge: Both the Alien and Predator have a ranged lunge move. Before the Online Multiplayer died out, this move was considered extremely overpowered for the Alien, as when used by players who had mastered the timing of when to use it, it would often lead to very fast kills, even on another Alien.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In the first level of the Marine campaign, you are mandated to take a stim. The game will not count this as you using a health stim, allowing you to get the stat of you not taking a single stim.
  • Whenever you get a collectible in the campaign, that collectible is automatically saved.
  • In the Alien campaign, cutting the power will lead marines to come closer and investigate enabling you to grab them.
  • Some civilians will shoot themselves in the head if they see Six or Six takes too long to harvest them.
  • Waiting in the trapped building will result in your death when the Colonial Marines blow it up, while attempting to rush one of the Marines results in them shooting you. Similarly, attempting to attack the Marine and avoid the trap altogether will result in a One-Hit Kill because the Marine serving as bait is carrying a shotgun.
  • On higher difficulties, some of the obstacles that would just take a chunk of health off are fatal. Rookie will die if he is too close to the canisters when they blow up, while Six will be killed instantly by the mines.
  • The other Xenomorphs will kill the Predators though it may take a while. Doing so will result in the Elite Predator boss fight.
  • Attempting to grab the Predators in the final battle of the Alien campaign will end with the Predators breaking the hold and injuring you.
  • In the Marine campaign, if you spend enough time looking for collectibles instead of going to the objective, a lone Xenomorph will attack you.
  • If you manage to keep the various Marines around you alive long enough, they will have more dialogue, though they are scripted to die.
  • Taking too long in the compound when the Predator is searching for you will result in the Predator killing you.
  • Getting in water during the Predator campaign will result in your cloaking device malfunctioning.
  • You can only distract one human at a time in either the Alien or Predator campaigns. Everyone else will be on alert.
  • During Dark's fight with the Praetorian, the Praetorian's height means that it can still hit Dark if he is on a low level ruin. This will mandate Dark to head for the higher ground.
  • The boss fights involving the Queen and the Praetorians will result in a never ending swarm of warriors until the boss is defeated.
  • In order to get the last royal jelly canister in the Alien campaign, Six needs to head into the arena. However the second Six enters the arena, the spikes come up and prevent her from leaving forcing her to fight the Predators.
  • In the jungle levels, because the Xenomorphs are more likely to blend in, more Marines have motion trackers, which makes stealth a lot more difficult.
  • In the Marine campaign, after you get orders from Tequila to head to the club, staying in the room will result in her asking you to leave, as she will try to get the sentries up to prevent her from getting attacked.
  • If Specimen Six and Dark try to distract multiple marines at once, it won't work, as someone is already investigating it. Similarly, if either of them use the same method to kill unaware marines a couple of times in a row, the Marines will buddy up, and also pull out different weapons.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Aliens take on this role in the multiplayer. You're more fragile than the Predators and the Humans, you move differently, and your only attacks are melee-oriented, but a skilled player can make use of their prodigious speed, wall-crawling abilities, and swift takedown maneuvers and become a absolute nightmare to play against.
• Disc-One Final Boss:
  • Both the Marine and Predator campaigns build up the Matriarch as the ultimate threat and the looming Big Bad. However, the Matriarch dies in the second level of the Marine campaign, and Karl Bishop Weyland and the Abomination take the role of the Big Bad in their respective campaigns.
  • Weyland Yutani is set up as the main antagonists of the Alien campaign, but you spend the majority of the game fighting the Colonial Marines, and then a final fight with the Predators.
• The Dragon: Doctor Groves apparently serves as Weyland's right hand man on BG 386.
• Dragon Their Feet: Praetorians, supposedly there to protect the Queen, don't even begin to show up until well after she's killed. To be fair, it is implied that it takes a considerable amount of time for a Warrior to moult into a Praetorian, so this could be a potential subversion.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Those players who are smart enough to remember where the Matriarch is in the Refinery will know that Rookie, who is just trying to find his way out, is about to battle the Matriarch. On that note, everything Rookie does, given that veterans are slaughtered left and right, while the new guy manages to become a One-Man Army.
  • Those who pay attention to the Jungle mission dialogue will realize the commander is stating the same dialogue lines. Both Six and Dark are literally meters away from each other, yet they do not meet.
  • In one of his audio logs, Doctor Groves expresses his fear that the androids will give orders to humans. His boss is actually an android.
• Dwindling Party: There are only seven Predators outside of Dark who appear in the game, and they are all killed well before the end of the game.
  • Two Youngbloods are killed by Specimen Six in the combat arena, while the Elite Predator is defeated by Six and harvested to create the Abomination.
  • Two Youngbloods are discovered by Dark in the jungle, presumably killed by Xenomorphs. Dark promptly sets the guntlests on them to vaporize their remains to prevent the humans from gaining their tech.
  • The other Elite predator is discovered by Dark in the refinery dead, killed by the Xenomorphs just outside the Matriarch's chamber. Dark vaporizes his corpse with his gauntlet.
  • A youngblood Predator stalks Rookie throughout the jungle before attacking him at the combat arena, before he is killed by the Marine.
  • The Marines first lose their ship the Marlow to a Predator attack, than they keep losing squad after squad until it's only the Rookie and Tequila of the entire Marine detachment left.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Six was born into human captivity to be a test subject. After breaking her brethren out and exacting revenge on the humans, she loses her mother and is recaptured by the humans. Her campaign ends with her having escaped, cocooning Doctor Groves and becoming a new queen.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: The Predator campaign has a few:
  • The combistick spear, which doesn't become available until the second-to-last level. It can be thrown several dozen feet, is a one-hit-kill against almost everything, and best of all doesn't drop you out of cloak. Once you get it, you can waltz through human enemies without any effort, and even aliens become much easier to handle.
  • During the last boss fight, your energy automatically recharges, which suddenly makes the mines and plasma caster much more attractive options than they were previously.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Combat Synths, now referred to as Combat Androids, make a return during the later levels in all 3 campaigns. They normally carry either a shotgun or, more likely, a sniper rifle. They can take about 25% more damage than a human Marine (Weyland's black-uniformed personal Praetorian Guard are even tougher, and can take at least 60 rounds from the pulse rifle to kill), and headshots do not help.
  • Survival Mode has mini-Praetorians in the later stages; they behave like regular aliens, but have Praetorian headcrests, deal increased damage, and have enhanced health (it takes up to 5 close range shotgun blasts to kill one, although alternatively it "only" takes a few dozen bullets to do the job).
  • Likewise, flamethrower marines are the most dangerous enemies in the Alien campaign. Getting in contact with one of them for a few seconds can kill Six easily, forcing the player to grab them and perform stealth kills.
  • The Praetorians themselves return serving as bosses in two of the campaigns, and are shown to lead the Xenomorphs in battle after the Matriarch's death.
• Emergency Weapon: You have a pistol with infinite ammo, but it takes nearly have a whole magazine to kill a single Alien.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: The Marines get the motion tracker as usual, though much like in the other parts of the franchise, it does not tell you what direction they are coming from, it will not tell you if they are in the vents, and it will mistake things like boxes and wires for hostile movement, which is frequently used, especially in the first level, for creating paranoia in the player.
• Establishing Character Moment: Six is established as being unusually intelligent and dangerous from birth. While other xenomorphs next to her burst out of restrained humans right into containers placed over their sternums, Six waits until the scientists come in to retrieve the containers, and then bursts out of her host's mouth.
• Evil Is Petty: Weyland condemns Tequila to death simply because he does not like Katya.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Karl Bishop Weyland has a deep monotone voice, and his actions are very evil.
• Exact Words: When Karl Bishop Weyland sees Rookie and Tequila arrive at the Research Labs, he offers them a choice to leave and they will not be pursued, at least not by his minions. The Xenomorphs, and the Predators on the other hand.
• Excuse Plot: Like the other games in the franchise by Rebellion (the Jaguar, the 1999 PC game) there is only a bare-bones outline cribbed from the films for the plot.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Aside from the first Alien level, which occurs a few days before the main outbreak, all of the campaigns occurs within the course of a single day, with the Marine and Predator campaigns ending at nightfall.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Since we are dealing with Xenomorphs, this is inevitable. This happens to multiple human NPC's offscreen, Weyland Yutani is harvesting people using this method, it can happen to Rookie if his last health bar is taken down by a Facehugger, or if the player isn't careful when near eggs.
• Fake Difficulty: The Marines don't have any sort of alert to tell them from what direction they just took damage from. In theory the motion-capture device should tell you, but Aliens don't move when they are beating you up.
  • The Rookie cannot crouch at all. Not a big deal when fighting the melee-based Xenos and Predator, a huge deal when combat synths with guns show up and you can't take cover.
• Faux Affably Evil: The first two times you meet Karl Bishop Weyland in the Marine campaign, he acts friendly by offering for you to leave, but it is very obvious that he does not want them anywhere near the labs, and he quickly shows his true colors.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Each of the playable characters:
  • The Predator, Dark, is the Fighter. They are able to use a vast array of weapons to attack enemies, both up close and far away. They can take a lot of damage, but are somewhat lacking in stealth tactics.
  • The Marine, Rookie, is the Mage. With a wide selection of firearms, the Marine can engage enemies at a multitude of ranges. However, they are rather slow and squishy, and when in close quarters, they simply can't measure up to the melee abilities of the other two characters.
  • The Alien, Specimen Six, is the Thief. The Alien scuttles around in the shadows, and uses cunning and trickery to isolate enemies, picking them off one by one. Of course, in open combat, they have no chance, due to lacking a ranged weapon, and they won't last long against sustained fire.
• First-Person Ghost: Averted. All three characters have their arms constantly visible, you can look down and see their legs, and Six even can see her own tail trailing along if you turn around fast enough.
• Foil: Six and Dark serve as foils for each other. Six is the daughter of the Matriarch and the one who results in the Xenomorphs breaking out and causing the entire nightmare in the first place. Dark is a Predator elite who is the descendant of the Predator Lord who held Six's mother hostage and the one who cleans up the whole mess in the end. Six is the one who directly creates the Abomination, while Dark is the one who kills it. Six is taken off world and becomes a Queen, while Dark is treated as a king because of his accomplishments on BG 386.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Several times during the Marine campaign, you will hear Predator laughter. In the colony, it is likely the Elite that Dark finds in the refinery. In the arena, it's the Predator stalking Rookie.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality:
  • Action Girl/Mission Control Corporal Tequila briefly joins you for about 1/3 of Level 4 and Level 5 and helps you fight about a dozen or so of Weyland's Combat Androids and the Xenomorphs. She's entirely invincible.
  • Averted with the Red Shirt Colonial Marines who occasionally join you; they can die at any time, but if you manage to get through the area while keeping them alive (which can be quite difficult) you'll usually get an extra mini-scripted sequence with them.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • It is usually stated in the Predator universe that a Predator must blow themselves up if they are near death. The four Predators encountered outside the Predator campaign never do that for gameplay purposes.
  • While it seems impossible for Tequila and the Major to have been impregnated that quickly, as the Alien films establish it takes at least a day, they are impregnated when Rookie finds them, usually for plot points, and to show that Weyland has crossed the line of no return.
    • On a similar level, Tequila seems to have literally just been impregnated with a chestburster, as the Xenomorphs have only had Tequila as their prisoner for a few hours. Nevertheless, Tequila already shows signs of illness from the parasite, despite the fact that it usually takes a whole day before visible symptoms begin to show.
  • It is established also in the Alien franchise that a Queen who sees its young slaughtered in front of them goes into full Roaring Rampage of Revenge mode. The Matriarch just stays on the oviposter, presumably to make the fight manageable.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: There are several parts in the campaign where you come across the actions of the other protagonists:
  • In the Alien campaign, going on certain ledges in the Jungle level will result in a mine blowing up. While at first this might be a human mine, playing the Predator campaign will make you realize the mines are those of the Predators, most likely the Youngblood who is held in the house.
  • In the Predator campaign, the main boss is the Abomination, who was created by Specimen Six when she harvested the Elite Predator.
  • Also, Dark comes across the remains of the burned queen, killed by Rookie.
  • Dark also comes across a squad looking for Tequila in the ruins, indicating this happened shortly after they were shot down. The survivors of the squad meet Rookie when he arrives at the crash site.
  • When Tequila brings up the giant Xenomorph, it becomes obvious she is referring to the Praetorians. It is most likely the one she is referring to is the one fought by Dark in the combat arena.
  • In the Predator campaign, you find a dead Elite in the refinery. In the Marine campaign, Tequila brings up unfriendly signals, and you think its a Xenomorph, until you realize it is the Elite Predator and the few seconds where the signal moves away before it moves back is the Predator on his way to the refinery.
• General Ripper: The marine compound commander in the Alien level "Jungle", with a side order of General Failure. His battle plan is to essentially send a platoon of three Marines out armed with flamethrowers to bring down a Xenomorph that just took out their communications. Six easily gets rid of his incredibly small platoon before making her way into the compound. He then tries to use a civilian as bait to trap her in the building, but the civilian predictably panics, and he immediately resorts to using his own men as bait. When that doesn't work, along with Six knocking out the power, his next decision is to seal everyone in the main control room. Six promptly enters anyway and annihilates him and everyone else inside the building.
• General Failure: Subverted. Tequila is shown to be a skillful support person, especially when it comes to just one person or a single squad, but the second she gets put in charge of every single Marine in Freya's Prospect, she makes multiple errors that just make the situation worse. However, this is justified as Tequila is only a corporal and clearly is out of her depth and element with commanding an entire force of at least a few hundred marines. Furthermore, Tequila does not freeze up under pressure and tries to do what is best, but that often backfires, a prime example is when she orders reinforcements to Rookie's position, only for them to run straight into a barricade his squad put up, getting them all killed, something anyone more experienced would have realized.
• Gladiator Games: The combat arena is technically this, where the Predators of the past were pitted against Xenomorphs with spectators watching. Six fights two Predators here and kill them, before harvesting the Elite Predator. Dark battles a Praetorian and its warriors, and Rookie goes against a Predator in a one on one battle.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: How the game and the story works out. The marines are obviously the good guys, trying to save the colonists lives and shut down the infestation. The Xenomorphs, however just want to be left alone and have been used by two sapient species. The Predators have very understandable reasons as to why they don't want their tech falling into human hands. The only real evil is Weyland Yutani, who sacrifice their own people to create Xenomorphs, and later deem everyone expendable.
• Gorn:
  • The demo showed how the Predator can collect trophies by ripping off marines' heads, with the faces twitching in shock while the still-attached spinal cord flails around.
  • All the Alien special kills apply as well.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • When Tequila orders a full fledged retreat, it becomes obvious this is when the Marines decide they would prefer to deal with the unknown hostiles in space than fight an army of Xenomorphs.
  • The Predators deciding to destroy the pyramid. While they will usually use the self destruct devices as a means of honor, it is made clear that the Predators plan to blow up the entire region, because the Xenomorph breakout is too serious to contain, and they have already lost seven Predators.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Karl Bishop Weyland takes this role in the Alien and Predator campaigns. Not only do his actions drive the events of the plots of both campaigns, but his actions directly affect the path of the respective protagonists in those campaigns.
• Greed: This is Weyland Yutani's motivation as usual, hoping to use the Predator technology and Xenomorphs to enrich itself, regardless of who has to die.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The Marines are quite idiotic, making several errors.
  • They frequently wander off by themselves, enabling Six or Dark to grab them.
  • Despite being aware that Xenomorphs arrive in vents, they never throw hand grenades in them.
  • Their CO's never tell them that a colleague is down.
  • They fail to pursue either Six or Dark, or even better, they chase them and they allow themselves to be killed.
  • They will nonchantaly walk into an area where a hiss or a taunt is heard, even though that area already has 3 dead colleagues.
• Harder Than Hard: Nightmare difficulty, especially for the slow, squishy Marine. It has all the challenge of Hard difficulty (enemies have more health and do more damage, button prompts no longer appear to tell you whether an enemy is using a heavy or light attack, marines are smarter and more aware of their surroundings, and xenos can no longer be knocked down in melee) AND no save checkpoints in any of the levels, so if you die (and you likely will) you have to restart the entire level.
• Healing Factor: The Alien auto-heals, while the Marine and Predator have a segmented bar; damage within a segment auto-heals, past one requires a stimpack or medicomp.
• Hero Antagonist: The Marines take this role in the Alien and Predator campaigns, in that they are just trying to stop the infestation. In the Predator campaign, the Predators are well aware the Marines have nothing to do with the infestation, but they kill them anyway because they have violated the Predators honored ground. Its even more blatant with the Xenomorphs who just want to be left alone, and who were just used by Weyland Yutani in sick experiments, and are fighting the Marines in self defence.
• He Knows Too Much: Several Weyland Yutani employees are executed by Weyland's combat androids because they have knowledge of his crimes.
• Hidden Depths: In one of the audio logs, one of the Marines argue that the Colonial Marines are supposed to be a security force, not the clean up crew for Weyland Yutani. Then there is the fact that Tequila immediately realizes Weyland Yutani was doing something shady for a Xenomorph infestation to be this bad. This indicates the Marines have had to bail Wey Yu out multiple times, and they are getting tired of it.
• Honor Before Reason: As is always the case with the Predators, they view the humans messing with their technology as a severe affront to their pride and honor. Furthermore, the Predator player character will always drop out of cloak when killing humans because it is honorable, even if doing so gets him shot to death by Marines.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The parasitic nightmare-beasts and killing machines who rip people apart for fun tend to be treated almost sympathetically in comparison to the human villains. For example, Six, the Drone PC, starts off getting a number branded into her forehead, and by the time the game starts, is so broken she can only sullenly obey the scientist giving orders. The Marine player character is the only one who ever ends up facing enemies of his own species.
  • It's worth noting that this is one of the rare times both the Predators and the Xenomorphs are depicted sympathetically, with Weyland Yutani being depicted as truly evil. The Predators don't want Wey Yu to get its hands on their technology, and while the Predator universe usually establishes it as being a crime, this is a rare instance where you can hardly blame them. The Xenomorphs were created to be Weyland's weapons and just want to be left alone by everyone and the Colonial Marines attack them to Weyland's scheming.
• Identical Grandson: Karl Bishop Weyland, the CEO of Weyland-Yutani, looks and sounds exactly like Charles Bishop Weyland, company founder way back in the 20th century. As anyone who's seen the Aliens movies will know, he turns out to be a series of androids who have been doing this for a very long time, with a new one taking over every time the previous one gets killed. Oddly, no one at the Company seems to have noticed this as being odd.
• Idiot Ball: Even the most low level Weyland Yutani employees realize the company is playing with fire, as they are asking for a Xenomorph infestation, and some very unhappy Predators. Sure enough, both happen. Simillarly, the Marines fail to arrive until after the infestation has gotten out of control, even though class 4 sounds pretty severe.
• Ignore the Fanservice: In the first mission of the human campaign, you are sent to help your buddies in a club. A holographic Ms. Fanservice pops up on the stage. You can watch her if you want, but the story will stop dead. And your CO keeps at you until you go do your job. If you progress, you're too busy killing monsters to watch the dancer.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: One of the grab kills for the Alien has you impaling your enemy on your tail, lifting your tail to slide down a bit, and then grabbing and pulling the body down just a few more inches. Two other versions are Six impaling her victim through the chest, and her tail exiting through her victim's mouth.
• Interface Screw:
  • Type B. Why does the player character Predator insist on holding his wristblades right up in front of his eyes, unless to check to see if he is cloaked or not?
  • In a similar example, Six and Dark are in the same area in the same level right around the exact same time. However, when playing as Six, Dark doesn't show up despite Xenomorphs being able to see a cloaked Predator to ensure that two of the main protagonists don't meet each other.
  • Although the Elite Predator was killed right outside the Matriarch's chamber, Rookie never saw the corpse.
• It's All About Me: Karl Bishop Weyland's audio logs emphasize this a lot. Case in point, Weyland believes that the profits will benefit him, and him alone.
• Jerkass: Understatement of the year regarding Weyland Yutani, but the Marines Specimen Six encounters either use colonists as bait to try to trap her, or are incredibly dismissive and negligent of their comrades.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Spartan, Dark's mentor and his Voice with an Internet Connection, blames the humans as careless with letting a hive spread. While Spartan is pretty unfazed by the fact civilians have been killed by the Xenomorphs and that the Marines are in the situation they are in because he blew up their ship, his argument that the humans were idiots for letting the infestation get this bad is completely valid. In the Alien campaign, Katya sends out the call for the Marines the second it becomes obvious to her that the Xenos will get out. It is not until the Alien infestation is already quite large that the Marines finally arrive, despite a class 4 Xenomorph infestation is pretty serious.
• It Can Think: For Specimen Six, we are probably well past the "potential to think" and into how intelligent is she territory. Six is shown to be a strategist, have advanced situational awareness, and is even shown, albeit very briefly, to weep when the Matriarch dies.
• Justified Tutorial: The opening for the Marine has you be incapacitated until after things go to Hell, and a Voice with an Internet Connection talks you through basic actions. For the alien, the tutorial is provided by a scientist observing you. The Predator goes through his Initiation trials.
• Karmic Death: Karl Bishop Weyland is killed in the pyramid that he spent the entire backstory of the game trying to get into, and he is killed in the inner heart of the pyramid which he recklessly opened at the beginning of each campaign.
• King Mook: Praetorians and PredAliens. The PredAlien is upgraded to a unique, full-on Big Bad for the Predator campaign, while the Praetorian is a full boss battle with only 3 appearing in the Marine campaign and 1 in the Predator campaign.
• Late to the Tragedy: The Marine campaign starts considerably later in the game's timeline, so thanks to Six and Dark, everywhere Rookie goes, the situation has already gotten much worse.
• A Lighter Shade of Grey: Specimen Six is quite sympathetic for a Xenomorph, especially when she is pitted against Weyland Yutani and the Predators. In order to keep Six sympathetic while fighting the Marines and innocent civilians however, the game presents the Marines and civilians she fights in her campaign are depicted as colossal jerks at best, and very willing to resort to Shoot the Dog tactics along with a We Have Reserves mentality that deems that no cost is too high as long as Six ends up dead.
• Majorly Awesome: Major Van Zandt who is shown to be a very good commander, and the only reason the whole mission goes sideways is when the Predators show up. Unfortunately, his belief in leading from the front leaves only Corporal Tequila to tell the rest of the Marines what to do, something she clearly was not prepared for.
• Malevolent Architecture: The main building of the colony is a volcano-shaped tower centered on a smelter apparently built directly above a room full of explosive canisters. Later on, the research labs are revealed to be built on the pyramid, and the labs collapse when the pyramid starts to cave in.
• The Many Deaths of You: The Aliens and Predators can kill humans and each other in a variety of different ways, depending on how they are caught. The players can similarly be killed in a multitude of different ways, fighting the Aliens and Predators, while the Marines don't inflict any unique kills.
• Meaningful Name: Six's very number. The number Six stands as the heart and the one who will do the best to save her kin. This is exactly what Six does as she liberates her brethren from the human oppression and leading them to safety.
• Meaningful Rename: While Synths seem to have been changed to Androids for no particular reason, the change of Alien "Queen" to "Matriarch" reflects a slightly different take on how the Alien Hive actually works. Specifically, that any drone can become Matriarch, seemingly just by kicking enough ass. This happens to Six in the Alien campaign ending.
• Mêlée à Trois: The colony quickly turns into a three way war between the Marines who are trying to shut down the infestation, the Xenomorphs who just want to be left alone, and the Predators who want to make sure their technology dosen't fall into Weyland Yutani hands.
• Mercy Kill: In the Marine campaign, Rookie will do this to Van Zandt, and Tequila will also order Rookie to do this, though Katya stops him. In the Alien campaign, some civilians are scripted to commit suicide if they see Six, and other civilians will commit suicide if Six takes too long to harvest them.
• Messianic Archetype: Specimen Six quickly fulfills this role. She is born into captivity, but much smarter than her kin. She is almost killed as an infant, but is spared at the insistence of the leader who intends to use her as an attempt to increase his power. Shortly after she kills several humans, she hears the call of her mother who orders her to escape, and Six promptly liberates her kin while unleashing a plague on the humans. After Six is recaptured, she escapes again and figuratively resurrects by becoming the new Queen, leading the Xenomorphs into a new era. By the end of the Alien campaign, Six becomes the Xenomorphs Moses.
• Metamorphosis Monster: In the end cutscene of the Xenomorph campaign, Six is seen metamorphosing from a Warrior into a Praetorian, and then from a Praetorian into a Queen.
• Mildly Military: The marines are quite lax when it comes to military regulation.
  • First of all, they seem to address everyone by first and last names, which is extremely disrespectful.
  • Second, they appear to be wearing basic body armor despite knowing acid blood can melt right through it.
  • In both the Alien and Predator campaigns, they have no real designations of who is in charge.
  • They could easily have just had their dropship start raining heavy fire on them.
• Mission Control: Four of them
  • In the Marine campaign for the first half, it is Corporal Tequila, while in the second half, it is Katya.
  • During the Alien campaign, it is the Matriarch.
  • During the Predator campaign, it is Spartan.
• Mook Horror Show: During the stealth sequences, Specimen Six and Dark can increasingly unnerve the civilians and the Marines by silently killing them one by one, and driving them into a state of panic.
• Moses Archetype: Specimen Six serves as a Moses figure for the Xenomorphs. Six is more intelligent than the rest of her kin, she is spared as an infant from being executed at the insistence of a human who sees her as a slave, she is forced to kill many innocent humans on her master's orders before hearing the commands of the Matriarch who orders her to liberate her people and in doing so, unleashing a plague on their oppressors. When Six is taken off-world, she is born again as a Queen to lead the Xenomorphs into a new era, and she is briefly shown in a Crucified Hero Shot at the beginning of the Alien campaign.
• Moses In The Bull Rushes: All of the Xenomorphs are killed by the Predators and the humans except for Specimen Six, which further fits her being a Moses figure for the Xenomorphs.
• Mythology Gag:
  • An obscure one: Tequila refers to their present mission as shaping up "worse than Acheron". Acheron is the alternate name for LV426, the planet where the Aliens were first discovered and where a company of Marines were wiped out in Aliens.
  • Two of the Predator-on-Alien finishing moves (the backbreaker and the one where the front half of the Alien's head gets cut off) are references to the 2004 movie.
  • Many of the achievements are named after lines from Alien and Predator.
  • When Six is trapped in the building, one of the marines says "I think its love at first sight.", referring to when Hicks said the same thing to Burke when he looked at the facehuggers.
  • One of the audio diaries has Karl Bishop Weyland mention Ellen Ripley, though not by name, stating that she defeated the Aliens three times, which puts the game after her death in Alien 3.
  • Several power loaders are seen throughout the levels, especially in the colony and refinery. Some of them are turned over, indicating some colonists tried to use them to fight back, though you never use one yourself.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules:
  • During the battle against the two Predators in the Alien campaign, the plasma cannons can apparently recharge without a power source. This is obviously to make sure the player moves, but in the same area in the Predator campaign, you don't get that luxury.
  • In the Predator campaign, you gain the ability to destroy the laptops that keep the sentry guns powered up and taking them down. In the Alien campaign, with only a few exceptions, the turrets stay activated even if you cut the power.
  • Similarly in the Alien campaign, the Marines with flamethrowers have infinite ammunition. In the Marine campaign, you can easily burn through your ammo.
  • In the final Alien mission, if you are able to get a stealth kill on a combat android, slicing off the head apparently kills the android. In the marine and Predator campaign, it doesn't kill them.
• Nerf: The Pulse Rifle is noticeably weaker than in previous games. It takes 15-25 bullets to kill just one Xenomorph drone on Normal difficulty, compared to just a handful of bullets in the 1999 AvP and AvP 2.
• Never Trust a Title: The game's title implies that all of the campaigns will have the two titular species slugging it out repeatedly in all three campaigns, with the humans caught in the middle. Aside from Dark, and Specimen Six's battle with the Predators at the end of the Alien campaign, there is hardly any fighting between the titular species witnessed, though plenty of it is implied. Indeed, the Marine campaign has not a single instance of humans witnessing Xenomorphs fighting Predators, and for nearly the entire game, it is Xenomorphs and Predators vs humans or combat androids.
• New Meat: The Marine player character is called "The Rookie." Even by his own HUD. That said, he proves to be the most valuable marine in the entire game.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: While the Predators aren't evil, they make the Marines job far more difficult by taking out their ship. It makes coordinating their forces nearly impossible, causes the marines to scatter all over the place and it ensures that the Xenomorphs always have the advantage. Then of course, the Predators who are actually encountered in the game actually make it more difficult by killing the Marines.
• No One Gets Left Behind: The Rookie tries this multiple times, but he never succeeds or is seconds too late to prevent someone from being impregnated.
• No OSHA Compliance: Mining explosives were kept directly underneath a blast furnace.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Used incredibly frequently in the Marine campaign, as the music, the environment, and your trusty motion tracker will happily remind you that there are Xenomorphs everywhere and that you could be attacked from any direction.
• Nuke 'em: Dark has the wrist bracer go off in a nuclear explosion, destroying the labs, the colony and the pyramid, killing all remaining Xenomorphs and Marines.
• Off with His Head!: The Predators remove the heads of their kills. Specimen Six gets a unique kill against combat androids in that she rips the android's head clean off.
• Older Is Better: Midway through the game, the Predator player character tosses away his mask in favor of a much more ornate one belonging to an ancient Predator king. Aside from containing useful holographic recordings, it also has a Xenomorph-specific vision mode; which the Predator's original mask didn't. The manual suggests the ancient predator clans were much more prolific and powerful than their descendants.
• One-Man Army: All of the main characters tear through dozens of their adversaries single handily.
• One-Hit Kill: On higher difficulties, facehuggers can one hit kill Rookie, but the opposite is true in that except on Nightmare, one shot from even the pistol will kill facehuggers.
• One-Woman Wail: Specimen Six's theme has this throughout the majority of the piece, and it is used the most in the story during emotional moments.
• Only Six Faces: While the game has several different Marine character models, they do tend to recycle a bit if you play for a while. Most notably, one of the female marines uses the exact same character and face model as main female character Tequila, only with slightly different color hair. It's a bit jarring to go through much of the Marine campaign saving her, then performing gruesome finishing moves on marines that look exactly like her in the Alien and Predator campaigns.
• Orcus on His Throne: Despite the Abomination being the main antagonist of the Predator campaign, it only appears three times. The first time, it appears removing the head of a colonist, the second time very briefly roaring at Dark, and then it appears again for the boss fight, with no lead up whatsoever.
• Orifice Evacuation: Weyland-Yutani is farming aliens in human hosts, using canisters over the hosts' chests to capture the creatures as they emerge. Six circumvents this trap by burrowing back into her host and then emerging through his mouth.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Most of the bosses are relatively easily killed with one particular weapon, and almost impossible to kill with any other weapon - i.e., the Praetorian laughs off scoped rifle shots and automatic weapons fire, but goes down after only a few shotgun blasts, while the Predator is fairly easily sniped with the scoped rifle, while a full magazine from the Smartgun will barely tickle him.
• Permanently Missable Content: The alternate skins can only be unlocked via the game's multiplayer, which has all-but died out.
• Pistol-Whipping: The marine can fairly competently stun Aliens in close quarters, but it does no actual damage and is hardly suitable to be your primary tactic.
• Plot Hole: Why exactly did the marines drag the unconscious player character with them into the combat situation, only to leave him behind when things got dangerous?
  • The EMP is stated to have knocked out power over the entire facility. Conveniently, only Six is able to get out of her restraints as a result, while her brethren need to be released manually by Six.
• Praetorian Guard: The Praetorians appear after the Matriarch's death leading the Xenomorphs and two of them serve as bosses. Being a Predator elite, Dark is also this.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: Inverted. The pistol is the weakest of the Marine weapons you get and it proves to be miserably ineffective against adult Xenomorphs, requiring a whole magazine to kill a single one depending on the difficulty. The first two Marine levels only start you out with a pistol as a weapon, though mercifully, you only encounter two adult Xenomorphs before you get a weapon like the pulse rifle or shotgun, and the pistol kills facehuggers in a single shot.
• Puzzle Boss: The Matriarch is initially one, until Tequila tells you to burn her to death.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: The pistol is markedly inferior to any other Marine weapon (other than possibly the flamethrower), but you always carry it and have an infinite ammo reserve for it.
• Recycled Title: Rebellion Developments has made not one, not two, but three separate games based on the Alien Vs Predator universe: Alien Vs Predator (1994, Atari Jaguar), Aliens versus Predator (1999, PC), and... Aliens Vs. Predator (2010, multiplatform). That's not counting the SNES and arcade games, which are also titled Alien vs. Predator.
• Redshirt Army: As is always the case with the Colonial Marines, most of the Marines get barely an inch of time in the game and have only one or two lines of dialogue, with only a few of them getting names. They effectively serve as heroic Mooks in the Alien and Predator campaigns, and in the Marine campaign, they are absolutely useless whenever you join up with them.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain:
  • Averted, as the combat androids can have their heads shot clean off and remain functional, even continuing to attack. Presumably, they have other sensory devices not on their heads. Knocking the head off does reduce their accuracy and make it easier to sneak up on them, though; apparently the other sensory devices are limited back-ups.
  • The only way to finally kill Big Bad Karl Bishop Weyland is with a headshot, since in the final quickdraw duel he completely ignores being shot anywhere else.
• Ridiculously Human Robot:
  • Karl Bishop Weyland is an android based on and claiming to be the human descendant of Charles Bishop Weyland.
  • Katya, the administrative android, would also count, though the fact she's been partially dismembered breaks the illusion.
• Right-Handed Left-Handed Guns: The pulse rifle has the charging handle on the left-hand side, and most of the guns have left-handed ejection ports, even though they don't actually eject anything.
• Sadist: Downplayed with Karl Bishop Weyland, who dosen't show overt signs of it, but it quickly becomes obvious that he gets a thrill out of seeing the Xenomorphs struggle against him.
• Sadistic Choice: The developers will happily put civilians in the Alien campaign right next to Marines, have them state that they will kill themselves to force the player to be stealthy or have them summon Marines. Harvesting them takes time and will make a lot of noise. And in the Ruins level, some of them are right next to Combat Androids, you either pounce the android and harvest the civilian, or pounce the civilian and leave the android. The civilian will make a beeline for the Predator devices that will spout flames, while leaving the android will result in you getting shot with a shotgun or sniper rifle., which is a one shot kill on higher difficulties. You can avert this with careful planning, but it can still be difficult.
• Schmuck Bait: Some collectibles in all three campaigns have hidden geographic hurtles that are one hit kills. In the Marine campaign, some are positioned in drops that unless walked around, will kill you, while in the Alien campaign, some of them are guarded by turrets. And two civilians will run towards the flame devices in the ruins in the Alien campaign. If they manage to get there, chase them at your peril, because depending on luck and timing, you could either be severely wounded at which point the android will likely finish you off, or you will be burned to death right then and there.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The 10,000+ year old pyramid has a self-destruct sequence. Note that this pyramid was a large shrine to the first Predator to find the xenomorphs and the first captured Queen was buried along with him so maybe it was a defense mechanism but still, does everything their race builds have to blow up?
• Sensor Suspense: The Marine campaign loves to do this with the motion tracker, especially if you simply run around a bit. The motion tracker will constantly beep, as if to toy with your mind about whether you will get attacked.
• Sequel Hook: The Predator campaign ends with the player leaving the planet and setting course for another, implied to be the Xenomorph homeworld. Over a decade later, we haven't received any follow up.
• Shoot the Dog: The marines in the Alien Campaign are not afraid to resort to dirty tactics when fighting Specimen Six. This is best shown in the fourth level, "Jungle", as the Marines use a civilian as bait to try to trap Six in a building.
• Shout-Out: After Six's initial test, Groves tells her "Impressive Six. Most impressive." in a reference to The Empire Strikes Back, when Vader said the same thing to Luke.
• Simultaneous Arcs: There's noticeably more overlap between the Marine, Predator, and Alien campaigns than there was in the first Aliens vs Predator game, though not as much as in Aliens vs Predator 2 by Monolith.
• Sole Survivor: The end of the campaigns see the protagonists leave BG 386 making them the only members of their species to escape the planet alive.
  • Six is taken off world after being recaptured following the death of the Matriarch, before escaping and becoming a Matriarch herself.
  • Dark summons his ship after he sets the wrist bracer to go nuclear and killing the Abomination.
  • The Marine campaign subverts by having Rookie escape with Tequila and Katya on board a Weyland Yutani ship.
• Stat-O-Vision: The Predator can enter "Focus Mode" which allows him to identify his enemy's equipment. Mostly useless, except to find out if an NPC Marine is equipped with a motion tracker.
• The Stoic: Karl Bishop Weyland and Doctor Groves are completely calm even when they are arranging for people's deaths and outright attacking the protagonists.
• Straight for the Commander:
  • The Marines attempt to penetrate the Refinery and kill the Matriarch to shut down the infestation. Several coordinated assaults fail, and its only when Rookie unknowingly stumbles into her chamber that she is killed.
  • Dark kills two human commanders, but his primary objective wasn't to disorient the humans. He just needed the heads to get past retinal scanners.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Apparently a human Marine with average strength can catch a Facehugger in mid-jump and hold it away from his face, shove a Xenomorph off him, block the metal-shredding claws of a Xenomorph or the super-sharp blades of a Predator, and even knock these super-strong creatures flat on their asses. But lifting up a big battery is still "nnnngh"-worthy.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: During the Marine campaign, anytime you are about to get into a major fight with the Xenomorphs or combat androids will usually be preceded by about 10 seconds of you getting ammo, a new weapon, or stims.
• Take That!: One of the Marines in the Predator campaign asks "Why does everything in the universe hates our guts?" referring to the very long history of alien and human conflict throughout science fiction.
• Tempting Fate: Groves mocks Six for attempting to escape and tells her not to try it again. Moments later, the EMP burst knocks out the power and allows Six to do just that once again.
• Thong of Shielding: The holographic nudie dancer. This is what gave the game a "Suggestive themes" warning in the rating box.
• Time Abyss: The Matriarch was apparently the first Alien Queen ever hunted by Predators, and was entombed along with a Predator noble.
• Uncertain Doom: More like uncertain time, but the humans state that the Matriarch is thousands of years old, while Spartan says that the first hunt took place centuries ago. Both could be right given that the Predator universe establishes Predators can live for centuries, and that Xenomorphs have biological immortality as long as they aren't killed outright.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Charging marines and sentry turrets head on is a sure fire way for Six to end up dead. Sticking to the shadows enables Six to pick them off silently one by one.
  • Rookie is able to throw the Xenomorphs off of him, but when he prevents the Predator from stabbing him at the cabin, the brief protaction of strength quickly ends when the Predator throws him into the arena. The Xenomorphs put only a minimal effort into holding Rookie, while the Predator quickly makes a genuine push of strength that Rookie quickly loses.
  • Rookie getting into close combat with the Predator goes about as well as you would expect against blades designed to kill Xenomorphs.
  • Dark landing in water results in his cloaking malfunctioning and enables the marines to find him.
  • When some humans run into the compound, they have just encountered the Pred Alien, and they are understandably freaked out. However, they are equally horrified when they see that Dark has slaughtered everyone else.
  • Katya's attempt to draw power off of Weyland's base at the pyramid goes as well as could be expected. Weyland immediately notices the drain and shuts it down.
  • The Predators and Xenomorphs are able to bypass various geographic issues by jumping and crawling. The Marines have no such luck, so Rookie has to take the most dangerous route to get to his objective.
  • When fighting the Matriarch and her facehuggers, standing too close to the canisters when you blow them up will take a third of your health when they blow up. Just because you aren't directly near the explosion doesn't mean the blast wave will not hurt you
  • The Marine force is quite large, primarily a few hundred individuals if all the ones you kill in the Alien and Predator campaigns along with the ones you meet and see in the game are any indication. However, the losses at the hands of the Xenomorphs in the colony and refinery and the Predators slaughtering them in the jungle and ruins means that by the time Dark and Rookie make it to the labs, the marines are all but wiped out.
  • Rookie being knocked unconscious initially. Just because the Marines were strapped in dosen't mean the equipment was, and a large crate can easily knock out a healthy adult male.
  • It turns out that if there is no real CO, a mission is not likely to go well. The loss of the Marlow, the death of Major von Zandt, and Tequila's capture leave the Marines scattered and divided.
  • In the Alien campaign, Six can easily hide in the labs, the colony and refinery because the natural darkness of the building and the loss of power easily hides her. In the jungle and ruins, when the sun is beaming down, its a lot harder for her to stay hidden.
  • It turns out that when the music starts playing, the Xenomorphs wake up and attack the marines in the club. The sudden attraction of noise will lure someone to investigate.
  • Given how big the infestation is, and the fact that Katya tells them it is Weyland Yutani, the Marines immediately realize that Wey Yu was doing something shady.
  • When Specimen Six performs a stealth kill from behind, one of the potential kills is a headbite. However, the Marine still has enough time to scream, and it will draw their comrades to investigate.
  • On harder difficulties, Marines will start looking in vents in the Alien campaign and checking the tree tops in the Predator campaign. They will similarly stay in the same place rather than move, and therefore the player has to come up with another way of getting them, rather than rely on the same old tactic.
  • Corporal Tequila is shown to be a good commander when it comes to one Marine, or a single squad. However, the second she gets put in charge of a force of hundreds of Marines, she starts making errors and unintentionally making situations worse, as Tequila is shown to be clearly panicking and overlooking details that an officer would be able to calmly realize, a shining example is when she unintentionally orders Charlie Squad right into a barricade which gets them all killed. Tequila, despite not freezing up under the pressure like Gorman, does not have any training as an officer, so the second she gets put in charge of such a large force, she proves she is severely out of her depth.
  • In the Marine and Predator campaign, trying to get across the subway without using the train car results in you falling on the track. What happens? You immediately die, as the third rail has more than enough power to kill someone in just one touch, whereas other games ignore the third rail.
  • Facehuggers are a nightmare to fight in the Marine campaign, but only if you get close enough to the eggs, or if you have a scripted encounter. If you cause them to emerge from the eggs by shooting them at long range, the facehugger will wonder around in the same area aimlessly. They are still infants, and lack the tracking capabilities of the adults. Similarly, depending on the difficulty, one shot from any of the weapons will kill them, as they aren't the mature fighters the Warriors are.
  • After you get a sniper rifle in the Marine campaign, your flashlight really obscures the scope's ability to see through buildings, which could potentially reveal hidden enemies, especially facehuggers. As a result, it is best used with the flashlight off.
• Unique Enemy:
  • You only fight 1 predator in the entire Marine campaign.
  • There are only 3 Predators in the Alien campaign, and they are all in a single boss fight.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Tequila is a borderline case; she's something of an Expy of both Vasquez and Hicks. She gets implanted with a chestburster, but is put into cryo sleep to keep her alive until it can be removed. Considering that the Marine Campaign doesn't exactly end cheerfully, it's probable she'll never get that surgery.
• Vertical Kidnapping: This is shown multiple times happening to Marines and civilians in the Marine campaign, making you deathly afraid to go under vents, though it doesn't happen to you. Specimen Six similarly cannot do this to any Marines in her campaign.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Both Specimen Six and Dark can be pretty sadistic with their stealth kills, such as giving the victims a good look at them before they die, dragging out the kill instead of killing the victim immediatly, and toying with the other marines for their own amusement.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Although the game usually does not punish the protagonists for taking their time or doing silly things, in the Alien campaign, if Six toys with the civilians she can harvest long enough, they will attempt to commit suicide.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: The flamethrower is abysmally ineffective against both Xenomorphs and Androids; sure, it'll set enemies on fire, but it doesn't speed up how long it takes them to burn to death (which is quite a long time) and does nothing to dissuade them from continuing to attack you while burning. Just about the only enemy it's effective against are facehuggers, since they won't try to latch onto you when on fire.
• Villain Has a Point: Sure Weyland is a monster, but he isn't entirely wrong when Katya attempts to drain power from his site to give Tequila surgery and saying that its Company resources.
• Villainous Breakdown: Weyland noticeably panics as Dark gets closer to the Pyramid, because he knows Dark is going to blow it up.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: The Alien, marines, and the Predator all get this for their campaigns.
• We Have Reserves: This appears to be the Marines main strategy in the Alien campaign, throwing as many of their soldiers as possible to get rid of Specimen Six.
• Wrestler in All of Us:
  • One of the Predator's kill moves is to grab an Alien and do a backbreaker.
  • Specimen Six can deliver a choke slam onto an enemy before headbiting them.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The marine compound commander, despite not being the best strategist as shown above, does seem to be aware that a Xenomorph will rush to attack a solitary host, and tries to trap Six using this method, which makes sense as most of the Marines present on BG 386 have fought Xenomorphs before. Unfortunately, he winds up having to deal with a Xenomorph that is far more intelligent than the average Xenomorph Warrior.
• You All Look Familiar: Most of the Marines in the Alien and Predator campaigns are merely the reuse of models of Marines met in the Marine campaign.
• You Are in Command Now:
  • Thanks to all of the officers being killed, and van Zandt being captured, Corporal Tequila is forced to become the commander.
  • Specimen Six becomes the new Matriarch thanks to the Matriarch's death and the killing of all the Praetorians.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In the opening of the fourth Predator level, Weyland's combat androids tell some employees their contracts have expired before they execute them. They are noticeably bloodier and more graphic than any death that occurs in the game. Weyland comes close to saying this line word for word in the final level of the Marine campaign, when he insinuates he owns the Corps, and that when a asset is of no further use, it is to be disposed of.
• You Are Number 6: The player character of the Alien campaign was given the name "Six" (due to being the sixth specimen), and has the number literally branded on her forehead.
• Young and in Charge: All of the playable characters are extremely young, and are seen as the defacto leaders of the faction during the war on BG 386.

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