Before Halo, Call of Duty, and other new-school shooters that currently saturate the FPS market, there was the old school. I’m talking about games that kept the same spirit as Wolfenstein 3D, like the Doom series, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, the Quake series, and Unreal. If you lived through this time, you know what I’m talking about. These games are representative of a peak in shooters in that their challenge, length, and fun depended on gameplay alone—no cutscenes that pad the game time, no predictable plot elements, and no exploitative glitches that most new school gamers use in games today. Controls were fluid and customizable, combat was fast and furious, and the games were almost exclusively for PC. It took skill to play and if you were killed, you had only yourself to blame. This was when multiplayer was on the rise, before mods and cheating took hold to as great an extent as it does now, and before cheap tactics like quick-scoping were often the deciding factor in encounters.

Aliens vs. Predator Classic 2000, as it’s currently known, in some ways represents one of the last examples of this FPS golden age. It was released in 1999 in the wake of the game-changing Quake (1996) and Half-Life (1998). Its main selling point, of course, is that you can play as each of the three different species, the Marine, Predator, and Alien. There are three different campaigns for each, and beating each on successively harder difficulties unlocks up to five bonus levels for each, which also bestow additional equipment to the predator and marine. Additionally, if you complete certain challenges, you can also unlock new options that may classify as “cheats” in single player. You won’t really see much of a storyline progression between levels because there isn’t really a story. As with most developers of old school shooters, Rebellion focused on gameplay more than anything and the result is excellent.

Being a game now available on Steam, you’re probably thinking about multiplayer, and yes, that is one of the best reasons for this game’s existence. In fact, it seems almost designed as a tournament fighter, given the vast differences between species. If you were to never play the story missions at all, you would still have endless amounts of fun. Of course, I’m referring more to this game in its prime (early 2000’s) rather than now, because as you might expect, not many people still play this game. But when you find a game, you will see that the multiplayer is still very good and holds up today, even if it’s under-populated.

The perfect word to describe this game is balanced. Each species has its own advantages and disadvantages such that you never really feel like one is significantly over- or under-powered. The alien is the fastest, can jump the farthest, and walk on walls, but it’s the weakest physically and only has close-range weapons. The marine is slow and relatively weak, but can resupply through medpacks and armor and has access to the motion tracker and the game’s strongest weapons. The predator is the physically toughest, has strong weapons and cloaking device, but is kind of clunky with its limited energy, limited speargun ammo, and species-specific vision modes.

Now for the gameplay. This game is fast, incredibly fast. Like other old-school shooters, you have to react quickly and precisely or you’ll end up dead. Start spamming your weapons and you’ll just leave yourself open to attack and die. This game can feel relentless but never unfair. As stated above, it’s the product of a more refined and merciless age, before button-mashing, quick-scoping, and button-combinations became as prevalent as they are now. Like the alien itself, this game goes back to the roots of what makes a great shooter by stripping away all the hand-holding.

Need I say more? If you’re a product of the nineties, then you were probably into either the Aliens or Predator series at one point or another. Even if you’re not, this is a great game solely for the gameplay value. And for $4.99 you can’t really go wrong. In my opinion it’s the best AvP game ever released (better than AVP2 and 2010). And honestly, I don’t have any gripes or complaints about it, which is pretty rare for me.

For those of you interested in the more technical aspects, the Steam version is the 2000 update by Rebellion that allows for saving (yes, the original did not allow saves) and has two new weapons, the Skeeter missile launcher and the dual-wielding pistols, both for the marine. You can get graphical updates through what’s called the Redux mod, which you can get at moddb.com. You can also pick up extra multiplayer maps and other refinements for this game there as well. Happy hunting.

The game is not good. Even before the censorship fiasco, for which they rightly deserve rebuke, this game is just bad, plain and simple. It's not the successor to SWAT 4 it claimed to be. It clearly has that Unreal jank, friendly AI is shoddy, enemy AI will headshot you from across the map, sometimes you'll be running around the entire map not knowing where evidence or the last suspect is, your teammates suffer anxiety attacks and have to be sent to therapy EVERY SINGLE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TIME. You can't just start a mission, you have to run around the stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ police station first. At least they nailed the depressing atmosphere because this game is just depressing, it puts me in a bad mood every time I play it.

Worst of all, it's not even fun to play with friends. The enemies aren't fun to try and take down and it's basically impossible to get an S-rank even when complying to all officer duties, apprehending all suspects, rescuing all civilians, and securing all evidence. Because Void Interactive hates its players.

And now the icing on the cake is that Void is removing content from the PC version to satisfy its playerbase on consoles. Just wrap your head around that. They're removing stuff that's already been out on the STEAM version because of the PLAYSTATION and XBOX.

♥♥♥♥ you, Void. I won't be buying any of your ♥♥♥♥ again.