Thanks to several Alien vs. Predator movies, video games, and comics, the Predator franchise is no stranger to a crossover, but the Yautja have faced up against a variety of other well-known characters. It’s not surprising that the fierce warriors have been picked to make a few surprise visits in order to confront some of gaming’s best because they are one of the best hunters in pop culture and have an iconic and unquestionably awesome design.
Therefore, if you’ve been burned by subpar licensed games or thought the full-on Predator games weren’t exactly masterpieces, here are a few entirely different franchises where the Yautja hunters appear, including somewhere they are playable. A massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game (MMORTS) called Soldiers Inc. was released in 2013 and is playable on Facebook using web browsers. Soldiers Inc. is a mostly realistic military simulation game about soldiers vying for resources in East Africa. However, in 2015, an Alien vs. Predator crossover was released, featuring a brand-new campaign and themed Yautja and Xenomorph units.
The plot slightly diverged from the Predator movies, with the extraterrestrial hunters being created through genetic engineering and trained to obey military authorities. Similar to the preceding real-time strategy game Alien Versus Predator: Extinction, the crossover in Soldiers Inc. only lasted 90 days before the creatures were eliminated in the style of AVP in a pyramid explosion. It’s not surprising that the Predator was included in Mortal Kombat 10 because the series has gradually begun to include guest characters in recent installments. The Predator is a legendary hunter and all-around badass. In the character’s combos and brutalities, all of the key weapons are present, including wrist blades, cloaking, thermal vision, and the Smart Disc and Plasmacaster, which take center stage during the game’s infamous deaths.
Many of the moves are named after famous quotes from the movies, and the victory animation features the Predator using their signature spine-ripping technique before placing the skull in a trophy room. There are also other nods to the films. Even a skin for Jax, Carl Weathers, who was modeled by Dillon from the original movie, was included. Later, the Xenomorph was included as a guest character, enabling you to design your own Alien vs. Predator fights in the infamously bloody fashion of Mortal Kombat.
With 2017’s Wildlands game, the Ghost Recon franchise became open-world and also out of this world, with the Predator showing up in a DLC expansion later that year. The crew investigates skinned corpses in Bolivia for the sinisterly titled bonus objective, “The Jungle Moved,” which, of course, reveals to be a Yautja’s nefarious deed. Bring on the boss fight, complete with cloaking, plasma caster shots, and the infamous self-destruct.
This Predator crossover is appropriately one of the hardest boss fights in the game, with the Yautja having the biggest health pool in the game and checkmarks completely missing from this mission (until rights expire, meaning the expansion was withdrawn in December 2020). This is unfortunate because, although not a Predator game, this is one of the more accurate remakes of the original movie, thanks to the Yautja’s design, the fireteam’s characters, and the rainforest setting.
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