Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 Review

The Aliens franchise has seen a bevy of games, ranging from survival, to shooters, to even a real-time strategy game. Carried largely by the hype and the name, even mediocre games can still be decent by simply drawing on the name. With such a strong headwind, then, how does the latest from Cold Iron Studios stack up? If Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 can be summed up in a single word, it would be “disjointed”.

Continuing off the story of the last game, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 sees players picking different gunner classes, changing load-outs or items, then entering into levels where they must shoot their way through hundreds of aliens. It doesn’t promise or strive to be anything more than a fun squad shooter, so on that, its merits must be judged. Even granting this, though, there are a lot of cracks in the armour.

Playing through AFE2, one largely starts to feel how all over the place the experience is. What becomes increasingly clear is how much they needed a director or lead to help tie everything together, as there are far too many parts that don’t jive coherently in the slightest. The game presents some very interesting class customisation, which is a highlight of the game, mixed with repetitious gameplay, all next to thinly-veiled political commentary that detracts from the experience.

On the face of it, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 still feels like it should be in a beta or “early access” stage, as there is just too much that feels slipshod for how high of a price it is selling for. The stages seem woefully empty; endless metal corridors with the occasional box or dead synth thrown in for “decoration”. It is really stunning when compared to, say, the Dead Space series, which is over 10 years older, how much more atmosphere any single room has. Level design is abysmal; there are solo dev indie games where the rooms have more life than this.

Luckily the story is fairly short, because the dialogue is painful and where a lot of political overtones seem forced onto players. It’s a constant array of tiny barbs, from a lack of diversity of having a single relevant male character in the plot, to a verbal lashing the player receives for misidentifying a synthetic character. It really breaks immersion that the marines are supposed to be fighting humanity’s greatest threat, but these transgressions are even more important than that. It feels petty to drive home such a random point while trying to fight a killer monster.

Gameplay is a mixed bag, but by far the best part is the class system. Cold Iron Studios has revamped the system from the first one, making classes deeper than before. The starting class, for example, runs the typical pulse rifle and shotgun, but now has a recharging energy rifle and grenade launcher. There is a hunter class capable of freezing a target, the smartgunner class, and a medic class capable of buffs and healing. Even in these classes, players can build them slightly different, such as changing the energy rifle into a shotgun.

The problem, though, is the gameplay becomes very repetitious. One of the issues is a design decision to make the game very wave-based (no different than the first, but a far cry from the source material), which makes every level feel like the last. Get to the next checkpoint, get attacked by 50 aliens, kill them, move on. It makes the aliens feel like not much of a threat and more like StarCraft Marines blowing through waves of zerglings rather than a scary enemy.

One other problem is that, despite the praise for the class system, excluding some very specific points, all the classes and weapons feel the same. There is next to no stun or pushback, so aliens just charge the firing line and run forward until they fall down dead. Despite the energy rifle, it’s “just another weapon” and doesn’t feel any different. Combat is floaty and non-responsive. With such little feedback, it leads to constant situations where players will randomly get killed by some buffed or elite alien that charges through the bullets to knock players down.

There are simply too many parts that are not that good or complete to recommend. Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 comes in at a heavy price, without any of the quality expected of it. There are a lot of little things that drag it down, but ultimately people are here for the combat and it’s simply too repetitious to stay long term.