Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, out now on consoles and PC, is a bigger and, in many ways, better follow-up to the original Fireteam Elite. Like that game, Fireteam Elite 2 is a third-person co-op shooter built around completing levels, fighting off waves of aliens, and improving your space marines with upgrades, perks, and new gear. This time around, however, four people can play together instead of just three. Also, there’s a lot more dialogue and narrative. That last addition is a problem.
I enjoyed the original Fireteam Elite, but it felt a bit small at launch. Over time, with updates and DLC, it expanded, but it never felt quite as fleshed out as it could have been or as deep as it needed to be to make sinking a lot of hours into it worthwhile. This time around, developer Cold Iron Studios has added a lot more to the formula. You can now fully customize your marine, apply all sorts of decals wherever you please to your guns, and there are more ways to upgrade and tweak your gear and character. On top of that, you can now crouch, there are new enemies to fight, and you even have a handy-dandy sidearm option that features unlimited ammo, which is useful for when it’s nearly game over, man.
All of this is great. I’ve been playing with friends and randos and solo and have had a good time. Some performance issues have been annoying, and they seem worse on the game’s first mission, which is a long, tutorial-like prologue mission, but the game is definitely playable. Guns feel great, especially once I leveled up and got my hands on the OG Aliens pulse rifle. Ripping through waves of Xenos never gets old, especially as everything sounds and looks like it was ripped right from the movies. And four-player co-op is nice to have, as it lets more of my pals help me go out on another bug hunt. I also think the game looks incredibly sharp and clear, something that I appreciate quite a bit.
However, Fireteam Elite 2‘s characters and narrative won’t just get out of the way and let me have fun with buds. And it’s becoming a problem. You spend a lot of time early on talking to NPCs found in your in-game hub between missions. And a lot of the writing isn’t great. At one point I was talking to an NPC about spicy chicken sandwiches and wasn’t having a good time. Even worse, and incredibly baffling to me, is that a lot of these conversations include different options. I don’t think a co-op Aliens-themed shooter needs dialogue trees. And none of these choices matter, as conversations always end the same and lead you to the next part of the story or the next mission regardless of what you say. It all feels like a waste of time.
When playing with friends, the chatty NPCs and dialogue options become an even bigger problem. My pals are in the background discussing builds, cracking jokes, or just talking, and I can’t hear what the characters are saying. Trying to read their text and pick an option while you have friends ready to play another mission isn’t much fun either. And boy, it was really annoying when playing with friends who were at a different point in the story and had to chat with different NPCs, and trying to coordinate all of this was a pain.
And then, when you actually do get into a mission, you have to hear the NPCs chat throughout it over and over again. Fireteam Elite 2, like the original game, is built around the loop of doing missions many times with different groups, using different classes, and on harder difficulty levels or with various modifiers. This is how you get better gear and credits used to upgrade your character and weapons. In the first game, I didn’t mind replaying missions over and over as the combat was fun and NPC chatter wasn’t a huge factor.
But in the sequel, I started searching for an option to turn off NPC conversations entirely while replaying missions. And while there is a way to basically disable in-game chatter, it doesn’t remove the dialogue sequences back in the hub. Eventually, one of my friends just told someone to mash the X button to get through them so we could get back to shooting aliens. Bleh.
Aliens Fireteam Elite 2 is a solid co-op shooter that fans of the Alien franchise will enjoy a lot. Heck, I’ve played with someone who hasn’t seen a single frame of any of the movies, and they’re digging it, too. But be prepared to deal with some annoying NPCs and performance issues.
