Aliens: Fireteam Elite Review (Polacanthus)
It is a fun game with friends on discord, but it has some major flaws. I will continue playing it, but I can't give this a thumbs up with the many easily avoidable oversights from the devs.
- No in-game voice chat
- No in-game text chat
- Once a player gets disconnected they get replaced with a bot, without any chance to rejoin
- Small connectivity issues quickly result in a disconnect of both other players, meaning you either quit, without getting any XP or you have to finish the rest of the mission with bots
- Those who lose connection to host, won't be able to continue the mission (with bots) and get absolutely 0 XP
- Even during matchmaking, if a player joins and quits, they get replaced with a bot before even starting the mission, so you have to quit matchmaking and start it again, if you want all slots occupied by real players
- Apart from "pings" there is no meaningful way to communicate with your team via quick chat functions etc (thx to no text, voice)
- Without aimin you will always look over the right shoulder, but you can switch shoulders when aiming, which can be stored (a setting you can change) but that results in switching shoulders when aiming vs not aiming, giving you some strong paralax.
- Quite a few sound bugs, that do fix themselves after a while, but often I don't get any weapon sounds from other players
- Performance can be quite a rollarcoaster, even on decent hardware if you don't invest some time in the graphic settings, which do not have any auto detection or presets.
- Story/content is rather lacking. Basically finished the thing in 2 sessions of about 5 hours each in length (that included the pathogen expansion), which OC contained a lot of lobby hogging and restarting thx to the connectivity issues with this game.
- The bots you have to play with if somebody drops out are absolutely horrible. They will constantly get between you and the enemy, which on higher difficulties means dealing massive amounts of friendly fire.
- You can't crouch. Only dedicated cover options will result in your character getting down. In a game with friendly fire on higher difficulties, this is not really a wise decision.
No voice/text and the fact that a disconnect results in slots being blocked by bots are the two most annoying facts about this game, which easily reduced my rating from a 85 to a 65. With a higher budget this game could've probably become one of my favourites, but sadly it has two big problems. So if you have a somewhat instable internet connection, stay away. Disconnects happen rapidly, even if your connection is just gone for a second. Issues I do not have with Deep Rock Galactic.