Developed by Cold Iron Studios and published by Focus Home Interactive, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a brand-new co-op survival shooter following the formula of Left 4 Dead. While the game primarily follows the same criteria, it is played in third-person and brings plenty of unique mechanics into play as well as setting itself apart from the franchise it takes its inspiration from. In this review, we find out whether we finally have a decent shooter in the Alien franchise, or this is just another failed attempt at making a decent Alien shooter. This is our review of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the PC in which we suit up as Colonial Marines and take the Xenomorph infestation head-on in a brilliantly designed atmospheric setting.
On its core, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a survival co-op shooter of up to three players. Empty slots are filled with bots, but the game is always played in a squad of three players. The game’s story takes place after 23 years of the original trilogy. You play as a Colonial Marine who is stationed aboard the UAS Endeavor, and you must help out carry missions to contain a deadly Xenomorph outbreak in various facilities. During the campaign, your main hub is your ship where you will spend your time if you are not deployed on missions. You will find various NPCs here that you can speak with to learn more about what is happening in the world and various facilities to restock your weapons and gear including buying more as well.
From your ship, you will deploy on various missions which I will point out here is very simple. Inviting friends over for co-op gameplay was extremely smooth and the game ensures that all players have the same story progression and locks out any missions that even a single player in the party has not unlocked yet. Your inventory and class selection are directly from the Esc key as well which is yet again really easy however you can choose your class once again before embarking on a mission. While there are no cutscenes during the missions, you do get plenty of dialogue here and there between NPCs found in the missions and your command.
Probably the biggest letdown in Aliens: Fireteam Elite is the campaign length. After completing the game, it keeps you wanting more. At launch, the game has four campaign missions, and each campaign mission has multiple missions, around three in most cases. The story is continued in these missions however I did not really care about the story of the title as well because the game just feels like a survival shooter as you must run-and-gun aliens and try to complete the objectives without really caring about the story of the title. The objectives are mostly similar as well which require you to secure locations, defend survivors and push various buttons in different locations to proceed further. This goes to show that the focus of Aliens: Fireteam Elite is simply its co-op fun, shooting mechanics instead of delivering a story-heavy experience.
Each mission in Aliens: Fireteam Elite is played in teams of 3 players where if you decide to go solo, your team will be filled with two robotic AI players which are literally 2 robotic players. Instead of having randomly generated characters, you will get two players that look like synthetic AI robots accompanying your mission. I will seriously recommend that you play the game with your friends because that is where the game really shines. Sometimes the AI really feels dumb however most of the time, the AI manages fine on its own. You can set matchmaking on or off before starting a mission or invite your friends to your party. Each player must be on the same campaign progress to play your unlocked missions. This ensures that all players experience the complete story, but you might have to play a mission again.
However, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is not just a plain shooter. Its gameplay and character customization offer much depth for you to play around with. There are five classes in the game at this point, and each class comes with its own unique weapons and kit. While the weapons can be switched at will, some of the weapons are exclusive to classes and cannot be equipped on other classes. You have a primary weapon, mostly assault rifles for most classes, and a secondary weapon, which ranges from shotguns and heavy machine guns. There is also a third weapon which is a pistol, and it has unlimited ammo. Apart from your three weapons, you have different active and passive skills depending on your chosen class.
Each class has a passive skill which is mostly added damage stacks or different proximity bonuses to your teammates. For example, the Gunner can easily stack up damage multipliers if he continuously hits enemies while the Medic provides can increase his Trauma Station’s health by picking up aid kits. There is no regen-health in the game, so you have to find and use aid kits to heal yourself if you get damaged so having a Medic on the team always pays off since he can heal the entire party with his active ability Trauma Center. There are various consumables in the game as well that you can either purchase from the armory or pick up from random crates found during missions at key locations. These are of course rare unless you buy them, and these run out after a single use, so you have to be careful with their use and only use them when you really need them.
You have two in-game currencies, one is the Rep Scrip which allows you to access the ‘special’ stock which is just pointless visual customizations while the other currency is Requisition Credits which are used to purchase weapons and accessories for your weapons. You can also purchase consumables using Requisition Credits. The Armory screen just looks like a mishmash without any proper weapon categories. You have to figure out everything yourself by looking at the weapon icons on the various items displayed in front of you in the form of a list. I am not a fan of the armory screen at this time, and I have seen better shop screens in lower-budget titles.
I also found the prices of new weapons and accessories to be a little higher than they should have been. This shows that the game demands grinding if you want to unlock all of the weapons and their accessories in the game. The weapons are not too much at this time, but their variety is decent and you have a healthy choice of various attachments to further customize each weapon. I had to use the basic weapons for quite some time before I could purchase another weapon that is not appealing in a game that is just made for the mindless slaughter of Xenomorphs. This is made even more frustrated by just having four campaigns at launch because you will quickly become bored of playing the same mission again and again.
However, there are various ways by which you can make your future runs a little more interesting. First, you have various difficulty levels including an Insan level which is just bloodbath and I do not mean of the Xenomorphs. To complete every mission in the game on Insane is just a massive task of its own. Each player in the level gets various lives and they are reducing when you are downed and not killed. Each down means a loss of life and when you are out of lives, you are gone forever. Apart from the difficulty levels, you can also equip various Challenge Cards which affect the gameplay in various unique ways. There act as various buffs or debuffs that provide various ways to experience the same mission in the game.
Another way to customize your runs is by altering the perks and modifiers for your class. As you play with your chosen class, you will level up and unlock new skill slots and new skills to equip in them. You can make the game even more difficult by removing all of these skills or you can customize how you play by removing and adding new skills to your slots. Since you have more skills than slots, the character can be customized to great detail but obviously, it requires a bit of grinding since you first have to unlock all slots and all skills to fully customize your Colonial Marine. Your choice of weapons, skills, and abilities will actually define how the game plays out for you.
This brings me to another star of the game which is your enemies. There are different variants of Xenomorphs that will come in your path as you fight through haunting space stations and environments. Apart from the normal smaller Xenomorphs that love to outnumber you, you will also need to fight with various types of Xenomorphs, which is yet another nod to Left 4 Dead. Each of these ‘special’ Xenomorphs have a unique AI and will attack you in their own unique ways. For example, you have the Spitters which will maintain their safe distance and will continue to shoot spit at you that damage you on hitting and even if you keep standing in their spit. The prowler sticks to the shadows and jumps on you when you least expect it however some mini-games will allow you to escape from them on your own as well. The much heavier Drones and Warriors walk on their hind legs, and they prefer a more direct head-on approach to take you down.
The gameplay of Aliens: Fireteam is heavily dependent on co-op gameplay, and it ranges from one scenario to another. At times, you will be just roaming around levels, hearing the Xenomorphs move all around you in tunnels and tubes but on the other hand, you will be swarmed with a horde that keeps coming and never ends. Most of the levels end at a defensive location where hordes of Xenomorphs attack you and you have to defend that location. These defensive scenarios are not just limited to mission ends as well. Sometimes, you will come under the attack by an entire swarm mid-level as well, so you never know what to expect around the corner.
These hordes or normal attack waves have a variety of Xenomorphs all thrown in the mix. Sometimes you will be busy shooting down the smaller Xenomorphs off from the roof when suddenly a Warrior will grab you and start pummeling you down. Similarly, you and your squad might be sitting safely behind your Sentry Turrets and a spitter will start shooting from a distance forcing you to go out of your safe zone and take it out. This is where the co-op element of the game comes into play as well. No matter which class you pick, you have abilities that benefit your whole squad and a squad that looks after each other survives longer in the game as well.
The level design in Aliens: Fireteam Elite is yet another thing that I loved about the title. Each campaign takes you to a unique location and these locations are brilliantly designed. They appear haunting, spooky and each one is filled with various spooky jump scares, like an alien prancing on you right after a locked door or one jumping from the rooftop in a dark room. They are not that scary but will surely make you jump in your seat. This beautiful level design is however is complemented by an unimpressive soundtrack that I did not really like very much. It feels out of place and eventually, I had to mute it all together since it was just plain boring. This is surprising because the ambiance sound design of the game is brilliant as you hear alien voices creeping all around you and some key sounds in various locations throughout the campaign really show how well the in-game sound is designed apart from the soundtrack.
There are a few bugs in the game at this point as well. The biggest one is that sometimes a Xenomorph would just get stuck while coming at you. This was more prominent for the special ones such as the Prowler or the Warrior that would just get stuck in some random environment object such as a barrier or a crate sitting in its path. Instead of going around it, the Xenomorph would just continue to run in it. I encountered this bug various times during my playthrough however it was always random and never happened at the same spot twice. It was not something game-breaking, but it just looks silly that a xenomorph is just running into a crate pointlessly.
Overall, the gameplay of the game is pretty good, and taking down hordes of Xenomorph is quite fun. The specials post a challenge, and you must be continuously on your toes to catch these buggers on time before they grab you. While the core formula of Aliens: Fireteam Elite is not new and we can see plenty of elements inspired by Left 4 Dead in it, it still brings a fresh take on the formula by combining it with the brilliant Aliens franchise. We have not seen a good shooter set in the Aliens universe for a long time and Aliens: Fireteam Elite might not be perfect, but it is a good, fun shooter, nonetheless.
The class system is decent and with a hefty customization system, you can play around with your character to have it exactly to your liking. However, I am not much a fan of the character design. They do not look fitting for a game releasing in 2021 and made me felt like I was developing a character in the PS3/360 era. The character animations feel stiff as well however this is only for the human characters. The Xenomorphs animations look just fine. In addition, the NPCs have no face animations while talking to us. A lot of RPGs do this, and I do not know why. It feels weird that you are speaking to someone and while you can hear their audio, their face is sitting idle and moving here and there randomly. It does not feel immersive and really put me off early in the game. What really catered to the Alien fan in me was the beautiful level design and the atmospheric levels of the title. This is where the game really shines: its level design and how atmospheric each level in the game feels.
Final Verdict:
Aliens: Fireteams Elite is an enjoyable co-op shooter however the main concern here is how the developer intends to continue supporting the title. In its current state, the campaign length is not that big and once you’ve played through the campaign missions a few times, the Horde Mode is your only mode in the game. While the gameplay is fun, the game seriously lacks when it comes to character animations and the soundtrack is subpar as well. Being a huge Alien fan, I loved the ambience and the atmospheric level design, and the game is fun in co-op as well. However, for making it the perfect Alien shooter, the game requires some bug fixing and better animations with additional missions. It is certainly a great shooter set in the Alien universe however it still lacks the polish of being the best co-op shooter at this point. If you love co-op shooters and are a fan of the Alien franchise, Aliens: Fireteam Elite will be right up your alley however it might feel a little lackluster around the edges.
Final Score: 7.5/10
