Think of Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 as the fast food of video games. It goes down easily enough in the moment, but it’s never especially good, and it slips out of your memory the instant you put the controller down.
That’s where I landed after spending launch weekend with it on PS5, and admitting it hurts a bit. Back in 2021, when the first Aliens: Fireteam Elite arrived on Xbox Game Pass, it became one of my guilty-pleasure co-op games. After a short hands-on with the sequel at Summer Game Fest in June, I wanted to see what Cold Iron Studios would do with that formula next.
Then the game shipped, and Steam users hammered it with negative reviews. It has climbed back up to a Mixed rating since.
The Steam crowd wasn’t just mad about the port
A lot of those write-ups focused squarely on the PC version’s technical woes. Others, though, called out a thin story and a generally unpolished feel — and having played it myself, I think they were onto something.
Worse co-op shooters exist; Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League springs to mind. The sequel also makes some genuinely smart improvements on what came before. I just can’t see myself sinking anything close to the hours into it that the original got from me.
Fifteen missions and a Horde mode to keep you busy
There are 15 missions in the story campaign, with each one clocking in at roughly 20 to 30 minutes. When the credits roll, meta-progression tied to every character class plus a Horde mode are there to send you back through those same environments.
Squad size has gone from three players up to four. That’s evolution rather than reinvention, and it does the job.
You will start button-mashing through the dialogue
If you pick this one up, pick it up for how it plays. Storytelling is not remotely where it shines.
On paper, a splinter group of Colonial Marines digging into what went wrong at a mining facility that Wayland Utani walked away from is a fine premise. Whatever interest I had drained away the moment a character started talking. The script strains for comedy and never lands it, and it wasn’t long before I was skipping past the most grating characters, tuning out the plot completely and simply running and gunning my way forward.
The guns, at least, feel great
The shooting carries a satisfying weight and crunch, and the newly added elemental ammo types make firefights a genuine spectacle to look at. The sag comes in level and mission design, which is true of an awful lot of imperfect co-op games. Too often the task amounts to walking from point A to point B and then holding down square on a terminal or a door.
Everything enjoyable happens in the gunfights sandwiched between those chores. Messing around with the weapons and classes was a good time, the new build-your-own multiclass Specialist included. Combining the Machinist’s readily available turret with the Hunter’s stasis bolt, which slows enemies down, shredded incoming waves — and that pairing was effective even before I’d finished unlocking the Specialist perk board.
The connection drops cost me dozens of minutes
During the game’s most frantic moments, the appeal of the first Aliens: Fireteam Elite came flooding back. Then a flat story beat, a tedious objective or an online connectivity problem would arrive and drain it away again.
The technical side held up better on PS5 than it apparently does on PC. Even so, the frame rate dropped more often than I’d tolerate from a brand-new release, and matches were interrupted by connection issues on several occasions, despite a wired Ethernet setup. Every one of those wiped out dozens of minutes of progress.
Cold Iron Studios has pledged to fix some of these issues, which counts for something. It did nothing for my launch weekend.
Who this is actually for
The market is flooded with co-op shooters at the moment, and nothing here is offensive. Even so, I’d only steer you toward it if you specifically want to swap out the legally distinct aliens and androids of a game like Helldivers 2 for Xenomorphs and Synths.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is available now on PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X. The original is still sitting on Xbox Game Pass, and that’s the one I’d send you to first.