YMMV / Alien vs. Predator

The entire franchise:

• Complete Monster: See here.
• Magnificent Bastard: See here.

The video games

• Anticlimax Boss: Most of the bosses from the second PC game. The Exosuit is heavily armed and armored, but has an atrocious lack of armor over where the operator's head is, allowing you to bring it down with just a few headshots, or even a single bonegun round to the head; the Predator's pistol also paralyses the stupid thing with every shot. Even the Alien Queen goes down after a few bursts of minigun fire or some brief circle-strafing and whacking with the combi-stick. Predators are pretty nasty, though, especially when you fight them as the unarmed, unarmored Alien.
  • The final enemy of the Alien campaign in AvP2 is Dr. Eisenberg, who really seems anticlimactic after two in-tandem Predators, seeing as you can just run up to him and eat his freaking head off.
• Broken Base: Most of the fans of the older PC games are already decrying the route the series has taken in the new one.
  • The Primal Hunt expansion pack caused an interesting variation of these. Everyone was crying out about how "their species" got the shaft when it came to new equipment:
    • Alien players complained that the only addition was allowing Predaliens to headbite, restoring far more health than they were able to with claw attacks. This greatly mitigated Predaliens' "glass cannon" status. While Predaliens are tougher and stronger than other Warrior or Runner Aliens, they're also slower and larger, making them big targets for Marines and Predators. Without headbite, their ability to restore health was almost nonexistent, making them ironically have much lower battlefield longevity than other Aliens.
    • Marine players complained that all they got were dual pistols and a 360-degree motion tracker. Dual pistols with AP rounds could be devastating against armored enemies, and the 360-degree motion tracker made it much harder for aliens and cloaked predators to sneak up on them (though these were only available to "Corporate" Marine players).
    • The Predator players complained that their cloaking was now worthless (a faint rainbow shimmer had been added, making cloaked Predators easier to spot), and the only compensation they got was basically a laser SMG. The cloaking effect only made it possible to spot a cloaked Predator standing still, and the Energy Flechette filled a badly-needed mid-range gap in the Predator arsenal.
• Creator's Pet: The Colonial Marines in the video games can sometimes qualify, with fans preferring to play as the Alien or the Predator. The worst case was the 2010 game, where the Marine's story was by far the longest. And then the Marines got their own game, which barely even featured the Aliens despite them being in the title and was, for a time, poorly received.
• Demonic Spiders: Facehuggers in the first two PC games are a very literal version of this trope; they kill you in one hit and are small and difficult to spot, especially in the game's dark environments. They do make a distinct scuttling noise that's supposed to alert you to their presence, though.
  • Though 2 does have a bit of Nightmare Retardant in the Marine campaign since they can have severe problems actually attaching to NPCs outside scripted events, leading to the comical sight of a bunch of Facehuggers leaping aimlessly around and bumping into people. The 2010 game's Alien campaign has similar results when you realise Six must be being followed around by some kind of Facehugger conga line.
  • Alien Facehuggers, Predator Stalkers, and Marine Snipers in the RTS. The first will one-hit kill the first unit they hit if it doesn't have some sort of resistance to it, the second will sap your units' health while slowing them to a crawl, and the third just shoots them so hard there's a 20 foot blood splatter opposite the point of entry.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In the first PC game, the Predator's speargun was absolutely broken. It was a one-hit-kill, hitscan sniper-rifle-style weapon, which would have been remotely okay if it didn't have a fire rate of two a second, a no-reload magazine and more than its fair share of shots.
  • The use of "tracking" weapons was derided by many players due to how easy it is to use them to kill another player. The Plasma Caster, Smart-disc, Smart-Gun, and Rocket Launcher all have tracking, though the rocket launcher requires special ammo and time-luxury to lock on.
    • The Smartgun in the second game. The gun aimed for you, all that was left was to pull the trigger. It could even detect cloaked Predators, negating their prime advantage over the Marines. No wonder the majority of multiplayer servers disabled it.
      
      Partially averted in the 2010 game- the Smartgun takes up both primary weapon slots and prevents the Marine from running unless they have their pistol out instead. The tracking is a bit slower and can be outmanuevered by an agile Xeno player, and only covered a certain field of view in front of the player, although it does outline cloaked Predators and hard-to-see Xenos but still less unbalanced than before, since it only shows up in exposed, easy-to-cover spots.
    • The Predator smart-disc was derided for being a cheap One-Hit Kill weapon in AvP2 thanks to the tight homing ability it has. If it locks onto another player, it's often an easy frag.
      
      The 2010 game has its own problems with the smart-disc too. It's a 1 hit kill, and bypasses the melee system that was implemented by simply being unblockable. Combine that with the fact that there is no downside to using it at point blank range. Even if you miss, it will likely kill your target on the return trip if your enemy continues to fight you in melee.
  • In the first game the flamethrower is... well, more of a terror-breaker than a game-breaker, because once you get it facehuggers - the single most terrifying enemy in the game, due to their extremely small size, fast speed and ability to kill you instantly - become much less of a threat. Simply fire off a burst of flame at the ground and watch as the damned things start running around randomly and burning to death.
  • In AvP2, The Sniper Rifle in multi-player games is very easy to abuse: No gun sway to speak of, and it is sniper-accurate without the scope. By using a piece to tape and a marker to make a crosshair on your screen, you now have a weapon that works at any range and that usually causes a One-Hit Kill on any part of the body. If you thought the AWP in Counter-Strike was broken, this is even worse.
    
    The only limitation is restricted maximum ammo (10 shots after a Nerf patch) but staying mobile will keep you well stocked, and each bullet is one potential kill.
    
    On servers that enforce the use of classes, the Marine Sniper also has access to a versatile grenade launcher with EMP (de-cloaks predators and stuns any species), sticky (detonates on approach), spider (chases the target) & timer grenades. With a steady aim on the player's part, Marine Snipers can be highly-mobile killing machines and can booby trap paths to a sniper nest as well.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In AVP 2, if you can get out of a Chestburster's sight area while it's emerging, it'll just drop out and sit there staring straight ahead, as if thinking "Ok, now what?"
  • In the RTS, it's possible (through spamming the "move" button) for Predator Hunters to fire on the move... and they have excellent range. You can kite most enemies to death this way.
  • In AVP 2010 during the Alien Campaign when capturing civilians, you usually move backwards during the animation. This makes sense most of the time, since if you go up to one next to a wall you need room for the animation of lying them down and letting a conveniently nearby facehugger walk onscreen and attach to them. However, it doesn't take you grabbing them near a ledge into account, as you lay the civilian on the thin air you are standing on while a facehugger walks onscreen on nothing to attach itself and the body suddenly falls when the animation is done.
• Jerkass Woobie: Dunya in AVP 2.
• Narm:
  • In the first Aliens vs Predator game for the PC, the video messages were originally done by actual actors. The gold edition, and by extension the Classic 2000 modern re-release, replaced them with performances by the Rebellion dev team staff. Although the production values on the Rebellion vids are higher (with actual props being used), the Rebellion staff are clearly not actors, and turn in some really Narmtastic performances.
  • Early on in the Marine campaign of AvP2, one of your squad is kidnapped and the rest of the squad is left indecisive about how to rescue them. The player character volunteers with a simple "I'll go," but his delivery is more appropriate for volunteering to go make a beer run as opposed to walking into a Xenomorph nest alone.
• Paranoia Fuel: Know why the AVP 2 player character is called "Harrison?" It's so they could have every door in the entire game sound like it was whispering your name.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The second and third games are generally easier than the original 1999 PC game, especially if playing as the Marine; Aliens are no longer constantly respawning throughout the level, and the third game gives Marines the rather odd ability to block melee attacks. Aliens are also much slower in the third game, to compensate for the fact the player character is also much slower (whereas the characters in the original game moved at Doom Marine speeds).
• That One Boss: Goddamn you, Power Loader.

The 2004 movie

• Adaptation Displacement: There are a good amount of people who are unaware that the movie was based on a comic book series. There are also those who are aware the comics exist, but assume that they were based around the Xenomorph skull easter egg in Predator 2 (the comic actually predates that film).
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Given that Predators neither talk nor emote very much, we don't know what Scar's thoughts were after being subdued and impregnated by a Facehugger. If he knew there was a Chestburster inside of him (which he should have known very obviously upon waking up, especially after finding the damn thing dead next to him), he might have been expecting to finish the hunt and reach his mothership in time to get it extracted, or he might have been playing straight the Zombie Infectee and denying it to himself or just pushing to postpone the inevitable outcome.
• Badass Decay: Contrary to popular belief, Predators and not Aliens are the ones that get watered down in this adaptation. Out of the three who appear in the movie, the first is killed without doing a single kill, the second goes down against the same Alien who killed his buddy, and the third one never wins a hand-to-hand fight except for one entirely reliant on a surprise chop. Possibly justified, since they're Youngbloods conducting an initiation ritual.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Is Lex a genuinely interesting female lead, or a cliched adventure film girl?
  • Many fans were excited to see Lance Henrickson return to the franchise as Weyland, while others say his presence is pointless and just creates confusion over whether the film is meant to be in continuity with either franchise.
• Critical Backlash: There are actually many people who feel the movie is actually a fairly watchable product that only got buried by a controversial premise, a failure to live up to its hype, and initial bad reviews followed by later viewers jumping on the bandwagon, which some think might have something to do with people in Hollywood losing jobs to European studios when director Anderson chose to shoot the film in Czech Republic to save money. Notably, Doug Walker (who had already referenced the film in his Shining Mini-Series review as "decent") stated in his review that, while not perfect, the movie still did do a lot of things right and was very enjoyable, and even Andoni Garrido, who is typically ruthless with Anderson and his works, liked the film openly and called it a fairly entertaining and interesting product. The fact that it waa followed up with an even more controversial sequel only helped this general sentiment.
• Critical Dissonance: Internet Movie Database gives the first film a lukewarm 5,6/10, more than twice of Rotten Tomatoes's 21%, and most reviews are quite positive in that, thought not a great film, it gets most of what it attempts.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The alien nicknamed "Grid" (because of the grid pattern on its head caused by a predator's net) has become very popular among viewers because it seems to be an exceptionally intelligent and formidable alien warrior. In its very first appearance, Grid kills two Predators on its own, immediately establishing itself as a badass. It also manages to dodge being blasted by a predator's shoulder-cannon, and it's seen leading other aliens into battle. The novelization even upgrades it from a normal, albeit skilled warrior to an "alpha" Xenomorph who is bigger and stronger than normal. Even people who didn't like the film admit that Grid was pretty damn cool.
  • While most all of the humans are disliked, Adele Rousseau and Charles Weyland have fans thanks to Adele being the closest thing to a badass out of the secondary characters and Weyland for his Cool Old Guy personality (instead of the usual Corrupt Corporate Executive Asshole Victim the rest of the Weyland-Yutani representatives in the Alien films tend to be) and Lance Henriksen's performance.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Even before Ridley Scott's similarly controversial prequels officially discontinued them, an offset of Alien fans prefers not to consider the AVP movies canon for the concept of Xenomorphs being already on Earth all along, because it cheapens Ellen Ripley's struggles and sacrifices to stop the alien from reaching the Earth. Even with the Xenos getting wiped out at the end of both films there's still the Fridge Horror possibility of the Antarctic Queen surviving and freeing herself from the bottom of the ocean and that there could be more hidden Predator pyramids out there each containing a dormant Queen.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • The human characters of the film are often criticized for being bland, cliched and/or uninteresting. This complaint, however, goes back to the beginnings of the Alien franchise, as its human characters other than Ripley are typically a point of discussion that reaches quite caustic levels in installments like the ever-loved Aliens (whose colonial marines often come across as grating due to being Too Dumb to Live) and the comparatively less liked Alien³ (where barely any character manages to be sympathetic or effectual in the first place).
    • Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman and Rich Evans proposed that in the early Alien films people had less of a problem with the human characters not having a lot of depth because at least Ridley Scott and James Cameron knew how to pick really charismatic actors that could spice things up to make their characters feel like they had more going on beneath the surface, whereas Paul W.S. Anderson's humans turned out like average Slasher Movie victims and the lead heroine has a lot of Dull Surprise moments. To say nothing about how beloved Dutch's team in the original Predator is despite those characters not being exceptionally deep on paper.
  • In another layer, the film is sometimes accused to contain too many cliches, even although the cliches used in this film are precisely the ones popularized by Alien itself, in particular the overarching "generic, MegaCorp-founded expedition members who happen to be epically ill-prepared for the aggressive alien lifeforms they encounter" plot. This premise is so representative of the Alien franchise that the latter's installments Prometheus and Alien: Covenant adhere to it even tighter.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film was comparatively better received in several European countries.
• He's Just Hiding: Some people believe that the Alien Queen might perfectly have survived to her fate, as it was simply being dragged to the bottom of the sea by a chain despite Alien: Resurrection having established that Xenomorphs can adapt to underwater without any trouble.
• Improved by the Re-Cut: The Unrated Cut doesn't add much in the way of plot or character depth, but many fans prefer it over the bloodless theatrical cut due to the more graphic violence.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A lot of people who dislike the film tend to admit that the fights between Aliens and Predators were pretty damn cool, and they often watch the film specifically in order to see the creatures trashing each other.
• Mis-blamed: Sigourney Weaver and many fans believe the crossover killed the film franchise of Alien. Actually, the series was already a Franchise Zombie to begin with, with half of its installments having been mediocre at the best and outright panned at the worst. Even although Fox's intentions to make AvP did cause James Cameron and Ridley Scott to delay the prequel project that would be Prometheus, the latter eventually came to be a few years after the crossover and it wasn't particularly popular either (and its sequel, Alien: Covenant, even less). If anything, AvP might have actually rekindled the interest for its title franchises among younger people and/or in countries where there wasn't a great following.
• Narm:
  • The Predators were portrayed by muscular stuntman Ian Whyte, and many have complained that they look and move like cumbersome American football players cosplaying as Predators. The Jungle Hunter and the City Hunter were portrayed by Kevin Peter Hall and he was a Big Guy, yes... but he was also slender, and thus the muscles of the Predator suits didn't make him look bloated like the AVP hunters.
  • Some of the Xenomorph screeches sound an awful lot like pigs squealing, and it can take away the scare factor whenever they make that noise. Likewise the generic tiger roaring/growling SFX used for the Predators that makes them sound like the MGM lion can also feel distractingly cheap compared to the unique roars from the earlier Predator films.
  • It's hard to take Lex's Action Girl status later in the film seriously, when she is standing next to Scar, a Predator who is at least several feet taller than her, and is part of a Proud Warrior Race, known by fans for their total badassery.
• Older Than They Think: While one of the biggest complaints for the movie is often the film's PG-13 resulting in the movie being tame for franchises often rated R, however in terms of the Alien series, the first two movies are also fairly tame in regards for the violence despite their R rating. As both Alien and Aliens typically didn't fully show human characters being killed on-screen by the Xenomorphs (the chestburster being the exception) with characters either typically dragged away, scenes cutting away to a Gory Discretion Shot or having the actual wounds (mainly headbites) being a Freeze-Frame Bonus. Most of the more brutal deaths in the first two movies typically had androids or the Xenomorphs themselves on the receiving end.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Ancient Predator, especially for Predator fans.
• One True Pairing: Scar/Lex is probably the only ship with any significant number of fans to have emerged from the AvP movies. The producers even said they imagined Scar as a "romantic leading man", while the author of the novelization couldn't resist the temptation to introduce some jokes and teasing.
• Signature Scene: Nothing represents better this saga than the visual contraposition of a stern Predator mask and a slavering Alien head, which happens several times through the two movies. It was actually used for the first's poster.
• So Okay, It's Average: What the final consensus on the first film seems to be. Has enough cool Alien and Predator action to make it worth a watch but considering the films that it was following up and the strong concept of the film, it should have been much, much better.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Even after the similarly controversial Prometheus came along, this movie is still possibly the nearest to a film adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness we have in modern cinema, with the Predators pretty much taking the role of the Elder Things (being the more human-behaving aliens, bleeding green blood) and the Xenomorphs that of the Shoggoth (eldritch monsters that can change appearance and rebelled against their masters). The novel was actually one of the inspirations behind this movie.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The death of Charles Weyland is surprisingly sympathetic.
  • Lex having to mercy kill Sebastian due to a chestburster being in him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In early stages of the script, after Scar is impaled by the Alien Queen, he tries to stab himself with his dagger to take the Chestburster inside of his body with him, while speaking for the first and last time to tell Lex her earlier line of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", and in some stages he succeeded with Lex' help. It's unanimous that this would have been brilliant to see, with some believing it might have marked a significant difference in how the film ended up being received.
  • People had a similar opinion on the final few minutes of the film as a whole, with the idea of a Predator and a human trying to survive in a Xenomorph-infested building, as it combined similar elements from both major franchises between the female lead rising to the occasion as a competent leader, the low-supplies guerilla warfare, and a commentary on how life is often commodified and thrown away for the sake of a select few's gain due to both why the building existed, and why the research team were investigating it.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • The general opinion people have of Adele Rousseau, with most reviewers stating that she's the only character they liked. So of course she's one of the first to die.
  • Scar, for somewhat obvious reasons.
• Uncertain Audience: After all the Executive Meddling that shaped its production, the movie turned out to be a product that no fanbase actually wanted to watch. Alien fans hated such a crossover to begin with, with James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver speaking heavily against it (although the former eventually came around on the movie after seeing it) and regular people decrying the concept as a disjointed freakshow; Predator lovers generally didn't care about it either, with few of them being fans of Alien too in order to compare and/or being interested at the faceoff; and the fans of the AvP comic books, who by all logic should have not failed to be hyped, were turned away too when it was revealed the film's story had nothing to do with the comics and took place in modern day Earth instead of the familiar space setting. At the end of the day, even with all the panning by critics and fans, it is almost a moral victory that the film still managed to be economically successful and gain a healthy Critical Backlash over the years.
• Vindicated by History: To an extent. The movie received a drastically hostile reception by all the three fanbases upon release, but after the release of the sequel and later Alien films, many have found redeemable parts to look back upon. The visual effects used to portray the Xenomorphs (which are actually done with practical puppetry and suit work, with a wise usage of CGI when needed) are also considered some of the best in the entire Alien franchise, in comparison to examples like Alien: Covenant's perceivedly weak CGI.

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