When movie sequels do mostly the same thing as the original, audiences tend not to like it. When a sequel gets bolder, like how Aliens took the universe in a bold new direction and became one of the most beloved sequels of all time as a result, people remember it forever. And while we all appreciate radical new ideas in game sequels, if a game lands on an awesome formula, we’re often perfectly happy when sequels merely build and layer on top of that great core gameplay and give us more of what we already love (Portal 2 being perhaps the all-time Hall of Fame example of this).
Based on my initial hands-on time with Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, the sequel to the PvE third-person co-op shooter that pit you and up to two friends against countless Xenomorphs – including some special varieties that had unique ways of making your life a living Hell – it’s looking like it’s heading down the “iterating on what we already love” road, but that’s OK. More than OK, in fact. Fireteam Elite 2 is adding exactly what you probably want to its proven-fun formula: a fourth player on your team along with smarter Xenomophs and more types of them.
I played the first mission within the first campaign twice – both times in four-player teams with the developers. You can try to survive this nightmare solo if you like, but it’s not recommended. Anyway, the prologue mission sets up the story, with returning ally Ko in trouble on the planet surface below. You begin each mission on your orbiting ship, the USS Endeavor, where you can acquire new weapons, choose your mission, talk to your crewmates, etc.
It’s here you can customize your character and choose your class. Regarding the former, I was able to make a reasonable facsimile of myself, and though I did think while I was in the character creator that I wish I had some more options to more closely recreate myself, once I was actually in the game I only ever saw the back of my character’s head on account of the third-person perspective, so any mild disappointment in the customization options melted away.
Class Is in Session
And then there’s the latter: your class. The core five should seem mostly familiar: Duelist, Machinist, Marauder, Hunter, and the one I chose, the Medic (aka Doc). But then there’s a new sixth class: the Specialist. This one is the a la carte buffet that allows you to choose any weapons and any abilities you’ve unlocked from any of the other classes to create a unique custom soldier. As Doc, I had two initial skills – a deployable device that would slowly heal anyone inside its radius as well as an adrenaline burst that gave me and any teammates near me a damage boost for a short period of time. Both are on a reasonably generous cooldown.
Speaking of generous, difficulty levels return, allowing you to tailor your Xenomorph-induced stress level. The developers I played with set us on Normal, but as with the first game, higher difficulty levels turn friendly fire on, meaning you’ll have to be especially careful with your formations and where your bullets are going. Thankfully, a crouch button has been added, allowing particularly well-coordinated teams to take advantage of the new strategies this unlocks. I had a pretty easy time of it during both runs through the Prologue mission on Normal difficulty, but then again, I was playing with people who literally designed everything I was experiencing – not to mention that it was only the very first mission in the opening campaign! The difficulty no doubt ramps up significantly as you progress.
Getting back to my class, I gravitated towards Doc because, though I’ve played a decent bit of the original Fireteam Elite, I obviously hadn’t played any of the sequel, and it has admittedly been a few years since I last fired up the first one. I wanted to be useful to my team even in the event my combat skills didn’t match those of my exponentially more experienced developer teammates, and sure enough, I had a fantastic time and felt useful while healing everyone and providing the occasional Adrenaline boost. My default machine gun and shotgun weren’t particularly memorable (unlike, say, the Marauder’s classic auto-targeting Smart Gun), but the shotgun in particular felt satisfying to use.
Looking Sharp
Fortunately, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 isn’t too far away for a game that only just got announced this month; it’s due out this summer, which could (but probably doesn’t) mean June or it could mean September. No matter where it lands, you won’t have to wait too long to get your hands on it. Still, it’s a game that’s not done, but even in my hands-on (playing on my gaming PC with a 5080 graphics card), Fireteam Elite 2 ran beautifully and looked great too. That bodes well for its performance upon release.
Visually, that first mission has a familiar Aliens look: that Weyland-Yutani corporate and sanitized interior look – and when the Xenmorphs’ organic, H.R. Giger-inspired architecture starts to creep in later on in the prologue mission, it makes your skin crawl a little bit. Fireteam Elite 2 definitely accomplishes the task of giving you that classic Aliens feel right from the jump, and I’m eager to see what some of the later missions look like, aesthetically speaking.
I really liked the more subtle visual touches sprinkled throughout the first mission, like the fog hovering just above the floor, knee-high, in a hydroponics lab (where, as one character curiously points out in a line of dialogue, “Who keeps flowers behind bulletproof glass?”). That fog is used in a couple of places in the opening level, and it indeed adds an authentic Aliens flair to the proceedings. And overall, Fireteam Elite 2 seems to have a really polished, clean look to it, visually – impressive when you’ve got three other human players and sometimes dozens of Xenomorphs on the screen at once.
A Fourth Musketeer
When my play session began with three of the lead developers of Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, one of my first questions was what was the big thing they wanted to achieve with the sequel after the first one was received so well. Their instant, definitive answer was that fans had overwhelmingly asked for one thing above all else: a fourth player. And so that was a core building block on which this sequel was built, and after playing through the prologue mission twice, it feels so natural to have four players that it’d probably feel weird to only have three if I fired the first Fireteam Elite back up.
Four-player co-op is, after all, a magic number that goes back to the arcade days with classics like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and has persisted across almost every console generation. Before systems had native support for more than two controllers, they had four-player multitaps (well, except for the five-player multitap available for the Super Nintendo and TurboGrafx-16 that made for particularly frantic Bomberman matches, but I digress…). In short, four has pretty much always been the magic number when it comes to co-op gaming, and it seems to fit perfectly with Fireteam Elite 2 so far.
Smarter and Meaner
You’ll probably be glad to have a fourth player along for the ride when you start facing off against the new and returning special Xenomorph types. These, as you’ll recall, have custom attacks and are tougher to kill. They don’t just throw themselves at you like the vanilla Xenos do. The Drone is back – and one came after us in the aforementioned hydroponics lab. It tries to sneak up on you, attacks, and then retreats to the ventilation shafts once it’s under fire. One of the new ones we didn’t see in the prologue but that we have information about is the Harbinger, which, first of all, arguably looks creepier and more disgusting than any of the other Xenos. It’s described as “more mouth than body,” it has six arms, and it will aggressively chase you down and pin you while the claws on the end of each arm keep you pinned and the mega-mouth starts trying to turn your skull into mulch. I’m not looking forward to meeting that guy.
The developers also told me that all of the Xenomorphs, not just the special types, have been given an intelligence upgrade. While I didn’t necessarily see this in obvious action in my two runs through the prologue on Normal difficulty, they will nevertheless come at you from all angles, including the walls and ceiling, as you’d expect these aliens to.
The Bug Hunt Begins Again
With a fourth player added, a new completely open-ended Specialist class, new special Xenomorph types, and a totally new campaign, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 may not be reinventing the PvE Alien-game wheel, but it doesn’t need to. It’s adding seemingly everything we’d reasonably want in order to take the already well-executed concept from the first Fireteam Elite to the next level. Fortunately, you won’t have to wait long to find an extra friend and jump into it for yourself. In this case, it’s not “Game over, man!” it’s “Game on, man!”
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
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