While many horror fans would say the history of the Alien film franchise is a bit scattershot, its video game efforts are perhaps even more erratic. One of the series’ low points is Aliens: Colonial Marines, a 2013 Gearbox shooter that failed to do just about anything right, and its lasting blemish on the IP have left this summer’s Aliens Fireteam Elite with some skepticism from fans.
Distancing itself from the survival horror aspects of the beloved Alien Isolation, Fireteam Elite is much more akin to Colonial Marines, but after several hours with a good portion of the game, it feels like a much more competent shooter, albeit maybe still a curious use of the franchise.
In teams of three, players using their own customized avatars will star in Cameron-style Aliens action setpieces. The game wants you to play in co-op, but it will always fill out a team with one or two somewhat helpful AI companions as needed. The first campaign takes place aboard a spaceship not unlike those we’ve seen in the movies for decades and Cold Iron Studios nails the look in a way that immediately excites me. Analog computers and their scrawling green text, Working Joes ominously hibernating in their docking stations, and ample vents built into the framework of this first campaign’s spaceship setting make for a familiar and faithful scene.
It’s moody, but it’s quickly apparent this isn’t going to offer the slow-crawling tension of Scott’s original movie. In just seconds after I exited the starting area, I was greeted by hordes of xenomorphs. Most of the time, they were a basic type, with a slightly smaller frame and spawning in packs of a dozen or more. There were other types too, like a suiciding xeno that gets in close and explodes on players like an H.R. Giger-branded homing missile. Another spit its famous acid spit from a distance. Another stalked from behind corners or overhead and pounced on players, demanding they complete a QTE unless their teammates can assist.
The archetypes sound familiar, no doubt. The easy comparison to make for what Aliens Fireteam Elite plays like is – you guessed it – Left 4 Dead. I play a lot of games of that lineage, and admittedly I do grow wary (and even weary) of making the comparison when it can feel like low-hanging fruit, but sometimes the inspiration is too obvious to ignore. Fireteam Elite wants to be relentless, and in that regard, it succeeds. The past decade of Left 4 Dead-likes have passed or failed largely based on their ability to deliver proper pacing. Too much too fast, and it can feel pray-and-spray, but too few enemies mean failing to keep players on their toes.
Fireteam Elite betrays its franchise’s well-established rules of how even a single xenomorph is a catastrophic threat in favor of throwing hundreds of aliens at teams level by level. While this aspect is awkward and hard to ignore for the series’ purists, I was able to look past it once I saw how well-rounded Fireteam Elite is as a modern shooter.
Shooting from third-person feels great in Fireteam Elite, with optional waist-high cover available all over, though I didn’t find too much use in it, given how the aliens swarm from all over most of the time. Characters are split into classes, each given their own secondary items that use cooldown timers to reload. There’s even an emote menu with a few that are already incongruous with the typical Alien universe — is now the best time for a dance-off? Fireteam Elite is a modern co-op shooter first and foremost, and an Alien game second, and a deep menu of unlockable perks, attachments, weapons, and cosmetics reveal a long tail for this game once it launches in a few weeks. I think, ultimately, people coming to the game as merely Alien fans will need to squint to appreciate it as a part of their cherished franchise.
It’s going to take some appreciation for the genre, not just the familiar monsters roaming the ducts, but anyone who does enjoy both, as I do, I think they’ll quickly get sucked into the game’s reward dispersal schedule. It feels like pass or fail on any given mission, you’re always unlocking something new – or just about to, teasing you to go back in for another round. One of my favorite features is a perk system that demands players shuffle equipped bonuses like a puzzle akin to Resident Evil‘s inventory interface. I had several perks I earned, a few more I bought with the game’s free currency, and it was fun trying to squeeze them into my build like Tetris.
This is as unlike Alien Isolation as Aliens is to Alien, but Cold Iron overcomes skepticism with strong core mechanics, levels rich in homage despite a jarringly different pace, and an upgrade tree with countless branches for all types of players. It won’t be a game dedicated to its source material, but with about a month until launch, it feels like it could be a fun co-op shooter that just happens to have some famous aliens clawing at you and your teammates.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite preview code for PC provided by the publisher.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite is out August 24, 2021, for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Steam.