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I had the chance to play the new Predator game today, alongside a very excited development rep. It was clear that he loves this game, but I can only share his enthusiasm to a certain extent. In Predator: Concrete Jungle, you play as the Predator (duh), with all of his nifty weapons, vision modes, and cloaking abilities. He’s moved out of the jungle and into the city, and appears to be hunting down evil now. I’m not enough of a Predator fan to know if this makes sense, but it doesn’t seem quite right to me.
I started out in a building, cloaked near a security guard. The cloak effect was very cool, and looked similar to the movie, although there are a few differences so that you can see yourself better. I snuck up behind the guard, locked onto him with my L trigger, and pressed a button to do a quick, stealth kill. I must have made some noise, though, because he noticed me just in time and started shooting. No worries -- I’m the Predator, after all -- one rent-a-cop is no match for me! There was another guard nearby, but since he wasn’t looking in our direction, he didn’t notice anything. That’s kind of fishy, I know, but the development rep I spoke to told me that for E3 demo purposes, they’ve actually dumbed down the AI of certain characters in order to give you more chances to try out the stealth kill mechanics, so I’m not sure it’ll be the same in the final game.
After killing off those guards, I found my path blocked by a security gate -- the kind that lowers out of the ceiling. To open it, I walked up to it and hit A as fast as I could. As I did so, the Predator struggled to open the gate. I must suck at button mashing, because I took so long that the guys on the other side of the gate managed to kill me while I was doing it.
After that little disaster, I tried out another level, this time in an outdoor, rainy setting. The rain meant that I couldn’t cloak, although it didn’t stop me from trying. When I tried, there was a cool short out effect and I continued being completely visible. As I approached a group of enemies, I switched one of my weapons slots to my disc weapon, and used the baddies to test out a multi-lock system. You point at one enemy and hit the L trigger to lock on, then move your camera to point at another enemy to lock onto him. It was really cool, but harder to accomplish than it should have been. There appeared to be a limit of 3 enemies at a time, which seems to be a fair number, but I would have liked to see 4 or 5. Once you’ve finished locking on, you launch your blade and mayhem ensues. Even though it was a little tough to do, I used this multi-lock over and over to kill the whole group, because it was so cool.
The video was great, and the Predator’s a killing machine, but the premise seems odd (who cares -- it’s an action game), and the controls were a bit iffy at this stage. Of course, there’s still time for tweaking before it gets into our hands, so I’m not writing it off at this point, but I’d make sure you read a few previews or reviews as the release date approaches before you make up your mind to buy it.
- John Tucker
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