Skills u say? I mastered Doom 1, 2, Duke Nukem 3d , Quake, Unreal tournament, painkiller, doom 5, Kiss psycho circus, Serious sam, Legacy of Kain and The Suffering all without Gamefaq maps.
I was younger then so maybe i had more patience. AvP is ridiculous. If the enemies weren't constanty respawning every time you load your progress, i might have had a better chance of exploration. but having to kill all enemies again and being ambushed while getting lost in the air ducts is just outright madness and cheap shotting. I had all the maps printed out, laid out in a logical sequence on the table and i was determined to get down to business.
Realizing the vast amount of backtracking, exploring the mazes, airducts to reach new items in new levels, then going all the way back to open a door seems like more frustration than an engaging and fun experience.
All they needed to do was highlight rooms and areas already visited- highlight areas not yet accessed and areas accessible only with Key cards or Air ducts. leave markers like special lights to turn on when u have already explored an area. to make matters worse, they couldnt even put the full zoomed out view of the map, but only little pieces which gradually increased and still not the entire map layout.
graphically its the best looking FPS game for that time- even looks better than Doom and Wolfenstein (wolfenstein looked like a bad joke).
Anyways, i got myself Zool 2 to replace AvP and its fantastic- you can take time to master the levels and then use an access code like cybermorph to continue where you left off instead of constantly replaying the game from stage 1.