Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 lets you mow down waves of Xenomorphs again | gameplay preview

I had a chance to preview Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, the new co-op and solo survival shooter game set within the Alien universe. It’s a frenetic shooter in the extraction genre, and it should be great fun to play with friends who enjoy mowing down waves of enemies.

The third-person shooter game is coming out on August 25 from Daybreak Game Company, a publisher of massively multiplayer online games and emergent gameplay, and Cold Iron Studios, the San Jose-based game studio composed of veteran action and shooter developers. The title is a collaboration with 20th Century Games.

The game is being released on August 25 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Epic Games Store, and Steam for $50 for standard and $70 for a premium edition; it’s coming for Nintendo Switch 2 this fall.

You use your firepower against waves of Xenomorphs in Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2. Source: Daybreak Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is a sequel to the Aliens: Fireteam Elite title from 2021. That title sold an estimated one million copies and it had three-player co-op multiplayer. There were a dozen missions across four campaigns.

The new game has up to four players playing in co-op. You play as Colonial Marines deployed to the most hostile corners of the Alien universe. It’s a constant a fight for survival. Xenomorphs stalk the corridors, ambush from the shadows, and swarm in overwhelming numbers.

You have to coordinate with your fireteam, leverage each class’s unique abilities, and make sure you don’t all run out of ammo at the same time. It has deeper squad mechanics, smarter enemies, and a fully customizable specialist class.

Try not to have this happen in Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2. Source: Daybreak The mission takes you to a colony world that has gone dark and sent a distress call for help due to a Xenomorph infestation. It’s a bunch of scientists working for the Weyland-Yutani Corp., and their research isn’t what you would call human-friendly.

One fireteam, Banshee, has already gone in, led by Ko. You have to establish contact with Ko and find out what’s happened to her team. In the prologue, you have to find Ko and figure out how to find other members of her team as she is evacuated.

You have four members of the team and you can level up various capabilities and customize your equipment.

You can pick up credits to use in the store and open boxes of ammo and grenades. But the pathway forward is pretty scripted. You have to go through open doors and cut open the ones that are closed. It’s fairly easy to take the enemies out when they are coming down a corridor. But it gets more complex as they come out of the ceiling and crawl on the walls.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/k1CiInaOQZ8?feature=oembed You generally have enough room to maneuver, pulling back when you have to reload and moving around to catch them as they come down different pathways. But it gets truly difficult and even scary when they come at you from all directions in large rooms. There are plenty of those at the beginning of the game, and there also dead-end last-stand rooms where you have to fight waves of enemies.

The good thing is that you’re both vulnerable and powerful at the same time. You have to face off against bigger aliens who are more like mini-bosses who take extra firepower to bring down. And you can take the fight to the Xenomorphs by attacking their nests. You have lethal flame and rocket weapons that you can fire on a timer when the situation gets too hairy.

In solo play, I found the three bots fighting alongside me did a decent job reviving me whenever I went down. But there’s a limit to how much they can revive you. You have to restart at a checkpoint if you go down for good. But that’s OK, as the checkpoints don’t set you too far back. You can take down a lot of fast-moving Xenomorphs at once, which is very different from the all-powerful creatures you see in the movies. These ones take a few shots and then they’re down. But I’m mostly referring to the easy ones. The mini-bosses are taller and harder to bring down. That’s when it pays to use your flame and rocket weapons.

By the second mission, you encounter Synths, the AI-driven robots that aren’t really on anyone’s side except those who program them. You have to concentrate more firepower on the Synths to bring each one down, but their heads tend to explode after a few shots. The second mission is a multi-part journey where it’s easy to die and then have to start over. So you have to be careful, particularly in the endless final battles.

This game is priced at $50, or $10 more than the previous game. That makes sense in part due to inflation and rising costs, and there’s also more here than the previous game had, with an extra co-op team member and deeper progression.

The power fantasy of Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2. Source: Daybreak On the negative side, the graphics aren’t as big a leap forward as you would hope from five years ago. The interactivity of the environment is also fairly limited. It looks like many of the assets are used over and over again and rearranged in different spaces. I expect more out of an Unreal Engine 5 game, but I understand this is also made with a small team. On top of that, there’s a fundamental trade-off between speed and quality here. And the arcade-like death rattles of the enemies seems necessary just to keep the speed up.

Mainly due to the state of graphics, I view this more as a double-A game, rather than a triple-A title. That’s probably a smart target that contains the costs of development, but it leaves the player desiring more. The effect is more like an arcade game, rather than a hyperrealistic simulation and a horror game with atmospheric terror. In that sense, it’s not Alien: Isolation.

You have to make sure you don’t run out of ammo in Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2. Source: Daybreak What is good about the game is the stability I’ve seen so far. It hasn’t crashed on me. It is a fast game where Xenomorphs charge at you. On the standard level, it’s a bit too easy to take the Xenomorphs down, but it is good that you don’t bog down killing one enemy while a half dozen are running at you. The Xenomorphs are deadlier, smarter and come in more types.

When you bring down the enemies, they tend to fall in a predictable way. Occasionally, one will get pinned to the ceiling and hang from it, and that gives you a more realistic feel to fighting waves of aliens. When one enemy brings you down, another team member can revive you.

The game has a new roster of character classes alongside the specialist class that allows you to mix and match types. There’s deep weapon customization, stun batons, and elemental ammo types like pyro and electric.

The game has a story-driven campaign that you can play solo with three bots at your side, and it has Horde Mode maps where the enemies come in waves.

There are new kinds of weapons in Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2. Source: Daybreak This game is a good example of a double-A title that could find a solid audience at a time when people are growing tired of formulaic brand-based sequels. Fighting endless waves of Xenomorphs is an exhilarating gameplay approach and good match for the IP.

But it’s not going to be a triple-A game. It doesn’t have absolutely stunning graphics, and the interactivity with the environment isn’t perfect. But the game gives you a real sense of fear. When you are surrounded and running out of ammo or trying to open a door and the waves are coming after you, it gets hairy and scary. After finishing the tough battles, I feel a sense of relief, and my whole body is sweaty and I have to go into a recovery mode.

For the most part, this game does a good job of feeding more content to the fans for the previous game, but it’s not necessarily going to stand out for a long time with the waves of games that we have coming this fall. I hope the game gets enough traction to stand up against the horde of rival games coming after customers’ wallets.

Disclosure: I played the game on Steam on a Falcon Northwest PC with a Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card and a 27-inch Sony InZone monitor M10S II gaming monitor. The gaming PC and display kept up with the game, with performance with a QHD 540Hz refresh rate and rapid 0.02ms response time.

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