Aliens: Fireteam Elite Review
Game on, man.
Released a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—Winter 2014—Alien: Isolation was the first game to truly capture the essence of Ridley Scott’s original movie. We may have been playing as Ellen’s daughter, but Isolation was as authentic an adaptation of Ripley’s time on the Nostromo as we’ll ever see; a game which finally encapsulated the primordial horror of the Xenomorph and the deadly game of cat-and-mouse it played with Ripley. Fast forward seven years—ironically the same length of time that passed between the movies—and Cold Iron Studios’ Aliens: Fireteam Elite looks to similarly capture the essence of James Cameron’s action-packed 1986 sequel, Aliens.
I’m pleased to say it succeeds! At its best, Fireteam Elite triumphantly captures the white-knuckle mania of Cameron’s sequel, guaranteeing edge-of-your-seat firefights and an unholy number of Xenos to shred your way through. This isn’t quite the instant classic that Isolation became—its tight budget constraints leave it a limited but focused offering, and its player-base is somewhat dwindling months post-launch—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t damn good fun.
Taking the form of a cooperative, quasi-wave-based third-person shooter in the current trend of Left-4-Dead successors, Fireteam Elite pits up to three players against an unending swarm of glossy black Xenos, with some brief encounters with Seegson synthetics and other nasties for variety’s sake. Those budget constraints I mentioned show up quickly: NPC’s mouths stay clamped shut through dialogue, and a one-woman band of exposition delivers all mid-mission info so the marines can keep shtum outside of generic quips and hollers.
The missions themselves are the worst offenders for repetitive mission structure I’ve seen to date. Co-op shooters like this tend to rely on imaginative ways of mixing up activities to stave off monotony—think Left 4 Dead’s excellent crescendos—but you’ll find none of that here, each mission being almost completely identical in objective to the previous one, with almost no attempt to mask that fact. Oh, and the story is thinner than an android’s blood.
Thankfully Fireteam Elite gets away with all this thanks to what it gets right. Most fundamentally, the gunplay is thick and gratifying, meaning the swathes of slimy undesirables slithering your way are a joy to exterminate. Classes are great fun and all useful, if quite predictable (assault, heavy, support, medic, you know the drill), and some have access to unique weapons like flamethrowers. You can mould your marine to your liking, kitting them out with upgrades, buffs, weapons, and weapon mods, but calling it a ‘build’ is a push. While playing Gunner (assault), I ramped up my grenade and overclock abilities with cooldown buffs and radius enhancements, letting me engulf entire rooms of Xenos in flame from a single grenade. These kinds of fun but linear enhancements are exactly what to expect; there are no crazy mods that fundamentally alter the playstyle of a class, but new classes are on their way, and to be honest, I wasn’t playing Fireteam Elite for RPG-esque build diversity.
Crucially, Fireteam Elite is also fastidious about being an authentic Aliens experience. Listen to that classic phasing effect on the pulse rifle, watch how Xenos squirm out of vents like a morning’s worth of toothpaste, how their blood boils steel in their wake. Each chapter has its own distinct visual flare drawn from the franchise’s best moments, from gooey Xeno nests to derelict Promethean ruins, giving the impression of an Alien anthology that never outstays its welcome. The only thing missing is the marines grunting one-liners and bouncing off each other as they fight, something I found myself dearly missing by the tenth mission in a row with Little Miss Info-Dump chattering down the radio.
She’s less of a problem on higher difficulties—her comments barely register once you’re swimming in gore—but being forced to run through the campaign on standard first means the game’s shortcomings are highlighted for newcomers. The game’s design makes this necessary to level up and kit out your soldier for tastier fights down the line, but such a simple game surely doesn’t need so long an introduction to its systems. One level teaches you exactly what you need to know for the rest of the game, why drag it out? Letting more skilled players skip to higher difficulties may have kept the player base as high as it was on launch, and these higher difficulties, for me, were where the game came alive. On Expert and above I found the heart-in-mouth, frenetic bedlam the game was getting at, those moments where you’ve a sliver left of health, surrounded by Xenos big and small, holding out for last-minute extraction. This is where the game feels like Aliens incarnate, not on Standard.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite brings little new to its genre beside its namesake, but the strength of that franchise, brought to light by Cold Iron Studios’ steadfast adherence to the finer details of it, is enough to see it through. An exercise in rigorous focus, Fireteam Elite shoots for authenticity and raucous, white-knuckled fun at the complete expense of all else, and succeeds in both measures. This is an example of how a limited budget, spent wisely, can pay dividends.