REVIEW: ALIENS: FIRETEAM ELITE 2

This time it’s … still war.

Cold Iron Studios

By Patrick Greene

According to Google, the original Aliens: Fireteam Elite came out FIVE YEARS AGO. I’m still grappling with this fact, just as much as I’m grappling with figuring out where the colon goes in Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2’s title.

The OG Fireteam (often abbreviated FTE in fan circles) was a decidedly arcadey squad-based shooter that, after a slow launch, eventually found a dedicated player base (especially after crossplay was added a year or so after it came out). The servers stayed relatively active for a few years, thanks in part to its low entry price (a very reasonable $39.99 in the US) and frequent sales.

I personally enjoyed FTE quite a bit when it came out; I had some lovely evenings with friends blasting wave after wave of enemies. My kids got into the game too, and the three of us had lots of fun taking turns on the PS5 (although couch co-op would’ve been nice). After a few months, the game’s format started to get a little stale and I moved on to other things, but I’ve always had a soft spot for FTE.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2’s release has been a little … odd. We never received a review code, and no reviews were posted ahead of release anywhere. I assume this was due to an embargo, but the game’s been out for about seven hours as I’m writing this and I’m still seeing barely any release coverage or reviews anywhere. Was the game just not available to anyone ahead of time?

It’s also absolutely worth noting that this sequel costs so much more than the original did. In the United States, the basic edition is $49.99. The “40th Anniversary Premium Edition” costs $69.99—almost seventy dollars?!—and appears to only add some cosmetic items to the base game. The game also launched day one with all sorts of downloadable content locked behind a paywall. I still can’t figure out if the DLC weapons are skins, actual new items, or upgrades, and I can’t figure out if they are unlockable via game progression without having to pay extra money for them.

These are the sorts of things I’d likely have better answers to had we been given early access to the game, but I digress.

With all that out of the way, let’s see if all this extra cost amounts to anything.

What’s New

The big thing here is the extra squad member. The original FTE had a three-person squad; this sequel introduces a fourth. If you’re playing with AI companions, this means Alpha and Beta get a new pal named Gamma. With a cowboy hat! In terms of squad layouts, this fourth spot opens up quite a lot of possibilities—especially when taking into account the new character class called the Specialist, which allows you to borrow abilities from other classes. The Specialist is unlockable after you’ve sufficiently leveled up the other classes though, so you’re gonna have to work for it.

Unless that’s also a paid DLC option in the future?

Having four active team members (unless, you know, one of you is crawling around and/or dead) means there’s considerably more chaos on the screen. Luckily we have 15 new levels to explore, and they’ve supposedly been designed to allow more space for maneuvering with that fourth squad member.

The character classes are also slightly different in FTE2. I haven’t had enough time with the game to fully explore how different they are; I will say it’s fun being a Marauder and just blowing things up with your backpack rocket every thirty seconds, though.

In a massive shock, it appears Cold Iron figured out how to animate faces so the characters you’re interacting with in FTE2 are able to speak through non-telepathy. One of the funniest elements of the original was that you were constantly having to have one-on-one conversations with NPCs, but the NPCs just stared into your soul while a voiceover narrated what they were saying. Those dialog moments in FTE2 are certainly more natural, and the characters still have quite a bit of charm, but the story is still basically incomprehensible to me. I’ll be honest, I have zero idea what the plot was of the first game. I’m sure I could look it up somewhere, but I haven’t felt compelled to. The “plot” in FTE mostly just felt like an excuse to have to send you down to go find someone/something while mowing down hundreds upon hundreds of enemies.

The story in FTE2 seems (so far—I’m only a few hours in) to be considerably more involved. And by “involved,” I mean you have to click through more exposition-dump screens while you’re just waiting to go back down to blow up aliens on a planetoid.

I know Cold Iron worked with 20th Century on new creature designs. So far, I haven’t found any. Perhaps they’re later in the game?

You can crouch now, so that’s pretty sweet! And there’s a wonderful new tabling system that I’ve come to really appreciate, so you can use the environment more strategically.

WHAT’S OLD

Everything. The game is old, old, old. It looks like they recycled so many assets from the first one. I was hoping they’d take advantage of this game being exclusively current-gen (the first one, remember, also came out on PS4 etc.) and really re-engineer the graphics, environments, user interfaces, etc. To my untrained eye, it looks and performs very similarly to the first game. The in-game models and environments might look a little cleaner.

The combat, aside from the tabling and the crouching, feels the same. That’s not a bad thing! Combat was a strong point of the original game. You can still “feel” your weapon’s magazine inching towards empty with the immersive sound design and haptics, and you can still trigger your character’s unique bonus abilities easily via in-game menus and button assignments.

WHAT WORKS

Austin Wintory’s score was such a highlight of the first game, and I’m so happy to say it once again shines in the sequel. It’s orchestral and it’s artful and it’s just everything I want in Alien game scoring. It feels of a piece with Goldsmith/Horner/Goldenthal without feeling like it’s aping any of them. Just wonderful work.

The squad mechanics are still tight and nicely balanced. The weapons feel solid, the upgrade trees are fun to figure out, and you can spend hours messing around with cosmetic items (including many loving references to Aliens).

The basic premise of the game is still very solid: a great way to have fun with friends for a couple of hours. With just enough story to feel like there’s (at least kind of) a reason you keep getting sent down to blow things up, enough weapons to have a good time with, etc.

Of course, you’ll need to convince those friends to pay FIFTY DOLLARS for a game that doesn’t add very much to the one that came out in 2021. The first game’s campaign took maybe six hours to finish. The replayability of course adds to its value, but once the servers started getting quiet it became a lot less exciting to log back in and grind with Alpha and Beta. At $39.99, that amount of content feels OK to me. But unless this sequel is much larger, $50 is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of “casuals.”

WHAT DOESN’T

Unfortunately, a game like this absolutely NEEDS a dedicated playerbase to survive. The original game found a very small, passionate niche of core gamers who kept it alive. This sequel is more expensive, has microtransactions, doesn’t add very much, doesn’t feel very different, and makes the exact same mistakes its predecessor did.

What mistakes? For me, the biggest one is how repetitive the missions begin to feel. You might be doing slightly different things—collecting intel, rescuing someone, blowing up a hive—but the mechanic of essentially every level ends up being identical. You are deployed, you run through a bunch of hallways shooting occasional enemies, you enter an arena area where you have to deal with a couple waves, you press the Action button for five or ten seconds (gathering the intel, rescuing someone, blowing up the hive), then you go through hallways, shoot enemies, enter an arena, shoot enemies, press the Action button again, run through hallways …

Then after THIRTY MINUTES you finally get to the end of the level, which is typically an evac where you just shoot hundreds of xenos and/or synthetics so the lander can touch down.

And yes, these individual missions have been taking me around thirty minutes to complete. Perhaps I just suck at this game, but I’m playing on Standard and not dying too much. I think they take about that long. If a game is really well designed—if it’s surprising, and nuanced, and the AI really pushes you—that’s a great thing! I love long sections of games where the tension is high and the stakes are great. But after a couple of deaths early on, I started to feel a sense of “Oh man, I have to do all that again?”

And “all that” is, of course, running through hallways, shooting enemies, entering an arena, shooting enemies, pressing the Action button … you get my drift.

All this is to say FTE2 commits the cardinal sin a game like this can commit: it becomes boring. I haven’t played with actual friends yet, just strangers on the PS network and my pals Alpha/Beta/Cowpoke Gamma, and I’m sure that will add to the fun. I’m actually excited to do that, and I’ll absolutely come back to update this review if the game ends up growing on me. But even if that’s the case: there will come a day when the servers will quiet down, and people will have moved on, and I’ll have to ask myself “Do I want to play FTE2 tonight?”

Unfortunately, as of now I think the answer to that would be “no.”

Finally, the game has bugs. I know this is somewhat expected on release day, but some of them are horrendous. A particular issue I was running into was some of the audio log entries were so loud they were literally clipping on my audio system. Then, when an in-game character had something to say about what they’d just heard, their voice would be nearly inaudibly quiet. There are also numerous physics and AI glitches, like a xeno humping a railing and a synth humping a door. I haven’t seen a xeno humping a synth yet. We’ll have to wait and see.

Would I normally let technical issues go on release day? Maybe. But when you jack the price of a game up, launch with pay-to-unlock content, don’t let any of us fans/reviewers get early access to help hype the game (or offer feedback!), etc., I’m going to be harsher than usual.

I do love Gamma’s cowboy hat, though.

Rating: 5/10

Me getting cranky writing this review.

Cold Iron Studios

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ROSS YOST (@rossperminute)

Aliens Fireteam Elite 2 builds off a great foundation that the first installment gave us. FTE2 gives us cooler weapons, thoughtfully designed marine classes, gorgeous lighting, and plenty of tense moments fighting off hoards of space's most terrifying monster. Cold Iron places us 28 years after the events of Alien 3 and 5 years after the first installment. You dive right in investigating a distress call from Storr's Boon mining colony, but this time you'll have an additional character in your squad.

When you encounter your first cluster of xenomorphs, you immediately notice they are more intelligent than the creatures from the first game. They move more naturally and seem to have a more random and not predefined path as they attempt to eliminate both you and your squad-mates. Therefore, the combat feels more intense and can quickly escalate into chaos if you are not prepared. Understanding your character's perks and abilities is key to preventing your downfall. I chose the Marauder class to start with as I tend to lean towards heavy DPS-style characters. The titan rockets are extremely satisfying when clearing out an area and the blast cannon came in handy plenty of times when xenos started to overpower the groups control of the situation.

I wanted to experience the game first alone to see how it felt just playing with my fellow synths Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. While they are fairly capable in combat, they feel like very empty synth characters. There's no dialogue or banter between you and them during the missions and they follow you like pets instead of fellow soldiers. Clearly, Cold Iron intends for you to join your friends while experiencing this game.

I didn't experience many issues with bugs in the game aside from some very minor stutters here and there and some odd audio balance moments, but I did think I was going to have to restart the first prologue mission at one point. While recalibrating the atmosphere processor, I was instructed to stay in a room while the gas outside was present and noticed a ping on my motion tracker. While we had managed to kill a huge wave of xenomorphs, there was one that was off screen that must have gotten stuck somewhere. I waited nearly two minutes before it resolved and disappeared, allowing me to continue the mission. While the game ran pretty smooth for me, I can't help but wonder if this release date was rushed a bit. Hopefully a patch soon will hunt down some of these bugs.

One thing that was sorely missing in the first game was a well-thought-out story and characters that felt real. FTE2 improves on that some but I'm still left wanting more. The animation and cutscenes to start the game are fine, but the other characters you meet on the Endeavor feel very one-dimensional. The reply options you frequently get in conversations with these characters is a decent addition even if it may not make a difference in how the story plays out. However, I feel that Cold Iron is missing a key component when designing these games. Story matters in the Alien saga! Repeating lines from Aliens is fun and blasting away with your pulse rife or smart gun is satisfying, but at the end of the day I want a story that surprises me and keeps me thinking after I've turned off my PC.

At the end of the day, I'm really enjoying FTE2. The weapons and combat feels smooth and there are plenty of satisfying ways to mow down our acid-blooded enemies, but I think relying on repeated lines and more colonial marines role playing is getting a bit worn out. The addition of Mondo, Romulus, and Ripley gear and content is a nice hit of nostalgia and I'm thankful it was available on release. The return of Austin Wintory as the composer for the game is also very much exciting. Wintory continues to compose music that evokes feelings of Aliens while not seeming to repeat what made that music so impactful and special. The continued use of wind instruments that echo themes from the prequels will always be welcomed with open arms. The score of the game is one of its strongest components. I'm hoping for more content as the months progress to keep people coming back to play. I want more that just going from point A to point B to activate a switch and fighting off waves. There's more to Aliens than just combat. At the moment, I'd score this game a 3.5 out of 5.