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Aliens: Fireteam Elite review – Frustrating, fiddly, fun

Aliens: Fireteam Elite has a very simple premise: a squad of three Colonial Marines are sent against countless hordes of xenos and the shooting doesn’t stop until one side is dead. As a “AA” title by developer Cold Iron Studios and publisher Focus Home Interactive some things have fallen through the cracks, but there’s still some fun to be had.

Reversing things back to the premise and Fireteam Elite is a third person horde shooter with a class system. The aforementioned three person team can actually only be one real person with AI Synthetics filling the cold, lonely gap of any missing friends.

Booting up the game for the first time and immediately things feel off. It’s difficult to put feeling into words but something about this game feels gritty and not as smooth as you’d like from the moment you take controls of your character.

If Fireteam Elite was a machine you’d be able to tell that there was some sand and rust in the gears and cogs. It’s not just a lack of polish but a sense of missing refinement in movement, menu navigation, shooting… everything really.

Characters move on the slower, clunky side and popping off some practice shots in the between mission hub reveals some oddities.

Aiming down sites, for example, completely messes with mouse sensitivity in a destructive way. While that may be intentional some things seem like outright bugs such as the game simply not taking inputs at times.

A very common problem we found is, when hip firing, your character will stop following mouse movements after a while. This happened consistently across multiple PCs and players so it’s not a player-specific issue. It’s a small thing but in the middle of a firefight, while you’re waving the stream of a flamethrower around in a panic, it can be a run ender.

All of that is just the first few minutes before actually jumping into a mission. Finally loading into a map and we’re impressed here with the level of detail the team at Cold Iron Studios has packed in here.

This looks and sounds like an authentic Alien experience with appropriate retro-futuristic space machinery contrasted against the xeno architecture and that good old H. R. Giger weirdness.

As you get deeper into the game you appreciate this more and more with environments a joy to look at. It’s leagues away from matching Alien: Isolation in this regard but the devs should be given a pat on the back for the hard work here.

The enemies you’ll be fighting share this level of detail in their look, but not their gameplay execution. As a horde shooter Fireteam Elite borrows heavily from genre tropes. Most of the time you’re fighting smaller aliens that can be taken out in a few shots, and every few minutes a bigger, tougher enemy will spawn that requires greater firepower and teamwork to take down.

There’s a tank alien that soaks up damage, a spitter that attacks from afar, a jumper that pins down enemies, you get the idea. If you’ve played one of these games before you will be familiar with the enemies here.

The frustration comes in the level design and you interact with it and the enemies. It’s long corridor, stop as some gubbin forces you to stand in place as the horde piles in, repeat. There’s almost zero mission differentiation or mix up to things and we found ourselves utterly exhausted with the game after less than an hour.

There’s also a cover system here that is pointless. 90 percent of the time you need to be standing out in the open to best take on enemies so we’re a bit puzzled as to why it was even included. Most of the time taking cover means being less mobile and being swarmed by the enemy.

Tied to combat is progression. Player classes and weapons level individually and this severely hampers variety and the joy of unlocking new content.

To keep up with the escalating threat of the aliens players need to have higher levels to compensate, but if you switch to a new class or a new weapon you’re starting from scratch.

It’s very clear that the developers intend for you to go back and reply missions to grind, something that we’ve always disliked in games. Instead of progression being natural and fun to go through, it becomes a slog.

After figuring this out a couple of hours into our playthrough we decided to just stick to the early weapons and class we picked at the beginning and rock that until the credits rolled. This was a successful strategy but every time a new unlock popped up we felt a pang of missing out as we knew switching over would mean mindless grinding or going into later missions with a lesser chance of survival.

This is a real slap in the face as you see or hear about other classes and their weapons, knowing that it would take hours of playing the same content to get them. Then a second slap as it’s revealed that the last player class is locked behind finishing the main storyline. Bleh.

Adding some variety to this is the challenge card systems. Cards are game modifiers that can either make missions easier in exchange for lesser rewards, or bump up the difficulty for a greater pay out.

We liked this system only as a way to help us level up with the team saving up bonus XP and money cards for replaying simple missions and bagging better loot. The challenge cards are one time use so these need to be managed.

The cards seem like a band aid to address repetition and difficulty, putting the onus on the player to adjust things when the developer couldn’t.

Then there are the technical aspects here. We experienced several bugs such as objectives glitching out and becoming impossible to complete, UI elements freaking out, severe framerate drops (on PC), buttons not working when pressed and more.

These are less important than quality of life details. Certain elements of the game are painful to look at with flamethrowers absolutely blinding friendlies when used in close proximity. Certain placement of enemies are also a problem with the developers simply being jerks about it. Coming around a corner and losing half your health to a swarm of sentry guns isn’t fun, neither is enemies clipping through walls to pin you to the ground or their animations looking exceedingly goofy as they fly across the room for a cheap shot.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is brought down by a thousand cuts. So many small design choices, bugs and odd decisions create a game that can be fun when all the stars align, but is mostly middling to frustrating most of the time. It also makes it difficult to recommend at its normal price and it’s a very hard no for the even more expensive Deluxe Edition.

The perfect environment for this game is a decent sale picked up on a Friday afternoon and blasted through with two friends over the weekend. Once Monday rolls around it gets uninstalled and most people won’t remember it by the time next Friday rolls around.

More people are asking for shorter experiences and decrying 100 plus hour games, so this can fill the niche of decent enough horde shooter for fans of the genre who have played everything else and can deal with the problems and foibles mentioned above.

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