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Aliens: Fireteam Elite. There's a lot to love, and a lot to hate.
The good
•The core game-play is fun. It's a third person shooter. Nothing overly complex, just simple alien-gibbing fun.
•The story is exceptional as far as aliens games go. Don't listen to youtube reviewers who trash the story. Yes, the story is minimal if you just blast through missions. But if you explore the levels and gather the hidden intelligence artifacts, you are given a wealth of background information that is both pertinent to the story and awesome world building in general
•The characters aren't overly annoying. Unlike some previous titles in the franchise, you don't get a lot of bombastic one-liners and quips, and no "oorah to ashes". Right up until the last two or so missions, they're all more-or-less professional (if just a tiny bit cartoony in places.)
•The music is great. Early on during the marketing hype for the game, I was worried because the music samples we were shown seemed like they belonged in a HALO Flood sequence more so than an Aliens game. The James Horner style was absent. Luckily, I was wrong. While there are some deviations, the classic Aliens style is very present and the newer stuff compliments it great. You go from rolling drums to riffs which I can only described as "Flight of the Angry Bumble Bee."
•The "perk grid" system is fun to toy around with for RPG lovers and allows you great flexibility in tailoring your marine class.
The bad
First off, I have to address the elephant in the room. During the initial marketing hype for the game, Cold Iron made abundantly clear that all gameplay-related DLC would be free. The post-release monetization of the game was to come in the form of optional cosmetic packs. At some point, they have quietly edited posts making this initial claim. They then announced the upcoming Pathogen DLC, which will not be free. Price is TBA as of the writing of this review. Clever users who did not buy in to the gas-lighting were able to track down (one of) the original posts thanks to internet archives.
Fans of the game and Cold Iron like to hand wave it as people who are upset having just "misunderstood" claims made regarding DLC. However, there was no misunderstanding.
The original claim in this thread (which has since been edited,) posted by developer Honourael, reads as follows:
Q: Will there be DLC or a Season Pass? Will any of the DLC include microtransactions and / or lootboxes?
A: We plan on continuing to support the game after launch with updates and new content. Any purchasable content will be purely cosmetic. We’ll reveal more details about these plans at a later date.
This was later changed to read:
Q: Will there be DLC or a Season Pass? Will any of the DLC include microtransactions and / or lootboxes?
A: Aliens: Fireteam Elite does include a Season Pass which gives a year’s worth of access to our cosmetic DLC packs. These DLC packs release at the same time as our free content releases.
You can find the original post here.
If you do not mind this sort of anti-consumer behavior, then fair enough. Critiques of the game itself are as follows:
•The game, currently, possesses a great many guns; 43 or so. Some of these are starkly better than others, with the worst ones being a hazard to your own team. They went with a quantity over quality approach, and it shows. Balance is a mess. Some weapons are just an absolute pain to use. This isn't just a case of "of course some guns are better than others. That's just how it always goes in games." This is some of the guns actually being detrimental to use. Currently, the game's meta revolves around roughly 6 weapons being usable at maximum difficulty. That's about 14% of the inventory.
•As of writing this review, PC Steam clients are unable to use VOIP. The function simply is not there. The developers have cut that corner for PC, reasoning that PC players can simply use programs like Discord. The issue is that the game uses random matchmaking, which means that the people you run into via matchmaking probably aren't going to be on your Discord friends list. This co-op game that demands communication gives no real communication tools, and it suffers for it especially at higher difficulty levels.
•Some of the classes, the "Doc" in particular, are just poorly designed from the ground-up. It's complicated and probably wouldn't do well to describe the entire situation here, but his healing station can only be recharged by team mates picking up curative items. They can only carry one each, and everyone starts with one. So if the Doc is staying on top of heals, and you reach a supply checkpoint with no one hurt, they are unable to use their healing items so that they can pick up new ones and thus recharge the station. The only recourse is to stop and shoot each other in the face so people can use their kits and then pick up new its.
If it sounds confusing and bizarre, it's because it is. If you plan to play a healer, this isn't the game for you. Other classes also suffer from the general symptoms of power creep and being left behind as new classes come out.
•The game holds your hand to some insulting degrees. From pointing you directly to every objective (discouraging exploration) to calling out supposedly hidden enemies, it's clear that the developers think you're an idiot. My personal "favorite" example of this is that the Prowler, a type of alien that randomly spawns behind pre-set corners of the level to attack players, gives an audio queue that he is present in the form of hissing. You can also outright see him in a lot of cases before you even cross his hiding place. This should be more than enough. But on top of that, your character breaks the fourth wall to inform you of the presence of a prowler in the room. It's dumb. All "elites" are verbally called out as well, whether appropriate or not.
•Difficulty in this game is the definition of artificial. There's not much to say. As you increase difficulty, the only thing that changes are the raw stats of the enemies (particularly hit points, which just balloon beyond the point of absurdity) and a reduction in the player's ammo pool, giving you less resources to deal with shamelessly inflated bullet sponges. The AI doesn't change, there are no real scripting changes, the enemies don't start coming out of different crawl spaces or use new attacks or behaviors. It's just lazy number increases/decreases.
•The enemies are bland outside of their Aliens-relevant skin. You got your spitting enemy, your grappling enemy, your charging enemy - it's all so uncreative and bland.
In conclusion:
The really hard part of this review is choosing my recommendation. From a moral standpoint regarding the DLC drama described earlier, as well as the lazy development, I'm going to say "no". The first year of season content drops were things like the introduction of Quick Play (this wasn't in from the beginning) and attempts at Cross Play culminating in their recent announcement of full Cross Play in July. While we did get a few new classes (which while nice, ultimately weren't needed) and new guns (many of which are mediocre at best,) this first year has largely been Cold Iron scrambling to finish development of an otherwise incomplete product.
Fans of Cold Iron are quick to point out the game's less-than-AAA price tag, at 39.99 USD. While true, you can only hide behind that for so long while incompetent development priorities mount. Animations break, bugs go unfixed, features missing, yadda yadda.
However, if you're just looking for a game to entertain yourself with friends, this will do okay. I guess.