So! After months of waiting we have been bestowed with the blessing of the AVP demo. I notified the SAO crew yesterday who were online to grab it, and we all played a few matches. Here’s my thoughts on the demo, and how it held up.

Pros:

• Great graphics! From my mediocre specc’d Dell XPS M1530 laptop with its 8600GT being able to play it at reasonable rates to the latest DX11 systems with everything maxed out, this is generally a great looking game, and seemingly the engine has been well optimised.
• Great atmosphere, it’s hard to capture true "crapping yourself moments" in multiplayer, but I believe they have done it well. I have played both AVP1 and 2 many times and I do believe this is a worthwhile evolution of the series
• Sensible balance of character controls (the system for climbing walls as the aliens, for instance)
• Level design seems fairly good.
• The fact this is a DEMO, and is 8 player multiplayer featuring all 3 races, is pretty impressive
• The animations/models have been done VERY well, and capture the nature of what they are supposed to be like excellently

Cons

• Voice chat being Auto-On in lobbies is annoying as hell, ESPECIALLY considering you cant turn it off!!! All you need in this situation is for 1 person in the lobby to have his/her mic to close to her speakers and you have a huge sound loop and deaf players. This could easily be fixed though
• The controls by default (in my opinion) are shit. who in the right mind would have Q set to sprint? this means you cant press strafe left, as your ring finger is holding down Q! silly, awkward, however it can be altered, so il forgive them.
• The timer is pretty short for matches, again this due to it being a demo, so i'll forgive you.
• When you die, you "Instantly" go to the security camera screen, which can be a bit "WTF JUST HAPPENED?" even a kill cam, or showing you die for a second (like cod4 or L4D for example) would be better, its as if you've just died in a split second, without even knowing what hit you
• It can be very confusing at first. A good learning curve is to play as the marines first, then the predator, then the aliens, as the aliens are the furthest away from the norm in terms of playing FPS's

Conclusion

All in all i'd say its a pretty solid demo. It's not perfect by any means but the things that ARE wrong with this could easily be patched. The idea of playing this with multiple classes per race, new guns, maps, modes and not forgetting 3 Single player campaigns, for either £16 (see other thread) or £25 from steam is a bargain.

I would buy this as i know im getting my moneys worth, and i know im gonna flog it to death for many hours in the future.

DEMO Rating: 8/10