Aliens: Fireteam Elite review: Finally, co-op action worthy of this franchise

2013’s Aliens: Colonial Marines was arguably the last huge video game to focus on the “Aliens with an S” side of all things xenomorphic. Between flashy trailers and Gearbox’s reputation at the time, series fans got their hopes up that the 1986 James Cameron film would finally inspire a modern shooter worth a loud oorah. Not so much.

This week, the letter S returns to PCs and game consoles with far lower expectations in the form of Aliens: Fireteam Elite. And I gotta say, this three-player co-op romp’s success makes me angry about Colonial Marines all over again.While losing hours to this new game’s faithful, no-frills fun, I imagined Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford sitting next to me. Between missions, I would ask him why his development teams couldn’t surpass a little-known indie studio’s slimmed-down excuse to rev up machine guns and flamethrowers with friends.

Still, a genuinely fun Aliens game is better late than never. And this is much better.

No need to swear on a Covenant

To be fair, Aliens: Fireteam Elite starts with milder aspirations. This game barely crawls past its $40 price tag in terms of included content and variety—albeit with all the production value and series-appropriate bombast you might hope for. And nothing here suggests a cinema-caliber Aliens entry with famous cameos and Cameron-caliber set pieces. (Worth noting: Stabs at such nostalgia don’t always work out for the Aliens-verse, so maybe that’s a point in Cold Iron Studios’ favor.)

Instead, AFE opens with a single cut scene suggesting that Marines have been assigned some unpleasant clean-up duties involving Weyland-Yutani, decades after the original trilogy concluded. From there, you create a generic Marine, pick from four soldier classes, listen to canon-filled mission briefings, and get to work.

That work will look familiar to anyone who’s played modern co-op shooters like Left 4 Dead. Squads of three marines, played by either friends or AI, must march through dimly lit environments, all pockmarked with a staggering number of vents and crawl holes—no Weyland-Yutani carpenters on duty?—and kill monsters on their way from point A to point Z. This all happens via third-person combat in pre-built levels, which range from chrome-plated industrial base interiors to lush, Prometheus-like excavations on planets.

Xenos and Joes: quantity over quality, with solid “supers” in the mix

The first thing that stands out is how AFE funnels players into an endorphin hit of tight, authentic combat against diabolical, swarming xenos. [Editor’s note: “Xenos” as shorthand for the Alien series’ most famous monsters is a contentious topic, we know.] The game immediately fills your ears with a full-orchestra score, serviceable radio chatter, familiar tracker beeps, and ominous 3D-mapped sounds of xeno skittering. The environs, as rendered in Unreal Engine 4, are bathed in tantalizing lighting—the kind that typically carves any path or hallway with alternating slivers of bright highlights and shadowy contrast.

And the xenos themselves are appropriately terrifying. They operate in a quantity-over-quality philosophy, since this is Aliens we’re talking about. Each of the game’s four classes are equipped to mow down waves of advancing xenos in relatively short order. The enemies’ first edge is their ability to appear from all sides, typically in formations that pop out of holes in walls and ceilings from all directions, and they crawl in your direction in a compelling show-of-force manner. AFE‘s xeno animation cycles are on target, and it’s awesome to watch them gecko-sneak across every surface imaginable. The game’s worst visual aspect is that xenos are bathed in a yellow highlight if aimed at. This looks unbecoming in screenshot form, but in the midst of swarm-filled combat, it quickly becomes essential.

Much like Left 4 Dead, AFE mixes its weaker xenos up with a few “supers,” and these come with a mix of stronger exoskeleton “shields,” distant acid-spitting powers, explode-upon-death abilities, and sneaky tackle-and-pin attacks. I would have liked to see Cold Iron Studios get more wiggle room to create a few more “magical” or atypical super xenos, but the variety here is still pretty solid.

Things really ramp up on an enemy level once Weyland Yutani’s line of creepy Working Joe androids enters the mix. At first, Joes appear in relatively underwhelming fashion, since their dumbest grunts hang back as easily sniped cannon fodder. Eventually, Cold Iron’s level design delivers some fantastic battling choke points where Joes will converge on your position from one side, while xenos surround you from the other. By this point, the Joe side of combat has been spiced up with its own “supers”—rush-and-explode grunts, shield-holding brutes, flamethrowing guards, and pesky snipers.

Occasionally, when both kinds of baddies converge, the xenos and Joes will focus on each other. This is always delightful stuff to see in action, but the laughs don’t last, since enough bad guys are appearing by this point in a fight to target your squad, as well.

Decent depth in classes, tactics, and badges

Surviving AFE‘s difficulty spikes often boils down to how well you and your squadmates juggle your slate of tactical abilities. Even upon first boot, the differentiation between the game’s four classes feels solid, and this only gets better the longer you play the game.

The above gallery breaks down the four classes, which will look familiar to anyone who’s played an online team-battling game or MMO in the past 15 years. There’s an all-around commando, a gadget specialist, a medic, and a heavy. Some classes have weapon overlap, but generally, each has its own unique loadout path, and each has at least one powerful, punchy weapon to focus on. Medics can still pitch in significantly by leaning on a slow-and-powerful pistol like a magnum, while the sheer brutality of the Demolisher’s auto-rifle and flamethrower is balanced by how ammo-intensive those are.

Even the weakest machine gun is fun to shoot, at least, thanks to sound design that lifts the guns’ classic pitch-shifty sound from the original films. You know it when you hear it: that vacuum cleaner-like warble, ringing in higher frequencies while splats, screams, and ‘splosions fill the rest of the air. Beyond weapons, each class has rechargeable abilities, and many of these either activate temporary bonuses for your squadmates or benefit from teammates maintaining physical proximity. Your squad should generally stick together, lest a xeno split the party, but “get back here so my meter recharges faster” is a nifty, organic nudge to keep that attitude in players’ minds.

As you rack up experience points in each class, AFE opens up a slate of upgrade opportunities. Instead of skill trees, AFE offers a series of “badges” that can be affixed to each class’s ability screen. These appear in a physical grid, in such a way that they must touch other badges to activate and don’t necessarily fit perfectly together. This results in some spicy “ugh, not quite perfect” decisions to make in tuning each class. And the more you play, the more this combination of badge variety and grid size expands, thus letting you further dial in your preferred playstyle as you come to terms with you and your teammates’ combat preferences.