 |
| OVERALL RATING |
2.0 |
| Presentation |
 |
3.0 |
| Control |
|
3.0 |
| Gameplay |
 |
1.5 |
| Fun factor |
|
1.5 |
| User Rating |
 |
3.0 |
 |
Posted: September 28, 2006
UFO Predator is an action game that continues the trend of allowing players to be on the flip side and play a villain by causing mass panic and carnage. As an invading alien, your goal is to launch a large-scale campaign of total destruction and conquer Earth.
Inside the spaceship, you’ll hover over the city and swallow up humans as they run through the streets like raving lunatics. Swooping down will pick up the earthlings and they will not only add to your score, but also replenish the ship’s energy that is constantly being diminished by attacking armies and special weapons. These include everything but the kitchen sink like tanks, robots, a reasonable facsimile of Superman and even a Godzilla-like dinosaur.
The weapons directed at you do stretch the imagination a bit but what knocks it out of the ballpark is your own weapon against them. It’s not a pulverizing death ray or miniature nukes (something you’d think would be in the possession of a craft that just traveled millions of light years with only conquest in mind). Instead, it’s some sort of magnetic crane, the type you see at junkyards picking up cars and dropping them into a metal grinder. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly how you use it… simply lower the crane, pick up a passing vehicle and then swing or drop it onto an attacking enemy. Now that’s high-tech weaponry!
Cranes and dinosaurs aside, the game boasts some nice visuals with tons of stuff on-screen and no apparent slow down. Not that it would matter in a game like this but it does keep it from being unplayable. Also, the actual mechanics involved in picking up vehicles and the physics used when swinging them across onto a target are quite adept. You probably won’t care about that however.
In the end, UFO Predator’s art of destruction doesn’t satisfy because there is very little mayhem to really cause. All you do is swoop up humans and destroy vehicles with other vehicles over and over. It gets old quick. Perhaps the aliens should have come up with weapons as comparable and creative as the humans.
