Aliens: Fireteam Elite

One of the most fun horde shooters since Left 4 Dead 2 thanks to an excellent progression system that motivates through several playthroughs of a surprisingly varied campaign featuring three unique enemy factions, as well as spectacular cross-faction battles. Especially on higher difficulties, this becomes tactical survival rather than a light-weight horde shooter, but thanks to in-depth weapon customization and class abilities the challenge never feels unfair.

Despite what its reduced price might suggest, there's a lot here to keep you entertained for numerous hours, especially once you've managed your first run through all four acts and start tackling them again with higher difficulty settings in the pursuit of consistently better gear. There's so much satisfaction in customizing and managing a handful of classes with enough depth to transform them into the Colonial Marine you need at a given time, along with a plethora of great weapons to make the moment-to-moment action engaging from the first time you pull the trigger. What it lacks in dread it makes up for in pure white-knuckle action, making Aliens: Fireteam Elite a great place to engage with this iconic sci-fi franchise again.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite does the franchise justice by delivering an addictive co-op shooter set in iconic locations from the films.

Apart from a camera that despises the view from a corner, some buggy and inconsistent team matchmaking mechanics, and the curious decision to add punishing roguelike elements, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a polished and potentially fun and action-filled romp through a corner of the Alien universe and lore. Played without human squadmates and reliant on AI stand-ins at anything but the easiest difficulty, the game’s more repetitious aspects begin to grate, as failure will be inevitable. Played with a trio of living beings possessing some situational awareness, reflexes and the ability to communicate, using an arsenal of cool guns and toys against swarms of iconic Xenomorphs is a mindless, if not mind-blowing, good time.

If you’re in the mood for a game that delivers the kind of action you see in the Aliens movie, I think you’ll enjoy this game. It’s not as good as Alien Isolation, but it’s definitely had a lot of love put into it. The game reminds me a lot of the World War Z game, which I was a big fan of, only it’s in the Alien universe. The game is not perfect, but I had a lot of fun with it and will continue to for quite a while.

If you are a fan of the franchise then you don’t need to be advised you are going to enjoy this game, but if you are new to Aliens know that it does a great job of easing you in so that you don’t feel overwhelmed.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is the cooperative game that every fan of the franchise will want to play. The setting and the confrontation against the Aliens make it a very enjoyable experience for fans of Ridley Scott's work.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a our chance to blast away swarms of xenomorphs at will in good co-op fashion.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a solid third-person co-op shooter that feels like it belongs in the franchise, but its replayability has yet to be determined.

Like the films that inspired it, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is great popcorn fun with a friend or two, but if you’re not a fan of the popular film franchise and/or siege-style game modes like Gears of War’s Horde and Halo’s Firefight, you are likely in for a long grind, especially if you are playing solo.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite mostly delivers the goods with a super solid squad-based shooter set in the Aliens universe. There's plenty to enjoy here, lots of fun nods to the movies, tons of lore, impressive attention to environmental detail and slick Xeno-slaying action that's enhanced immensely by taking the fight to the alien hordes with a couple of friends. It may be a little repetitive, there aren't nearly enough surprises and the campaign fizzles out towards its end but, grab some buddies, get your headsets on and crank up the difficulty and there's hours of properly intense, team-based action to get stuck into with this one.

Aliens Fireteam Elite is a cooperative shooter without infamy and without praise that, at a budget price, allows you to spend a few hours immersed in the typical atmosphere of Xenomorph-based films in the company of a couple of friends. However, do not expect a product capable of entertaining you for a long time due to an underlying repetitiveness and a scarce variety of situations that tends to tire rather quickly, not to mention the presence of an AI ally that is far from perfect, which makes the title difficult to enjoy for those who want to live the experience alone. The hope is that the free add-ons promised by the team can somehow revitalize the product and perhaps do justice to the Challenge Card system.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite occasionally fires on all cylinders, but a monotonous gameplay loop bogs down the entire experience.

Aliens Fireteam Elite is a title that will likely disappoint you during the first few hours, but once you get past the first chapter, the game starts to open up to its potential more. If you have a squad ready for some challenging scenarios in a decent, albeit familiar, co-op shooter, then you could see yourself with an enjoyable few of hours on your hands.

If it wasn’t for the franchise backdrop, Aliens: Fireteam Elite would be just a basic horde shooter that becomes tiresome and repetitive unless you really want to grind to max out each of the characters and weapons. For a game that focuses on multiplayer, a mountain full of more effort could have went into quality of life improvements to make it a seamless shooter to gather friends online and shoot some Xeno’s. Game over man, GAME OVER.

While not bad enough to be nuked from orbit, Aliens: Fireteam Elite regrettably falls short of what I'd hoped for from the franchise, especially seven years on from Alien: Isolation, which remains the high watermark. A lack of atmosphere, tension, and interesting stuff to do beyond shooting things, makes for a somewhat disappointingly flat experience.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Aliens: Fireteam Elite and aside from a handful of bugs, the game shows promise of a solid third-person co-op survival game. The rich lore and stunning level design put it on par with other successful Alien titles in terms of presentation (if not in terms of being faithful to the source material with its hordes of papier-mâché Xenomorphs), and although there isn’t anything revolutionary about the gameplay, the experience itself feels well crafted. I hope to see some of the issues resolved in the near future, but can happily say that this isn’t just another game to toss on the Aliens failure heap.

If you squint, you could be playing Outriders—with less satisfying shooting, granted, but with a superior world grafted onto the action.