Have You Played... Aliens Versus Predator 2?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Aka "the one where you got to be a chest-burster chewing its way out of someone's ribcage." Five stars for that alone, right?

AVP 2 was a lesser sequel in most respects. Perhaps a bit too story-led for its own good, never quite as frightening as the first and far too bright and inappropriately colourful for its own good. But it sat down and thought about the Alien mythos, and what had not yet been done, and what elements of it that horror fans and schoolchildren were most excited by.

Then it did it, in a bravura sequence that had you play through the notorious life cycle of the xenomorph. There's an adequate but largely forgettable tri-perspective first-person shooter hung around it, which suffers from both over-familiarity and not making the Aliens particularly as convincing as in the predecessor, but the rest of it almost doesn't matter. You get to be a Facehugger. You get to be Chestburster. You get to kill a cat and then finally become an Alien. Good work.