For over 45 years, the Alien franchise has captivated many with its horrifying monsters and tense atmosphere. As such, it is only natural that many developers have taken its worldbuilding and premise and applied it to video games. There have been many released over the years, all of which have varying quality. In 2021, Cold Iron Studio took the series in a new direction entirely with Aliens: Fireteam Elite. It presented the world of Aliens as a third-person co-op shooter akin to Left 4 Dead or Warhammer: Vermintide. It was a decent enough title overall; nothing amazing, but still fun enough with a good group of friends.
When Cold Iron announced the sequel in May 2026, I was a bit shocked to see it return but nonetheless interested to see how it would evolve its horde shooter. Still, the original had reached a cult status, so I hoped Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 would be a worthy sequel that builds upon the fun and exciting elements of its predecessor. After playing with a friend, I realized Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 fails to improve upon the original and is instead more underwhelming than exciting.
Locked and Loaded
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 builds off of the base that the first game laid with several quality-of-life adjustments and additions. Your basic gameplay has you and up to three of your friends mowing down waves of Xenomorphs while trying to complete mission objectives. Each person gets to choose a class, such as the machinist, duelist, hunter, and medic, to name a few. While the first game only offered three total teammates, this new entry gives us one more teammate for a total of four friends to enjoy the mayhem. There’s also added build customization for your selected class.
One of my favorite parts was maxing out your specialist weapon, the unique weapon each class has access to. Once you max out the level on that specialist weapon, you can use that weapon with any other class. This can lead to wild combinations, such as an auto-tracking smart gun with the medic class (which my friend and I nicknamed the “Rambo Medic.”) If you prefer to mix and match different weapons and skills, the new Specialist class lets you use said skills from each of the other classes as well. Whatever your playstyle is, Fireteam Elite 2 gives you the freedom to explore it so long as you can put in the experience points.
Coordination and communication are key in getting through some of these missions, and you’ll often learn that lesson the hard way. The first couple of missions were a bit of a struggle to get through for us, and one of the biggest problems we had was just how spongy some of the enemies felt. The base Pulse Rifle has a 50-round magazine, and some of those starting levels will have you unloading that entire magazine just to kill one or two Xenomorphs. The game pulls no punches as it throws entire hoards of Aliens at you, some variations taking even more bullets to kill. While Fireteam Elite 2 might feel like it wants to be a power fantasy at times, it tends to feel more like you’re barely scraping by.
As for the plot, it is nothing too crazy. You’re sent down as a squad to go investigate the disturbances at a mining facility stationed on planet LV-558. Lo and behold, Xenomorphs have infested the planet’s surface. You’re forced to fight your way through as a larger conspiracy about experiments conducted on the Xenos by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is unveiled. Missions are very linear, as each one mostly follows the same format: follow the waypoint marker, fight Xenomorphs, and either activate a switch and hold off a horde or activate a switch and walk through the newly opened door.
While the format of Fireteam Elite 2 is serviceable, and it is nice that there is a narrative throughline, it gets very repetitive very quickly. Fireteam Elite 2 takes an average of around 10 hours to fully complete, but those 10 hours can feel like ages when you’re doing the same things over and over again with very little variation. That repetition is made even worse by the game’s other idiosyncrasies.
In Space…
One of the things I really liked about the first Fireteam Elite game was its ambiance. It seems like Cold Iron took a lot of time and care to create something that felt authentic, and that was reflected in the quieter moments of the campaign. Walking through a ship corridor with windows to the stars or seeing how vast a cave is on an alien planet really built the atmosphere of the missions and was a nice break between encounters. While Fireteam Elite 2 does look as good as the first game, the constant pressure from enemies meant that I had no time to breathe and observe the environment around me. More often than not, I was railroaded into getting to each mission objective as quickly as possible.
A surplus of action isn’t necessarily a problem, but having a lack of quiet moments means you don’t get to appreciate the quiet contrast between encounters and the moody atmosphere that the Alien franchise is known for. With how quickly you’re moving, everything sort of blurs together. At times it didn’t even feel like I was playing an Alien game, and felt more like I was playing some generic sci-fi shooter you’d get on discount, especially since a lot of the gameplay functions a little too similarly to other games on the market.
As a result of the lack of breathing room, my friends and I noticed some of the game’s strange dialogue choices. For example, the sound design of the Pulse Rifle has lost a lot of its punch compared to the previous entry. Further, the flavor dialogue from teammates and NPCs will repeat over and over again. Some characters will frequently reuse the same nicknames like hotshot, which often distracted us from the immersive experience. It started to get so annoying that we almost muted the character dialogue at times.
Then there was the overabundance of technical bugs and glitches. Some were fairly funny, like Xenomorphs flying off after being killed, or an android being stuck inside a piece of the scenery. Sadly, there were quite a few borderline game-breaking bugs. One of which made it so that we could not pick up any health packs, which usually meant that we were dying in ways that were borderline unfair. I understand that each of these is a small problem, some of which will be fixed by upcoming patches, but it’s small issues like these that can add up and really hinder the overall experience of a game.
A Lack of Purity
As my friend and I played Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, we asked each other if we would return if the technical issues were fixed. Our consensus? Maybe, but it felt more likely not. Looking past the technical issues, there’s just not enough drawing us back to it anytime soon. It doesn’t have the design hallmarks Alien is known for, and most other aspects of the game are done very poorly. While it might please die-hard fans of the film franchise and doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, general audiences are just going to see Fireteam Elite 2 as another co-op shooter.
What makes this stand out when you could play something like Helldivers 2 or Warhammer: Space Marine 2? At best, it can be an action-packed evening with friends as the bugs and strange design choices are waved away absentmindedly. At worst, all the issues surpass your tolerance and completely wreck the experience. There is a great Aliens game in here, but it’s stuck somewhere in between the first Fireteam Elite and its sequel. It’ll be up to the developers to strike while the iron is hot and further build on the game’s offerings in future updates. For now, though, I am in no rush to return regardless of whether it’s with a friend or not.
Disclaimer: Daybreak Game Company provided a PC (Steam) copy of Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 for review purposes.
