Aliens vs. Predator 2 (2001): Plot, Campaigns & LV-1201 Lore
Aliens vs. Predator 2, often shortened to AvP 2, is a first-person shooter developed by Monolith Productions and published by Sierra Entertainment through Fox Interactive. It released in October 2001 for Windows and later for Mac, as a longer follow-up to Rebellion's 1999 game. The three campaigns share the planetoid LV-1201 in 2231 and follow Colonial Marine Corporal Andrew Harrison, a hive Xenomorph that grows from implantation to Praetorian, and the Elite hunter Prince during a Weyland-Yutani research collapse.
Plot Summary
Weyland-Yutani ran two fortified sites on LV-1201, the Primary Operations Complex and the Forward Observation Pods, linked by a gated tunnel road. Dr. Arnaud Eisenberg directed the Xenomorph work. General Vassili Rykov and the Iron Bears held security. The game tells the same collapse in three campaigns. A hive drone began in a cargo hold on 23 November 2230. Prince's clan hit the Zeta canyons on 1 December. Major Thomas McCain brought the USS Verloc in on 6 January 2231, six weeks after the company lost the POC, to hold the ground until the 6th Battalion could follow.
Marine Campaign
The Marine story followed Corporal Andrew Harrison from the Verloc drop to the Pilot ruins. McCain's people walked into a colony that had already been lying to them, and Harrison spent most of the day cut off from the main force.
Unwelcome Guests
The Verloc reached orbit at 5:10 a.m. on 6 January 2231. The ship was already short eight Marines and its synthetic from the last drop. McCain forbade air strikes and a heavy asset the crew called Alice. Headquarters wanted the site intact. Orders were to put out fires and dig in for the 6th. Duke had already laid out Harrison's kit. The other Marines called Harrison Frosty.
Johnson flew the lead Cheyenne into weather he could not see and put it down hard. Dropship Two and White Team dropped out of contact. The stabilizer jammed, the antenna died, and Johnson wanted a landing beacon and wind data before he would lift again. McCain sent Sergeant Hall and Red Team for power, White Team for security control, and Blackwell with Shugi and Harrison to the northern bay. A trap caught Blackwell's group. Harrison's video feed died, but his life signs held, and McCain left the beacon to him.
Collateral Damage
Harrison brought the northern beacon up. Security was still dark, so McCain sent him alone to a station on sub-level three, a ten-minute run he could not staff. When Harrison brought that grid live, the hive woke. White Team still had a clean southern pad, so Johnson limped the damaged dropship there. Hall called from Yard Four, pinned. Harrison stole a corporate APC rather than fall back. McCain logged that if Harrison lived, the charge would be insubordination.
Hall was already gone when he reached the yard. Decker was badly burned. Jones argued to leave. Harrison used the motion tracker for her life signs and went after an incubation site instead. White Team later pulled the rest of Hall's group beyond the POC fence. McCain listed Hall killed in action at 08:32 and put her in for a commendation. The southern pad had no colony survivors. The Pods were a three-hour APC drive away, and the landline was dead.
Betrayal
Mother, the Verloc's computer, could not open the tunnel gates while POC security stayed up. The road was a chain of containment locks, one gate at a time. Harrison walked the overrides on foot so the APCs could pass. Company maps were incomplete. When the Marines dropped the remaining grid, they also tore a hole in the Pods' own defense net. Rykov met them at 9:40 p.m. with Eisenberg and told McCain six of his men were already dead that day, including field teams that had not checked in.
Rykov claimed the Pods were sealed and that tunnel charges could cut the road. Deck 24 was closed for a contaminant, which he called routine chemical treatment. He and a lieutenant rewrote rosters so missing people could be listed as tunnel dead instead of POC dead from six weeks earlier. They isolated Marine radio so the newcomers could not ask Pod staff the wrong questions. Harrison went with technician Stiles to restore a booster link. A cut-off warning reached the terminal before it died: rosters had been changed, the scientists were already dead, and the Marine team was in trouble.
Tomiko
Dunya intercepted Harrison after the terminal failed. Her fiancé Dimitri, an Iron Bears anti-tank officer, had been outside the Pods when the Marines dropped the grid. She put Harrison in a convict slot as #16, skipped the sedative, and watched from the implantation gallery. A woman on a redirected camera feed, Tomiko, cut into that room and sent him down the belt to Implantation Lab 2 for a package she could not retrieve herself. She would not talk about his team until he had it. Eggs sat in stasis pools along that route.
Tomiko was already hiding from Pod security and from a man she thought might be Kenji. Harrison used her overrides, reached her, and kept her on the radio while McCain still believed Dunya's story that a convict fight had cooked Harrison in his own ammo belt. On the way out of the labs she asked his first name, said Andrew, and signed off. Power spikes wrecked the lab block. Johnson reported those decks gone. Harrison kept moving without her.
Savior
A software hole had already dropped the Pods' defense grid for fifteen minutes on the evening of 6 January. Drones and Runners entered. Archeological Team Omega vanished at Dig Site 12, about two dozen scientists and laborers. Eisenberg named the answer Operation Savior and sold it to McCain as a hive distraction that would let Marines save those people. Recovered mail called it a Large Mass Specimen Extraction aimed at rare hive castes, with the Empress bound for Gateway.
His staff briefed a three-part job. Combat synthetics would hit the hive surface as a feint. Marines would enter from the outer edge for the dig team. An extraction crew would come up a mapped shaft into the Empress chamber and take her as a hostage. Eisenberg claimed hive scent law would keep the nest off them once they held her. A dissenting voice cited Dr. Chin's work on succession fights among Young Queens. Chin was not in the room.
McCain put his people at Eisenberg's disposal. Pod comms stayed encrypted on the excuse of industrial theft. Contact with the Marine rescue team died in the hive. Harrison was no longer with that force. He reached the Pilot installation under the colony and killed a Queen with a mounted minigun, then left on whatever lift still existed. McCain's emergency dispatch said LV-1201 was abandoned, casualties were extreme, one dropship was still missing, and the 6th Battalion should not attempt another evac. Fusion cells in the Pods had ruptured. The hive was still alive.
The Company Record
Weyland-Yutani's later Incident file treated the morning of 6 January as a contained Alien spill and hand-waved later fights that never named a third species. It denied that the hive could have understood Savior or answered it on purpose. Dr. Chris Lund's dissent treated a more advanced species as part of the fight, and the board would not hear it. The official line was that White Team's silence and the southern pad did not require hunters to explain. Harrison's later account was filed as the word of one low-ranking Marine. The same file moved money off LV-1201 to Research Project X11 at Site #3 because the hive still lived and the Pods were not worth rebuilding.
Alien Campaign
The Alien story started weeks before the Verloc drop and ended in the same night as Savior. The playable creature grew through the full life cycle inside Eisenberg's colony and took the Empress back from him.
Expedition One
Eisenberg's first landing was 15 October 2221, dated in his own logs. The team followed flight telemetry from the derelict on LV-426 and found the same Pilot architecture in shafts and surface ruins. Days on LV-1201 ran short, the air was thin, and they camped in broken ground south of the hive. Synthetics cleared brush and put down mines and sentry guns.
The hive looked dormant through November. Smaller Aliens than the LV-426 type ranged at night, and Eisenberg named them Runners. He thought their skulls might work as resonance chambers for hive sound and scent, and he wondered whether those orders could be replaced. On 25 November they killed Weller near the hive, then ignored the camp again. Security chief McCulloch found a tribal weapon less than a decade old that did not match Pilot work. Eisenberg ordered radio silence and camouflage rather than a pull-out.
The horebush bloomed on 12 December. Eisenberg read that as the end of dormancy. On New Year's night a storm killed the perimeter, and drones wrecked the dropship. Seventeen people reached Observation Post 2. Adams and Green died on the run for Post 3. By 10 January 2222 Post 4 was full of Aliens standing on the emergency stores. Eisenberg wrote that he would not starve. A company press clip dated 6 October 2110, years before that expedition in the same files, described him announcing a genetics firm near New Brazil after rumors he had come back burned in cold sleep. He was the son of Ernest Eisenberg and the great-grandson of Tomas Eisenberg, who built the first cybernetic organism.
By 2229 the POC and the Pods were a working colony with convict labor, an artificial hive, and live eggs under class-4 stasis. Eisenberg blocked Dr. Maurita's transfer to Gateway, then announced the man's death and told staff to stop the rumors. Pod 5 was already gone. A committee meeting in a cargo hold accused him of promising cures and chasing hive control instead. Captain Jonas Richter was detained after a synthetic, W. Gibson, Model AE2, tied the cargo ship Aurora's timetable to guard rotations. A5 synthetics in the Pods were already failing, one of them after it shoved a man down stairs and claimed it had smelled a Stage 1.
Birth
On 23 November 2230 at 10:13 p.m., a contaminant alarm went off in a cargo hold at the POC's western landing. The playable Facehugger left that hull, stayed out of sight, and took an isolated host. Gestation produced a Chestburster that fed and molted into a drone, then later a Praetorian. Weyland-Yutani training text from the later debrief said Facehuggers escape most lab failures, Chestbursters hide until they grow, and the first twenty minutes of a grown-drone breach kill far more people than the later stages.
The POC Falls
On 28 November an explosion in the outflow tunnels opened the POC. Engineering studies had said only a bomb would breach those walls. The commander died trying to hold the lower crew decks. Guard captain Joss Blaney kept a handful of security on the landing bays and waited for Rykov. Through December he doubled shifts, watched a dead transmitter, and released convicts because so many named guards were already missing. Blade marks and plasma burns told him it was not only Aliens. Xavier led the remaining laborers. The lockbox code on remote-tunnel guns was AX72BY. No help came from the Pods.
Vengeance
The grown drone tore through the artificial hive under the Pods and stopped human bomb teams meant to cut the Empress off from her nest. Combat synthetics gave off no scent, which made them the hardest prey in those decks. Hive Warriors answered the Savior extraction as Eisenberg burned the Empress into stillness and tried to move her. The nest sealed its own tubes, then failed to hold the gates.
Freedom
Eisenberg told security team Zebra to skip the Pods and send the Verloc's dropship to the auxiliary pad. He was bringing a guest. In the tunnels to that pad at 2:55 a.m. on 7 January, Warriors wrecked the landing-bay gear and stopped the lift. Eisenberg did not reach the Verloc. The drone cocooned him in the nest. Company security later wrote that his death was unproven because the Verloc's second dropship vanished, and that they still wanted him and whatever specimens left with him.
Predator Campaign
The Predator story followed Prince's hunt on LV-1201, from the clan's December landing to Rykov's death at the hive mouth. It started nineteen years earlier on Korari.
Korari
On 3 July 2211, Prince's clan hit a Weyland-Yutani Weapons Division post on the jungle world Korari. Sergeant and Butler died in the first minutes. Life signs still showed Rykov, then a Colonial Marine officer, weak but alive. He was the only survivor. A later tribunal did not believe his story of an invisible killer and still gave him an honorable discharge that many called too light.
Medical files said his spine was shattered and that he left in a chair. He walked again after experimental synthetic nerve adaptation. The graft caused shadow pain, false memory, and a daily need for Sededrine, an illegal opiate with liver damage attached. He built the Iron Bears after that and took jobs with little oversight. A Weyland-Yutani security dossier already advised against hiring him as LV-1201 chief of security. Eisenberg hired him anyway.
Hunt And Trap
On 1 December 2230 at 9:08 a.m., a thermal track changed course over the Zeta canyons, three kilometers south of the Pods. Rykov knew the species. Relic A1South from that dig threw out frequencies that killed electronics and caused nausea. He sent containment teams with modified EMP grenades built from that gear. By late afternoon Bravo team had two hunters down and bagged. Surprise was gone, Alpha team was silent, and Rykov pulled the rest out. He would not spend soldiers the way he had spent a science team as bait.
Dunya took the first captive straight to implantation because Rykov wanted that death slow. Eisenberg stopped him from killing the second and kept it for study. Holding logs later listed five weeks and three days, high antibody counts, and surgeons who would not cut the forearm bands after an earlier removal stopped a prisoner's lungs. Rykov wrote that Zeta carvings were hundreds of years old at most, not Pilot work, and that more hunters would come for their own. A third hunter, younger, wore a more ornamental mask. Rykov read the carvings as a hunt record and began calling him a prince.
Unexpected Allies
At 10:22 p.m. on 6 January, Prince was still inside the Pods after five weeks. A drone killed the scientist over him and opened a path. Harrison's work on doors and fields, done for Tomiko and for his own escape, also dropped containment Prince needed. He took back most of his kit except the disc the labs had pulled for study, then stole a Cheyenne. Rykov ordered the cliffs watched so the hunter could not signal the rest of the clan, and he told Dunya to evac the blood work from an auxiliary site. Ivan went out in an exosuit and did not report back. Prince crashed the dropship in hive country and fought through drones, Runners, and Predaliens born from the implantation Rykov had ordered.
Trophy
Rykov refused his next Sededrine dose so the drug would not dull him. He sent Chekov out with the remaining Bears and waited at the hive mouth with the stolen mask. At 2:36 a.m. on 7 January he called for Ice team and security and got no answer. He told Prince he had seen that face without a mask on Korari and that the exosuit would hold. Prince killed him and took the spine. A last coded burst said the mule was acquired and the package was moving, Dunya leaving with the blood work Rykov had ordered her to finish.
On 12 July 2231 a security alert reported a top company bioweapons scientist taken from Gateway quarters, the New Brazil Weapons Division lead missing after a golf day, and three confirmed abductions by nightfall. The method matched the Iron Bears. Rykov was listed dead on LV-1201. A witness described a young dark-haired woman in charge. No ransom note followed.
Key Characters
The campaigns share a named human cast around Harrison, Eisenberg, and Prince.
- Andrew Harrison - Verloc corporal, platoon nickname Frosty. Brought the northern beacon up, woke the POC hive, took an APC for Hall, and kept moving after Dunya staged his death.
- Tomiko - Pod insider who pulled Harrison out of implantation and died when the labs went.
- Major Thomas McCain - Verloc commander. Wrote Hall KIA at 08:32 and signed the abandon-planet dispatch.
- Sergeant Hall - Red Team lead. Pinned in Yard Four and listed killed in action at 08:32.
- Johnson - Dropship pilot who put the lead Cheyenne down hard and later flew the southern pad.
- Duke - Marine who laid out Harrison's kit before the drop.
- Blackwell - Northern-bay lead. A trap cut him off from Harrison.
- Jones - Smartgunner who argued to leave after Hall was taken.
- Dr. Arnaud Eisenberg - Science lead. Sold Operation Savior as a rescue and tried to lift the Empress.
- General Vassili Rykov - Iron Bears chief. Ran the EMP hunt, the Predator-blood plan he compared to Anthrax 9, and wore Prince's stolen mask.
- Dunya - Rykov's lieutenant and Dimitri's partner. Slotted Harrison as convict #16 and left with the blood work.
- Dimitri - Iron Bears anti-tank officer, Dunya's fiancé. Outside the Pods when the Marines dropped the grid.
- Prince - Third hunter on the December landing. Escaped the Pods, killed Rykov, and took the spine.
- The hive drone - Playable Xenomorph that grew from Facehugger to Praetorian and cocooned Eisenberg.
- The Empress - Hive monarch Savior was built to steal.
LV-1201 And The Pilot Ruins
LV-1201 sat in the same numbered-world series as LV-426, about fifty years after Aliens. Humans used two surface forts and a lock-gated tunnel. The hive filled caverns, corporate decks, and the buried Pilot installation Eisenberg's first team had followed from the LV-426 derelict. Zeta was a younger overlay, Yautja work a few hundred years old, with trophies thick enough that Rykov called the land perfect for that species.
Observation Posts 2 through 4 from Expedition One still marked the old approach to the hive. The artificial hive under the Pods was a company build, not a wild nest. Harrison's Queen fight happened inside the Pilot structure, and that site was still standing when the Verloc left. The clip below is that installation in motion.
Xenomorphs And Enemies
Eisenberg's own notes treated a Praetorian as a Runner or drone that molts for several years. Mid-phase scent enrages the hive, most of those animals die, and a survivor leaves until the shell can turn small-arms fire, then comes back. Combat synthetics were the hive's worst human-side problem because they have no pheromone aura. Predaliens appeared after Rykov's forced implantations, and a Queen still held a chamber under the Pilot ruins besides the Empress.
Human opposition was Colonial Marines, Weyland-Yutani guards, convict labor, first-generation combat synthetics, and the Iron Bears. A5 units in the Pods were already unstable before the January breach. Training text told guards to push contamination up into offices and living decks on purpose, and to kill escaped convicts without pause.
Gameplay And Features
Marines carried a pulse rifle with a grenade launcher, a shotgun that switched pellet spread for AP slugs, a pistol with the same armor-piercing option, a flamethrower, a smartgun that lost tracking in night vision, a minigun, a rocket launcher with fire-and-forget rounds, a sniper rifle, and a grenade launcher whose EMP loads stunned targets and killed cloaks. The knife cut a hunter's net. Players could plant sentry guns and drive an exosuit with a laser and flamer on one arm and rockets and a minigun on the other.
The Alien campaign starts as a Facehugger, then a Chestburster that cannot wall-walk, then a drone with tail stun, pounce, headbite, and tear-through on weak metal and light doors. Navigation Vision shows laser grids and hides scent auras. Predators cloak, leap from a crouch, throw and recall a disc, charge a plasmacaster, snipe with a speargun without dropping cloak, and heal with a medicomp that costs half their energy bar. An energy sift fills that bar. The wrist computer shorts human door boards. Multiplayer let an Alien player molt all the way to Queen.
Development
Studio And Engine
Fox Interactive needed a new studio while Rebellion finished Gold content for the 1999 game. Monolith Productions took the job on LithTech Talon, the toolset they had already used on No One Lives Forever. Designer William Westwater and producer David Stalker ran the project. Kevin Kilstrom handled art. Nathan Grigg wrote the score. Wall-walking was the hardest engine problem. The renderer added 32-bit animated light maps and lights that moved when a door opened or a fan threw a shadow.
Voice Cast
Todd Licea voiced Harrison, Jeff Steitzer voiced Rykov, Jen Taylor voiced Tomiko, Andromeda Dunker voiced Dunya, Gary Schwartz voiced Eisenberg, and Jock Blaney voiced McCain. John Armstrong covered Duke, Blackwell, and Dimitri. David Scully covered Jones and Ivan. A Monolith artist built a Lance Henriksen model and asked Fox to recast Eisenberg as Michael Bishop from Alien 3. Fox kept Eisenberg.
Release And Editions
Sierra and Fox shipped the Windows build in October 2001. Official PlayStation Magazine had floated a PlayStation 2 port after LithTech 2 reached consoles. Monolith did not ship one after a hard No One Lives Forever conversion. Third Law Interactive built Primal Hunt for August 2002. Gold Edition bundled both on 30 May 2003. MacPlay released a Mac OS X port on 23 July 2003. Sierra shut official multiplayer in November 2008.
Primal Hunt
Aliens vs. Predator 2: Primal Hunt released on 13 August 2002 from Third Law Interactive, with three short campaigns that share LV-1201 across two dates. About five hundred years before the Verloc drop, an Ancient Predator found a hive in Pilot ruins at Zeta and woke an artifact that kept Xenomorphs off that ground. His clan built a hunting camp on those ruins, with a trophy room in the old structure. The artifact later failed and the hive came through. He was resetting the old stasis fields over egg bays when a Facehugger took him, and both locked in the field.
In 2230, weeks before the POC outbreak, Rykov sent Dunya after that relic. A synthetic team had already died on the approach, and he had a buyer waiting. Dr. Adam Post gave her a worm device to shut the Pilot systems down. She reached the chamber, took the artifact, and woke the Ancient with it. She fought out through the old camp and rode an APC back to Pod 5. The hunter followed her in and opened the pod to the hive. When Rykov ordered the artifact pulled from storage she found him already carrying it. Dimitri went to close the hole. Dunya held the cargo bay with a mounted minigun and sentry guns until he came back, then they left in a lift while Rykov blew Pod 5 off the rest of the facility.
The Ancient recovered the artifact, broke into a comms room, and sent a call that Prince's clan later answered. A Predalien chestburster then killed him. That Predalien grew in Pod 5, dropped the hunt for the relic when the charges were set, and left along a support girder before the pod fell. The wreck Prince walks in the main campaign is that crash. The expansion also put LV-1201's Chameleons in play, creatures that curled into camouflaged balls and fired a concussive beam, plus dual pistols, the Predator energy flechette, and extra multiplayer maps.
Conclusion
Monolith's Aliens vs. Predator 2 was the long, story-tied three-campaign shooter that followed Rebellion's 1999 game. The next numbered follow-up was Aliens vs. Predator 2010, a reboot rather than another LV-1201 story. Rebellion developed that 2010 game, the same studio that had made AvP Classic.
External Sources
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