In the current gaming landscape, one dominated by live-service models and online multiplayer, one subgenre has become especially prevalent: the co-op objective shooter. Some games handle the formula better than others, while some barely even try to hide the fact that their entire design exists to funnel you toward the in-game shop. Well, here comes another game that fits into that mold, minus the aggressive in-game shop aspect: Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, the follow-up to the sleeper hit that was the first game. The original Fireteam Elite always felt like its main marketing pitch was, “Remember Aliens: Colonial Marines? What if we actually made that game properly?” And somehow, that worked. What we ended up with was a perfectly enjoyable co-op shooter that I mostly remember as a great weekend game with friends. You download it, convince a couple of people to join you, spend a few nights blasting Xenomorphs, say, “Yeah, that was pretty good,” and then never think about it again until somebody announces a sequel. So now that the sequel is here, does it actually improve on the original, or does it just give us more of what already worked? Given the tone so far, you can probably tell where this is going.
At its core, Fireteam Elite 2 is basically more Fireteam Elite, just with some smart improvements around the edges. The biggest is moving from three-player teams to four-player co-op, something that immediately feels so natural that I have no idea why the first game settled on three. Having that extra person makes the larger encounters more chaotic while also giving you more freedom when deciding who fills each role. There are five primary classes to work through, but the most interesting addition is the Specialist, which unlocks through progression in the other classes and allows you to mix abilities you’ve already earned into your own custom setup. It’s a good system because it actually encourages you to try everything instead of immediately finding the class you like and refusing to touch anything else for the next 20 hours. The weapons and abilities are varied enough that experimenting with builds is enjoyable, even if none of this completely reinvents the genre. It mostly feels like Cold Iron looked at everything people liked about the first game and asked how they could make it slightly better rather than throwing the whole thing away.
Thankfully, the most important part still works shooting Xenomorphs is fun. A lot of the game comes down to moving through an area, completing an objective, preparing for a swarm, and then firing at everything that crawls out of the walls. There are also Synths and different enemy variants to break things up, but let’s be real here: you’re buying an Aliens game because you want a hallway filled with Xenomorphs while a motion tracker goes insane in the background. When everything gets going, the game captures that feeling really well. Hundreds of bullets are flying everywhere, Xenomorphs are crawling across the ceiling, someone is being attacked on the other side of the room, and whatever strategy your team had ten seconds ago has completely fallen apart. It’s dumb, chaotic fun, and the game understands that perfectly. The problem is that the mission design can become predictable. You enter a suspiciously large room, see some conveniently placed supplies, and immediately know you’re about to spend the next five minutes defending that exact location. Eventually you begin looking at every room like an exterminator determining where the next infestation is going to come from.
The story is mostly there to move you between these encounters, and while there are some likable characters and plenty of the usual Alien corporate stupidity happening in the background, I can’t imagine the narrative being the reason anyone sticks with the game. The biggest deciding factor is going to be whether you have friends to play it with. You can absolutely play solo, and it’s perfectly functional that way, but playing by yourself makes the repetition much harder to ignore. With four people, half the entertainment comes from everyone panicking in voice chat while somebody accidentally runs directly into the worst possible position. Without that social element, you’re left staring more closely at how frequently you’re walking down another hallway toward another defense encounter. There are also some bugs here and there, although nothing I encountered fundamentally destroyed the experience. This is still a game literally about hunting bugs, so maybe it was inevitable. At least Horde mode gives you something else to jump into once you’ve finished the campaign, and the progression system gives you a genuine reason to replay missions, level different classes, unlock equipment, and eventually experiment with the Specialist.
And that’s basically Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 in a nutshell. It’s bigger, smoother, more flexible, and the jump to four-player co-op is probably the single best change Cold Iron could have made. But considering this sequel arrives five years after the original, I was hoping for something that pushed the formula further. Left 4 Dead 2 took the foundation of the first game and expanded on it so much that going back almost felt unnecessary. Fireteam Elite 2 doesn’t have that same effect. Instead, it feels like someone took the original, wrote down a list of its most obvious shortcomings, and methodically fixed a bunch of them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. When you’re standing with three friends unloading pulse rifles into a wall of Xenomorphs, the game is undeniably entertaining. I just wish I had more moments where I thought, “Wow, they really changed things,” rather than, “Yeah, this is Fireteam Elite again.” Ultimately, it’s still that perfect weekend game: get some friends together, kill an unreasonable number of aliens, have a good time, and then probably uninstall it when everyone moves on to whatever co-op game comes next. And honestly, there are much worse things a game can be.
Score: 7 out of 10
Reviewed on PlayStation 5