Aliens: Fireteam Elite Review (Morgó)
Aside from it's ability to draw you in with cool environments and sounds, endearing voice acting, sometimes great music and an interesting progression system, this game feels very undercooked even a year after it's full release
1.) You probably don't want to play this in single player - the bots your team is filled out with are borderline useless. As far as I know they can't be customised (meaning you CAN'T choose their class or equipment to round out your team) and they have a nasty habit of running through your firing line.
2.) You probably don't want to play this in multiplayer - crashes and disconnects are very common and there is NO OPTION TO REJOIN your team - an inexcusable flaw in any multiplayer game, in my opinion. This impacts the experience negatively in 2 ways:
> you lose all the rewards you would've gotten for finishing the mission (money, xp, cosmetics, etc.), meaning when it inevitably happens you just lost around 20-40 minutes of your life (happened to me at least 4 times in less than 24 hours of gameplay).
I cannot adequately explain how much this POISONS the entire experience:
I don't want to experiment with builds...
I don't want to take engage with mission modifiers that'd slow me down...
I don't want to explore the levels...
I don't want to stick around in horde mode for another round...
...because I can instantly LOSE IT ALL at the drop of a hat.
> in the ongoing active game you were forcibly removed from: your "player slot" is filled by the aforementioned AI companion that is so goddamn useless, it's possible the remaining players won't be able to finish the run on higher difficulties, meaning effectively YOU JUST DOOMED YOUR TEAM AS WELL.
3.) You probably don't want to play this for long - horde shooters have a tendency to feel repetitive, but Aliens: Fireteam Elite is way worse it that regard than other entries in the genre.
There's just not a lot to do here!
As there's little content, you'll quickly be going back, doing the same scripted missions over and over... and I just don't think this game can compete with L4D's brilliant Game Director for creating "fresh feeling fights" and it CERTAINLY cannot hold a candle to the flexibility of DRG's mission generation and sheer variety of mission objectives. The card system while novel, fails to adequately spice things up (due to a mixture of predictable mission events / how the cards themselves are acquired / the fear of crashes causing you to avoid harder modifiers / and a general lack of base mission objective variety, "you can only do so much with the ingredients you were given", so to speak).
TLDR: While I don't regret my purchase, I wouldn't recommend this game to ANYONE right now.