AvP3 - Tutorial Levels Revealed

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This is details of the tutorial levels. If you don't want to know the tutorial levels, don't read the quoted part of this post.








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They don't mention the marine so I'll just add you start after a space accident where you get really hurt (in fact the first thing you learn is to heal). Then you appear in a neighborhood infested with aliens so you have to perform basic tasks as soon as you land, then you'll have to move on to other ones such as "protect the survivors", etc. Also, the marine campaign features moments such as a battle against a group of angry aliens on a stripper club, holographic strippers and techno included.


We were able to have a look at the very beginning of the Alien and Predator campaigns. Each has its own unique tutorial, shedding some light on just how differently each of these playable species will feel from one another. We'll start with the Alien campaign. This one begins with a delightfully morbid intro cinematic depicting a number of humans in a deep-space research lab. They're all strapped down into chairs and pinned down by large tubes mounted over their chests. It's unclear at first what these are for, but then it happens: baby Aliens burst from the stomachs of these poor saps, and safely into the tubes. (Well, mostly. Let's just say the guys who walk in to do clean-up duty weren't hoping to see an Alien burst from one of the corpse's mouths rather than inside the chest tubes.)

Flash forward a bit, and you're playing as one of these Aliens at a slightly more advanced age. The scientists have you locked up in a viewing chamber, but something goes awry and you're introduced to your first taste of combat. As the Alien, darkness is your best friend. During the tutorial you're taught how to use your massive tail to knock out the overhead lights, luring a guard into the darkness and mauling him with your claws. You can also scurry around on walls and ceilings. To minimize this ability's disorienting effects, the reticule in the middle of your screen always points toward the ground.

If you effectively keep yourself cloaked under the cover of darkness, you can sneak around enemies and go in for a trophy kill. These are stylized kills that take longer to perform and leave you open to enemy attacks, but offer a more vicious and rewarding viewing experience. Our favorite was the trophy that pulls the camera back behind your Alien teeth, giving you an in-the-mouth view of you chomping the head off a poor human guard. Overall, the Alien combat style is entirely focused on short-range melee attacks, and you'll need to use your speed and wall-hugging abilities to their full effect if you want to combat against enemies equipped with guns.

After the Alien into sequence, we took some time to check out how the beginning of the game plays out for the Predator. This tutorial involves you playing as a Predator youngblood, someone just learning the powers at his disposal. You're dropped into a giant pit, and your brethren toss in Xenomorph after Xenomorph to teach you basic combat. The Predator can attack with his wrist-mounted blades or use his shoulder cannon and specialty grenades. And rather than the regenerating health of the Alien, the Predator has to take health packs that you twist apart and jam into your chest.

If you survive this youngblood trial by fire, you're dropped into your first real mission, which is to recover all the Predator technology from the Marines and destroy any of your fallen comrades you encounter along the way. Beginning in a lush jungle, you can leap effortlessly up to branches and platforms tens of feet above you. From this vantage point, you can create a distraction by mimicking a human voice, calling one soldier away from the other, then use your invisibility cloak to sneak up behind either of these lone Marines. Why sneak up behind them? For the awesome trophy kills, of course. The Predator trophy kills run the gamut from ripping out the spine of a human enemy, to lifting him up by your wrist blade and listening to him gasp for air with giant puncture wounds in his chest. It's chilling stuff, but pretty entertaining if you can stomach it.

Down the road, the Predator has to storm his way into a Marine base housing a number of technology that has to be recovered. There are certain security measures in place restricting you from the really well-protected stuff, but there are workarounds. At one point, the player had to go through a series of retinal scanners to proceed past a number of checkpoints. The solution? Find someone with clearance authorization, rip his head off, and carry it around with you for the rest of the level as you occasionally produce it from offscreen to trigger the scanner. Yes, this game is very much a hard M rating on the ESRB scale.

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