14 DAY TRIAL // While Rebellion released its demo for Aliens vs Predator almost two weeks ago, most of the players that got their hands on it were pretty discontent with what they saw. It wasn't so much that the game proved unimpressive, it was just that the multiplayer mode chosen for the demo, simple deathmatch, was considered by many too straightforward, and didn't offer any of the tactical possibilities of the three-way war Rebellion boasted so much.
And indeed, the frantic corridors of the demo map offered little satisfaction, when everybody was out for their own, marines killing marines, Aliens attacking Aliens and Predators hunting each other. The game lacked any sense of immersion, and because of this many labeled the multiplayer demo's deathmatch mode as a very bad choice.
Rebellion tried to offer an explanation for this, and Jason Kingsley, the CEO and co-founder of Rebellion, stated that the choice was made so that players could get accustomed to the difficult controls of each race. "We chose Deathmatch as the mode for the demo as it's very familiar to all FPS gamers and minimizes restrictions on players while they are getting to grips with the controls of each of the three playable species," Kingsley said. "We have plenty of new modes in the game and players only have to wait a matter of days before they can play them when the game launches."
As far as controls go, Deathmatch indeed fulfilled its role, as the game's tempo steadily grew as days passed since the demo was first launched. The most basic of the races, the Colonial Marine, with nothing but its spawn-and-shoot ability, was a powerful adversary at the beginning, when Predators were still trying to figure out how to cloak, heal and use their secondary weapons, while Aliens were usually just fumbling around the map, suffering from acute motion sickness and a serious case of complete disorientation.
But as gamers got used to the controls, the Marine began to retake its place at the bottom of the food chain, and the demo became a pretty pointless and meaningless slaughter. In the short run, Deathmatch was indeed enough to get players accustomed to the controls and the gameplay, and they'll get their bearing pretty quick in the single-player mode, but that's only if they get there. The Deathmatch showed a very basic component of the game, a rather "mindless" one that lacked the individualistic feeling that AvP fans wanted to see, depicting the title as very rudimentary.