Aliens Review: Fireteam Elite – They’re Everywhere

One thing this game did absolutely great, and I’d say it’s on a better level than we’ve ever experienced in intruder games: induce a drooping jaw and a surge of fear and despair when you raise your eyes and see the ceiling facing you. countless floods of monstrous monsters will pour in on you. Fireteam Elite will set you up against the authentic floods of xenomorphs that will flock to you on the ground, walls and ceiling in such a way that they will reliably rub you – especially on higher difficulty, where you can’t afford to let an intruder into your body at all.

• Platform: PS5 (reviewed). PS4, X1, XSX | S, PC
• Date of publication: 24. 8. 2021
• Producer: Cold Iron (USA)
• Genre: 3PS co-op action
• Czech localization: yes, subtitles
• Multiplayer: up to 3 players
• Data to download: 30 GB
• Game time: 10+ hours
• Accessibility: 16+
• Sales version: box and digital
• Price: 949, – CZK (Xzone)

Armed conflict or chase?

The year is 2202, an emergency call will bring the Marine crew of the military cruiser UAS Endeavor to the planet LV-895, where a suspiciously silent ship from the Katanga refinery awaits them, whose problems appear to be related to Weyland-Yutani’s activity on the planet’s surface, hiding suspicious alien ruins. Once you board a refinery strikingly reminiscent of Nostromo with your unit, neither the music nor the acid-damaged deck will leave you in any doubt as to what happened here. The question is whether you brought enough ammunition, because a nest full of hundreds of intruders awaits you in the bowels of a darkened ship.

Although primarily a co-op event, Aliens: Fireteam Elite also works as a single-player story game. You get two as well as competent AI androids to accompany you (sometimes they kill something and if you fall, they try to revive you, so you can forgive them for some jam in the door) and you have to set a reasonable of five difficulties, because AI is simply not enough for the higher ones. In addition, come to terms with a more modest set-up – the game has a single introductory movie, the rest is solved in the form of dialogues, in which the characters do not even have animated faces (at least FaceFX could be here for some mouthfeel). However, the game is full of dialogues and hidden records, which quite amusingly mix not only old and new movies about Aliens (including Prometheus and Covenant), but also other resources, such as Alien: Isolation and its “Working Joe” androids.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite also works as a story game for one player.

In one, it’s also much easier to focus on the story, because the character dialogues spoken during missions can easily fit once you lean into the game with a friend or two. In cooperative online multiplayer, on the other hand, the intensity of the action will stand out, because according to the set difficulty you will always have enough work and intruders often attack from several directions at the same time, so there is natural space for mutually divided roles. This is also due to relatively significant differences in the armament and abilities of individual professions, such as the Destroyer (operated by the legendary self-aiming Smartgun), Medic or Technician, who only carries a pistol, but is able to build his automatic fire tower anywhere. Of course, it’s ideal to play with friends, but if you don’t have that option, the game includes random matchmaking.

Remember, short doses

For budget games, Fireteam has surprisingly good controls and a menu system. When moving your armored sailor, you feel the weight of his armament, but at the same time you can also aim at the remote control relatively quickly and accurately. All menus are perfectly clear, with distinctive fonts (mostly borrowed directly from the film master, including sound effects) and clearly marked the most important information. Too bad only the Czech translation, which will fulfill its function, but in some places it is comically bad (Colonel Shippová, for example, is translated as “Colonel’s ship”). Good control and UI may be taken for granted by some, but in fact games on a much larger budget have burned out on this front. Fireteam Elite impressed me with a solidly sleek and tuned shooter, which may be a bit monotonous, but it’s nice to play. The ability to modify and improve weapons, build “build” characters in an interactive ability tree, or the relative diversity of alien enemies (including specialized mutations) also contributes to this. On the contrary, there are clearly humanoid enemies in the form of androids, who spoil the otherwise peculiar pace of fighting with much more interesting swarming monsters.

Unfortunately, what really disappointed me is the music. Behind her is the excellent composer Austin Wintory, however, this genre probably did not suit him very well. While in the first campaign on board the refinery it is still possible and you can recognize the inspiration from the motifs from the films, from the second episode the music turns into a completely crazy cacophony, which clearly does not make sense. A huge pity, because it was the iconic music from the movies that also gave such Aliens: Colonial Marines a decent atmosphere. But here I would recommend turning off the music, because otherwise the sounds taken from the movies are great – from the cadence of a pulse rifle to small things like the whistling of intruders’ claws. In addition, a certain weakness of the game is its shortness (the campaign does not take you more than ten hours depending on the difficulty, then there is only a higher difficulty or horde mode), but maybe it’s better than if it was stretched unnecessarily, as it does to some extent. happened to Alien: Isolation. In any case, thanks to Season Pass, DLC allowances await us, so if you want to spend as much time as possible in this universe, you will have more opportunities.

Second opinion: Jakub Marušák

As a big fan of the Aliens University (and especially the second part), I watched the development of Aliens Fireteam Elite with tension. I kept my fingers crossed for the developers at Cold Iron Studios to make their project turn out better than the previous game about rough boys and girls from the colonial marina. And I can safely say for myself that it worked. The budget price and production qualities let you know at a glance that the developers didn’t aim for the title of the game of the year, but Aliens Fireteam Elite is still a great cooperative game for several long evenings of a party of friends repeating legendary rumors from movies and mowing hordes of intruders . I was very pleased with the audiovisual style, referring to movies and previous games (hacking takes place with the stylish knocking sound of old computers, and the pulse rifle M41A still has its charming scream). On the contrary, the disappointing music was somewhat disappointing (but even that can surprise, for example, with an interesting composition every time you kill one of the intruders in a shootout), rather weaker Marine animations and incomprehensibly missing facial expressions during interviews. A number of different classes of soldiers, weapons, and several difficulty variations (including modifier cards) ensure that the game does not get tired, even with fewer maps, before the creators start pouring new content. God, I don’t want to be a prophet, but maybe it won’t be seventeen days.