Alien: Isolation is the "Alien" game I've always wanted.
Aliens Fireteam Elite is the "Aliens" game I've always wanted. It's not perfect, but it's great fun. The sounds are movie perfect, the game that best nails the Xeno sounds. I'm not too fond of multiplayer games, but it works really well here, matchmaking could use some improvements though, but it works most of the time.
The campaign is surprisingly well done, my expectations were super low after Aliens Colonial Marines, but man, this story is really fun! it doesn't violate canon like A:CM, and somehow it manages to mix some Prometheus into it and it doesn't make it suck!

Great value for the price tag, excellent first game for a new studio, I'm enjoying it a lot and look forward to new campaigns.

For a budget Left 4 Dead meets Gears of War lovechild, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is rather good. Some solid shooting mechanics meeting the aesthetic goldmine of Gieger's sickening beauty sounds like a good time, and you'd be right. You'd also be right in assuming that Fireteam Elite is a budget licensed game, warts and all.

For what it is, Aliens: Fireteam Elite delivers a fun co-op shooting gallery experience, yet it's hampered with some severely obvious budget cuts in its narrative presentation, as well as its overall stability. Being disconnected from co-op sessions mid-mission, music, specific sound effects, or just all audio suddenly disappearing at a moment's notice, and a few clipping issues were issues my buddy and I were noticing our entire time playing. While the bugs certainly didn't ruin the experience, they were frequent and annoying enough to make an impact.

Let's just say xenomorphs won't be the only bugs you'll be fighting in this game.

No? ok.

Full video review: https://youtu.be/8YNCaVmbf_4

I am a simple man – I love the Alien series and I love horde shooters. Here we have a game that is exactly that - so yeah, I had to check it out.

Gameplay:
Unlike the last couple Alien games we got – both in first person – Fireteam Elite plays as a third-person shooter. The best comparison I can make is basically a combination of Gears of War and Left 4 Dead. You got the semi-clunky movement, but fun shooting of Gears and the horde-like gameplay style of Left 4 Dead.

It has its hiccups, but at its core – the movement and shooting are solid. Dodging is responsive, the cover system actually works, and landing shots is never not satisfying. The headshot sound effect in particular definitely adds to this feeling – it really makes those shots feel rewarding especially when playing on a higher difficulty.

Difficulty:
I would highly recommend playing on the game’s “intense” difficulty right from the start as opposed to its default “standard” difficulty. I started with the latter, but was breezing through the game with two of my friends and it didn’t really have that sense of urgency you would expect from an Alien game. Bumping it up to intense and now ammo is way more of a concern, the big alien types actually feel challenging, and setting up turrets, mines, and other traps in preparation for the next fight are way more rewarding. It’s just an overall better experience and I wish I had started on that difficulty from the start.

Also worth noting is that there exists a “challenge” system similar to the skulls from a Halo game. Whether that be having an alien constantly on the hunt for you, having only half of your maximum ammo, or just straight failing the mission if you take damage – some of them are pretty extreme, but the rewards do make them worth a shot.

Customization:
The game has some light RPG mechanics that have you leveling weapons and classes and the challenge cards allow you to earn more XP and currency every time you activate one. The RPG mechanics here are where the game gets its depth and variety from. You get a handful of different classes – each with their own specialization and abilities. The doc, for example, has a really nice AOE healing field, whereas the demolisher (my personal favorite) has shoulder-mounted missiles similar to Predator.

Your weapon type also depends on what class you pick, but you can freely swap between them between missions and the game even encourages this because it is constantly giving you loot for all of the classes – regardless of which one you are playing. There’s a good amount of experimentation here and the variety offered by all of the different weapons, abilities, perks, and other upgrades are really what carry the experience here.

Story:
Despite carrying the Aliens title and obviously borrowing a lot from the movies – this is not really a game you should go into expecting any sort of “good” story. It’s not bad, but just kinda “there” – like this optional thing added on just to link the different levels together. For example, while there is dialogue and full voice acting – NPCs lack facial animation, so you’re just hearing their words while looking at them. The Aliens theme obviously went more towards the setting and enemies, rather than storytelling – which I wouldn’t even consider to be a bad thing. It’s nice to just drop into a lobby with some friends and get to shooting some xenos.

Graphics/Music:
Graphically, the game looks just okay. Despite being released on PS5 and Xbox Series X, it is still a game you can tell was developed for the generation prior. Not to say that it looks bad – rather just basic. There’s also not much to say about the music. It’s not that memorable and honestly, it felt a bit too “cheerful” for how dark the setting was – I would be in a big firefight while some upbeat cantina theme is playing.

Performance:
I had to put down a few settings to get the game to run at 1440p on my 1070 Ti, but once I did it was smooth sailing fps-wise, hovering around 60-80 for most of it and rarely dipping below that. Still, I did run into the occasional model freaking out, frame stuttering when loading back into the hub world, and a grand total of one crash. I won’t say it’s the most polished game, but the technical issues I did run into were relatively minor and hopefully something a patch or two can clean up.

Overall:
Aliens: Fireteam Elite may be a bit clunky, but the core combat is some good stuff and the RPG mechanics on top of it give it a nice sense of depth. Fun and unique classes, cool enemy designs inspired by the movie, challenging levels – it’s a nice all-around horde shooter even if the story and graphics may be lacking. It’s not really a game I would recommend for solo players (at least, definitely not at full price), but I had a good time playing through it with a couple of friends and would recommend it if you have some to play through it with as well.

Pretty fun game with weird issues on the console version. Stuttering was prevalent with this game as every time you walked through a door the game would stutter for a little and it got quite annoying as I continued my playthrough. Past that it was fun shooting hordes of aliens down with other people online but the missions got very repetitive quickly as the formula for each level was literally the same exact thing. Overall if you have gamepass this game is now on their so I see no reason to at least give this one a shot.

While the game wasn't much to start with it really opens up the longer you play/the more your character levels up. While level objectives are extremely repetitive they throw in enough enemy variety(More then say back for blood) to keep it interesting. Game looks way better then it should. At the end of the day it's a short game to burn through in coop with friends and was above expectations.

Bonus for anyone that's fans of the Aliens universe its got alot of lore that actually is fairly decently written.

Gameplay was solid and blasting aliens was surprisingly satisfactory. The story was kinda take it or leave it and also pretty confusing for someone who knows nothing about the alien universe. NPCs could use some work, both with actually animating their mouths and also with more interesting dialogue. The UI was a bit confusing as well at the beginning, with time it got better as I learned what everything was.

If this game had a bigger budget to spend on better story, improving the NPCs, and cleaner UI; it would honestly be a really great game. As it is, it's fun to blast aliens with bullets and that's about it.

The game is fun, but it lacks content and apart from bugs, the game lacks a lot.
The game has 6 classes, but two of them are simply useless. Under Intense you can use them, but others are also better to use there and higher you can forget about them because they are too bad.
harder difficulties is simply just bullet sponge enemies with more damage output and although that's not enough, the developer takes away a large part of your ammunition and removes some of the medikits from the game. On Harder difficulties, only DPS counts. doc and phalanx are simply pointless there due to the game mechanics. It is the same with most of the 34 (+1 DLC) weapons and abilities on harder difficulties, most are not usable. Some perks outright don't work on everything or nothing at all an many are simply bugt.
The game has four campaigns with three missions each, for a total of 12 missions lasting 15-20 minutes (intense and below). On harder difficulties it takes much longer because you only progress very slowly due to the unfair mechanics, which are also no fun.
It has a horde mode xD This is bugged and consists of only 1 map on which you can only fight against xenomorphs. It is not fun, because it just gets boring very quickly and thanks to bugs (opponents glitch in the world geometry objects) you often have to restart.
Outfits and headgear is very lacking, few outfit options and headgear for the most part is ugly and inappropriate, as well as the colors and stickers.
The AI teammates are inconsistent and usually bad, even an L4D (2008) had already had a better one at that time.
Aimbot lunging aliens AI, seriously sometimes you just dodge roll but one lacks onto you and pounces you anyway.
Basically no story whatsoever outside of talking to characters a little and collecting intel. There is some lore and such there but no effort was made for story in general. You can tell that the game is an Aliens (Movie 2) Fanfest, but apart from that it hardly has anything of its own.
The new class and weapons are by far the most annoying and worst things in the game, so you should really worry about what will come in the future.
Matchmaking just sucks. it takes too long and still has a lot of problems. the game does so much wrong.
yes it's fun with friends, but the air is out very quickly. the grind is hardly present, because you reach everything very quickly and simply there is nothing more to do. to always do the same things, since there is no variety annoys in the long run.
for hardcore aliens fans with friends a nice game for some time, but otherwise quite dull

I thought this was a pretty fun co op aliens game. The game isn't packed full of features but I think the core gameplay is really good. The bad part is that match making isn't very good and it doesn't have any cross play whatesoever. The thing that really prevents me from sinking a lot more time into it is that any difficulty past normal activates friendly fire. Friendly Fire has never been fun and here it is so bad. The enemy stops being the challenge and instead it's your team mates. On the hardest difficulty you can literally die in a couple of shots, making playing this an impossible task. It's a shame cause I really liked what I played but just playing on normal feels so limiting. I would have loved to put another 50 hours into it and complete it 100%.

A third person horde focused co-op shooter for up to three players (you can also be joined by up to two synthetic AI if you are playing alone or with one other person) focusing on a ship of marines investigating a distress signal in the Aliens universe. The game is broken up into four acts with three missions in each and focusing on investigating the Katanga refinery and the planet that it orbits, LV-895.

Each player can play as one of six classes including the Gunner, Demolisher, Technician, Doc, Phalanx, and Recon (with the recon class only unlocking once you beat the campaign and the Phalanx being a recent free addition to the game. Each class carries two weapons, one each of their two available types (rifle, heavy, handgun, and CQW), has a passive and two activate abilities, and a class based board where they can assign class skills and universal modifiers to improve their weapons and abilities by slotting in skills to open slots on the board. Each weapon can have three attachments that can change the look of the weapon and add to things like fire rate, range, accuracy, handling, stability, max ammo, magazine capacity, weak point damage, etc as well as having a variety of varied passive benefits such as increasing stats when you hit enemy weak points or giving a chance of leaving behind trails of fire after killing an enemy. Each gun can also be leveled up up to four times with each increasing passive benefits. You also get access to consumable items that you can set up to help you while defending positions like a variety of turrets, mines, devices that stun enemies, and incendiary rounds you can load into your weapons.

There is a good variety of classes and weapons including ones that look and sound faithful to the film like the smartgun, flamethrowers, pulse rifle, and Hick's shotgun. The flame effects look great and even though you won't be able to see it well yourself with the third person camera you can see the ammo indicator on the side of the pulse rifle counting down your remaining shots. Class wise I always stuck with the Technician and Demolisher, the Technician being able to set up a turret and throw up to three devices that set up an electrical field that slows enemies (or that can be stuck to an enemy) and the Demolisher being the only class to be able to use heavy weapons like the smartgun, miniguns, the largest flamethrower, and rocket launchers and having a shoulder mounted rocket launcher and an AoE blast that knocks back and stumbles nearby enemies. The Doc can heal and buff himself and allies, the Gunner has abilities that improve his combat abilities and can raise the fire rate of everyone's weapons for a short time, the Phalanx has a protective shield they carry, and the Recon is a bit of a jack of all trades focusing on hitting enemy weak points, putting down a drone that heals and gives ammo, and PUPS drones that fly out and can for and weaken enemies.

Between missions you can walk around your ship and interact with other characters, learning more about the universe when it comes to the aliens, marines, different corporations, laws, and characters, a lot of the conversations activated by finding intel in the games missions (with each mission having three hidden intel pieces). You also get access to a vender that can sell you weapons, attachments, and cosmetics. Weapons have a variety of colors and cosmetic stickers you can put on them in addition to the attachments. The speed that you unlock weapons, attachments, and cosmetics is a lot better than many other games out there. Certain missions just reward you with guns, playing on certain difficulties can reward you with secret weapons, you gain credits fairly quickly that you can choose to spend on whatever you want and in each mission there are places a crate can spawn, usually not very difficult to find, that will give you three items that you don't already have.

The campaign is short, probably about four hours if you are just playing through it once, but features varied and good looking locations. Objectives are basically never changing though, with the exception of one escort mission in the first act, you will always be moving through an area until you get to a part where you have to interact with some device or scan something which triggers and assault of enemies you have to defend against before moving on. It would have been nice to see more variety there. What does help with the variety is that there are five difficulties, a variety of cards that you can play before a mission starts to cause a different missions effects that can either make you stronger or weaken you in different ways while increasing your credit and experience rewards. Cards can have effects like causing your weapons to jam, slowing down recharge rates of abilities, causing players to knock each other over if they run into each other, they can change the look of the game, add side objects like needing a certain number of headshot kills or completing the level with no one being downed, etc.

Levels also tend to bring in new enemy types to them. Stronger aliens show up over time, which are going to be your primary antagonists, but you will also run into synthetics either a variety of ones made for combat and armed with ranged and melee weapons or the weak Average Joe models that were a much bigger inconvenience in Alien Isolation. Ranged combat against synthetics isn't bad but it is the game's weak point and the whole reason the game has a cover system you will likely not be making much use of. Aliens types include the normal drones, warrior types, crushers with heavily armored skulls, the queen defending praetorians, predators that try to hide in the environment and pounce on you, ones that spit acid, ones that explode acid when killed, facehuggers, and eggs holding facehuggers that will break open if you get to close before destroying them. The warriors are really the only disappointing enemy type. They awkwardly lift you up and just kind of hold you while you take damage until they are either killed or you break free of their grasp, it's like they should just kill their target outright with the alien's headbite attack but the developers realized they would be really overpowered with the way they made them so they just kind of stand their awkwardly.

Once the campaign is completed you will unlock two additional game modes. A traditional horde mode and a similar mode but where you have to defend different points, each is limited to only one map though, which is odd considering there are likely places from the campaign that could have been easily adapted.

It's a fun time, a bit short on content and the focus on fighting synthetics in a couple missions just isn't that enjoyable but good mechanics, a fair unlock system that isn't focused on wasting your time or wanting you to buy DLC, and a good use of the Aliens license. Based on their content roadmap, at least three more updates are planned with them listing new weapons and the two bigger additional possibly being one that looks to be adding another class type and one that says it will add a new feature. Nothing lists any planned campaign missions being free or DLC or mentions additional horde mode maps so that is a little disappointing.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1477064742816546816

Going into this, I thought it would be a cover-based third-person shooter. Unfortunately after playing through the entire game, I may have used the cover mechanics as many times as I have fingers on a single hand.

This is more of a chaotic, "bullet spray the horde of incoming aliens" fast-paced, non-strategic shooter while attempting to masquerade itself as a cover-based game. Additionally, the lack of "leveled up" items to be found are incredibly scarce, and the skill system was most certainly an afterthought.

All in all, it's a game with no redeeming or memorable qualities with a non-existent story, but has just enough of a fun factor that you might find yourself wanting to play through it - after that though, it's surely going on the shelf.

some radio banter i heard while playing won me over: "the big ones are the ones that come out of people..."

this is solidly... solid? it has absolutely no charm, unlike the cast of aliens, and that seems to be one of the main things yet eluding video games which worship the space military aesthetic of the movie sequel (whereas alien: isolation did a more or less fine job of reaching for the tone and feel of the original film (with a touch of aliens as well)). it's fun 2 blast da xeno, tho. i enjoyed playing the technician and dropping my sentries. mindless. truthfully, though this may be a bit more graphically detailed it's about as stone cold "OK" as terminator: resistance (which also, like, hardly sucks). might play some more in the future, but at the moment i feel very spoiled for excellent games to play and this one stays on the game pass shelf for now

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a nice, fun, little Aliens game that will keep you and two friends decently engaged for maybe 8 or so hours. You'll probably enjoy your time with most of it. But unfortunately, that's just about all there is.

The main combat is mostly pretty fun, depending on who and what you're fighting. When fighting the Xenomorphs, gameplay will either feel really snappy, almost like a shooting gallery; or, decently engaging when you're dealing with the tougher armored enemies.
And when you're fighting the synthetics...well it mostly just feels like a worse Gears of War game. Which can be fun at times, but the game does very little to improve upon the generic third person combat beyond that.

Literally every encounter is just a survival/wave defense with only a couple small changes here and there. It's fun at first, but grows to be boring and monotonous very quickly by the time you get to the third campaign.

The story is also violently uninteresting. It feels more like a set of excuses for why you have to kill aliens, instead of just throwing us in to kill aliens. Honestly, I think the game would have been better off if there just wasn't a story mode at all and the game was just built around you killing aliens and upgrading your gear. Imagine something like Deep Rock Galactic but with a more intense focus on alien killing.

I think this game's biggest problem is that it can't decide if it wants to be a live service game or not. It toes the line straight down the middle. It has stuff like daily and weekly challenge rotations, a huge focus on online multiplayer, and plenty of rewards and skins to unlock or buy.
But the thing is, it just isn't enough. By the time you finish all four campaigns, there just isn't really a motivator to bother playing the game anymore. Which is weird, since the game seems to pretend that everything is just getting started then. So many modes and difficulties unlock upon completion of the fourth campaign, but it just doesn't feel like something I want to do. Why would I bother sinking more time into this when the entire game is literally just nothing but a less engaging version of horde mode from Gears of War?

I don't know, maybe I'm being to hard on this game. I had plenty of fun with it, but I think most of that came from playing with two of my friends the whole time and joking around that we were actually low-level soldiers in an Alien movie. I couldn't imagine playing this by myself, I think I would have given up before unlocking the third campaign.

Anyway, a nice game that can be fun if you're with friends, but there's not much else too it. It's better than the last Aliens game (Colonial Marines) but nowhere near as good as the most recent Alien game (Isolation).
If you want a fun little game to distract yourself for a bit, this is right on the money. Just don't expect much, or really anything, more than that.

A borderline iconic example of franchise game malaise, Fireteam Elite make no bold choices and takes no risks, resolving in a game that's fine. You'll be doing the same thing over and over for quite some time to make serious progression, with several run throughs and grinding sessions required for maximum progression and full arsenal. But you won't hate it, you'll just be INCREDIBLY aware of it.

Level design is fairly linear, game is definitely better with human teammates, and the sound design and visuals are great and true to franchise. It's the most game to ever exist. And no that's not a typo.

If you really like horde shooters like Left 4 Dead or Vermintide you'll find the bones of that here, and likely enjoy a new grind. Otherwise it's an okay way to kill a couple hours or a fun title to rent, borrow, play on game pass, etc. Genuine congrats to the team for making an Aliens game that isn't a disaster (because that bar is STILL really high somehow) but I definitely hope the next game aiming at the franchise takes a little more time for narrative and character work over doing high quality shooties...

Resumo: Um lixo.

Pontos positivos: A trilha sonora do jogo é interessante, consegue dar emoção aos tiroteios contra aliens e sintéticos. Alguns level designs são satisfatórios, gostei do cenário das missões "A Dádiva do Fogo", de resto é só ok. A vibração do controle é bem colocada. As cartas de desafio são muito interessantes e variadas, causam diversas mudanças na gameplay.

Pontos negativos: A música boa é totalmente mal configurada, em diversas partes ela para e inicia repentinamente, ou fica travando muito, estragando totalmente a experiência. Em partes com muitos inimigos as explosões simplesmente EXPLODEM o jogo, o fps cai absurdamente para algo por volta de 5 a 10 fps. Muitos bugs fatais! Há fases em que você precisa eliminar todos os inimigos, mas mais de 1 vez havia inimigos travados NO MEIO das paredes, me obrigando a desistir da fase, além desse bug, mais de 1 vez o jogo simplesmente não me deixou ir até o próximo local, a porta simplesmente não abria, isso em uma partida ONLINE, fiquei indo e voltando no cenário até que magicamente o jogo desbloqueou a porta do nada.

Com tantos bugs fatais que afetam a gameplay é impossível considerar tal jogo como minimamente bom, nota 4/10.