Aliens: Fireteam Elite

 

Previously I played games like Alien Isolation which is singleplayer horror, and Aliens Colonial Marines which is a attempt at FPS coop game that failed miserably. Aliens: Fireteam Elite is another attempt at co-op game in the franchise, this time its third person

The game is a third person action shooter. Its got controls sort of like Gears of War, you can press a button to snap into cover, although theres barely any point to it, you carry two guns, one on your back and one main. Theres a space button to dodge roll, it plays like a standard third person shooter.

The way the game works is it drops you into a 'hub world' first, which is some sort of marine space base. You can go around and talk to the NPC's there, but im not sure if theres actually any point besides flavour text? because you can just hit Tab and access most of the same stuff instantly anyway. I'm seeing a trend in these modern games with the hub world setups.  There is a shop you can go to to buy new weapons,attachments, and 'perks' but other than that the hub world is pretty pointless.

So the first thing I noticed is that the game sort of has RPG mechanics. When presented with a difficulty selection, we saw various difficulties and one in particular stoodout. It said something like

"The True Experience. This is the way the game is meant to be played. etc etc etc. Reccomended Combat level: 500"

So naturally of course we wanted to play that difficulty, right? Well sadly its kinda not that simple. What it really seems to mean, is first you have to 'level up' a bunch, get new gear, raise your 'combat level' which basically just means accumulating upgrades to where it kind of estimates how powerful you are, THEN you should try the difficulty. Why?

Well because we originally tried playing on the difficulty but it was just a mess. The first 2 levels took way longer than they should, something was just off. Not to mention if you fail a mission, theres no checkpoints you have to do the entire thing over again. And missions can be upwards of an hour long, so that wasnt helping at all. The game was kind of fun being this challenging, but we knew something was off and it wasnt actually meant to be like this from the get-go.

So we dropped it down to the Normal difficulty that more matched with our 'combat level' and from there we could actually progress the game at a steady pace.

The game has 4 'Acts' but really theres 12 levels total.

The bulk of the gameplay consists of running through hallways and military buildings, then coming to a room where you press a switch/button/object, then you get a swarm of aliens for like 3 minutes while you have to survive, kill them, then repeat. Most of the objectives are like that. There isnt much variety at all in the objectives.

I will say that the first 'Act' wasn't all that good. Very generic looking sci-fi space base levels, metal hallways, levels that just look like youre inside a metal box. Very repetetive level design. This went on for like 3 or 4 hours. After it ended though, the game started to become more impressive.

In act 2, you start to see more of the Alien species taking over the natural land. More caves, grassy fields, outdoors areas, and stuff like that. It really opens up from there. I dont know why they choose such a boring intro  set of levels. That's another thing, the pacing of the levels and difficulty is just a mess. Like, the first half of the game has some really hard moments, but then randomly here and there you'll have piss easy levels where they throw new enemies at you that are way easier than the previous. Like that one level in Act 4 where they introduce zombies and its like the easiest level in the game. It's just poor and weird pacing. Like some of the more impressive levels should of been the starting ones, why would they put the worst levels first?

Towards the last quarter/end of the game they start to throw in some robot humanoid type enemies that shoot at you, so you finally get a chance to use the cover system. It's not bad, I was initially worried the game wouldnt have much enemy variety but it does. It has typical small aliens, then its got big queen types that grab you and make you do quick time events, its Green spitter type aliens that shoot projectiles at you, its got the Robot enemies with guns, its got zombies, and of course Facehuggers but they only really showup towards the end. The enemy variety isn't a real problem.

But what is a real problem is kind of like I said previously, the objectives, lack of variety, and repetition. Like almost every single encounter is just surviving in a room arena for a few mins and then proceed to next. Its not awful they just could of been more creative.

About the perks and upgrades and RPG mechanics.
None of it is well done.
It tries to be like a modern Hero shooter where you have like 8 different classes you can choose.

 Stuff like Doctor, Gunner, Regular soldier etc. But none of it really has impact or fun to explore. Because the class you play as determines what Weapon slots you can use. So for example the Regular soldier gets Rifle and Shotgun class, but the Doctor only gets Pistol and Rifle. I tried playing the Doctor class for awhile, but the healing mechanic was super convuluted and didnt make sense. You have this like healing pack device that has to be recharged by picking up and using medkits on it or something, but I could never figure out how it worked. And the portable healing station thing didnt actually seem all that good to giveup the other bonuses from the regular default Soldier guy. So we both ended up just playing the default soldier guy that has Assault rifle/Shotgun for the whole game while ignoring the rest of classes because they werent interesting.

Then as you 'level up' or something, you can open your perk loadout and swap in different perks as different areas unlock, like Tetris or some shit, but it just wasnt interesting or intuitive at all. The perks are just lame shit like reload slightly faster or do more damage with grenades. I don't know, we barely touched it. It's like they dont intend you to mess with any of this stuff until you already beat the game once, THEN go back and play through on the higher "intended difficulty" which is so sad, the game would be so much better without any of this shoehorned RPG stuff and just let us pick the higher difficulty from the get go, just balanced around player skill not this upgrade BS.

And besides these upgrades, you can go to a shop in between missions and buy new guns, but again none of them are any good or interesting. I tried buying a few rifles and shotguns but they were just worse than the default weapons. Also, the game kind of punishes you for even swapping and trying new weapons, because the more you use a certain weapon, the more it levels up. So you'll be playing 5 levels in a row with the default Shotgun, then if you want to swap to a new one, its level zero and is worse than the default shotgun. It's just stupid. Why punish the player for trying new weapons?

Another annoying thing is you cant pickup weapons or change out weapons mid mission. Theres no such thing as a checkpoint armoury or 'safehouse' or anything where mid-mission you can change weaps. So when you lock in your two weapons, youre gonna be using it for 1+ hour.

The sound design overall is pretty attrocious , I dont know what they were smoking over there. The music is awful, its just constantly out of place loud farting trombones and  trumpets it just sounds goofy and stupid, not horror at all just out of place. I had to turn it almost completely down at a certain point it was ruining the game. The NPC dialogue at first isnt so bad, but about halfway in the game they never fucking shutup yammering in your ear just talking nonsense and they sound completely deadpan like some guy in a studio reading off a script. The gun sounds are just strange too, especially the assault rifle sound effect. Is it supposed to sound like that? I know it sounds a certain way in the movie, but it just sounds fucked here , like they ripped a low bitrate lo-fi sample directly from the movie and never even bothered to EQ it. Strange. Atleast the shotgun sounds satisfying, so I used that the whole game basically.

The last level is really disappointing, you think its gonna be a boss fight but guess what, you just go to a platform, hit a switch, and survive for 100 seconds. Then you do it again, 5 times. Then you run to a elevator, then the game ends. Wtf? no boss fight? You even see a cutscene of a big alien queen but dont fight it? Why?

So the game clearly has some flaws, but just the actual core gameplay, and the fact that its co-op does help a ton. The actual core of aliens swarming at you while you and your buddy try to survive can be really thrilling at times. The graphics are pretty impressive, it does have a decent amount of content to play through over a weekend or something, its not overly long about 12 hours length. Despite the repetitive objectives, pointless RPG mechanics, disappointing weapon system, etc its still a fun game. The graphics can have some really impressive moments and vistas like when you go outside for the first time, the aliens are pretty well done overall in terms of animation and design, although gameplay wise they can be a bullet sponge. Theres a lot of things the game could of done better but for just playing a third person shooter game over the weekend with a buddy, its not bad.

6/10