Aliens: Fireteam Elite

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.