Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem on the PSP should be the greatest game ever made. It sees the coming together of two of science fiction's coolest, deadliest and scariest creations - the Predator and the Alien. It should be adrenaline pumping, heart stopping and poo-yourself scary, all covered in more gore than you can shake a person's spilled guts at. Sadly however, the game is a disappointing letdown - another promising movie license that could have been so much more than it turned out to be.

Requiem begins with an opening cinematic that sets the thin as a rake story in motion. You play a predator, who has come to Earth to slaughter as many aliens as he can possibly manage. The aliens have already taken root and started breeding, so you'll be stalking around various US rural environments and cityscapes as you attempt to put an end to the alien menace while disposing of any evidence of your presence on the planet.

While this all sounds wonderful in theory, in execution it is found severely wanting. The Predator himself looks pretty cool at least - he's a big presence on the PSP's screen and there's an impressive amount of detail woven into his iconic looks - but the environments he runs about in are about as bland as they come. I'm mindful here of the PSP's limitations, so I'm not going to slam the game's overall aesthetic, but I am disappointed by its quality. Textures are bland, dark and generic and the game is full of similar looking tunnels, hills and forest areas, all with that gritty wash about them that we seem to be seeing in loads of PSP games at the moment. The graphics are reasonable, but you'll soon tire of what feels like endless identikit environments.

The combat is unfortunately equally uninspiring. You move around with the analogue nub, control horizontal camera movement with the shoulder buttons, fire your selected special weapon (which is usually your shoulder cannon) with Circle, interact with X, hack and slash with your dual claws with Square and go into first person mdoe with Triangle. There's no real depth or skill to the proceedings and as wave upon wave of aliens come at you, all you need to do is keep moving backwards as you blast them into oblivion with your shoulder cannon. While you can upgrade your special weapon as you proceed through the game, nothing is more effective for dealing with the pesky acid-blooded blighters than using the weapon you begin with.

My idea of what makes the Predator such a badass is that he is a stalker, surveying his prey from afar - he is the ultimate hunter. But Requiem makes him more of a tank, with no need for stealth and no need for real strategy; he is a hulking brute, trawling through a sea of alien flesh. What the game has you do is also pretty boring. When you're not spamming your shoulder cannon you'll be walking up to bits of predator and alien technology and disintegrating it with a simple press of the X button. There's a little more to it than that - certain things can only be seen in certain views, for example the classic predator thermal view or the alien view or the tech view - but it's pretty basic stuff.

There's also a disappointing lack of gore in the game. If you've seen the trailer for the movie you'll know that there's so much blood-soaked alien on predator on human destruction that the violence almost looks comical. Well, there's hardly any in the game - aliens simply writhe around on the ground for a bit then disappear when you kill them. I want alien heads flying off in the air, I want alien tails going mental after you've removed them from their bodies and I want so much alien blood spraying about the place that it looks like it's raining acid - and meanwhile, no acid even comes out of them to hurt you when they die!

As with a lot of PSP games, Requiem struggles a bit with the camera. It makes a decent effort, but it can be quite frustrating at times. A lot of this is due to the fact that the predator is such a big character model, so you can't see a lot of what's happening. Aliens often attack you from out of nowhere and start clawing at you before you've had a chance to react. I suppose this is probably how it's supposed to feel with the shadowy, swarming aliens, but it can often feel a bit unfair. Beyond the fairly short fifteen-mission single player experience you have a very basic ad hoc two-player skirmish multiplayer mode that doesn't really add much to the game, where you battle through more waves of aliens in a competitive face-off against another player. This could have been so much more - with more players and the chance to play as humans, and even aliens!

I guess my main issue with Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is that it's simply a bad game and also that it's just so disappointing. In the same way the first AvP movie left me feeling quite angry because it dealt with two of my favorite movie series in such a boring way, Requiem on PSP leaves me feeling worse than it probably should because I love the universe upon which it draws and I want it to be great. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable, but taking control of a predator and slaughtering masses of aliens on Earth isn't even half as cool as it should be.

Reviewed by James Fanciullo for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).