Previews
[Preview] ‘Aliens: Fireteam’ is Taking Players on Another Bug Hunt
While Alien: Isolation did help scrub the unpleasantness of Aliens: Colonial Marines from Xenofans minds, there’s always been some regret that we didn’t get to see a really good modern multiplayer game with all the Aliens trimmings.
Cold Iron Studios is trying to change that.
Aliens: Fireteam is a third-person, 3-player cooperative survival game that sees a return to a world of Colonial Marines and Alien swarms, but not quite as we know it. Set 23 years after the events of Alien 3, the Xenomorphs are no longer the secret they once were, and outbreaks of the chitinous buggers have become a common occurrence.
This is where you come in. As a fresh-faced member of one of the Colonial Marines’ titular fireteams, you’re sent to human-inhabited locations on four different planets where the Xenos have invaded, and are tasked with being a glorified pest controller.
Freed from the connection to Ripley and her story, Fireteam is putting the player into the world of Alien with a fresh start. You’ll begin by creating your own personal Colonial Marine, with customizations and upgrades to them and their gear remaining a key factor as you play and progress. There are 5 classes to pick from, which give you a specific job to do in tandem with your other two squad members. Want to be the Marine that patches the squad up? Hacks terminals, doors, and systems? Or just obliterates swathes of drooling Aliens? Chances are, Fireteam has the job for you.
During the preview, we were given a brief taste of the game in action with a late-in-the-mission siege scenario. Cold Iron Studios noted that each of the four campaigns has three overall missions with some manner of variation in encounters and smaller objectives occurring each time you play, so this siege could easily have turned out differently.
As it was, the three-person team cautiously navigated the pipe-laden corridors of a refinery, heads always on a swivel, and rightly so. Xenomporhs leap from the shadows in various directions, (handily they’re outlined faintly so you’re not just in an inky black nightmare) seemingly catching the team off guard on several occasions, leading to jolting bursts of pulse rifle fire and that familiar hissing screech as insectile bodies explode in showers of bright yellow/green acid.
That acid will be something to worry about, especially on higher difficulties where the consequences get to be a lot closer to what you’d expect from fighting the Hive. On those higher difficulty settings, Cold Iron Studios say that acid splashes will burn, friendly fire will be deadly, and getting surprised by a facehugger will prove more final if you fail to stop it getting intimate with your poor Marine’s mouth. The game will be a challenge, but the sliding scale of difficulty will allow for a more forgiving time with far fewer unwanted death kisses from those egg-dwelling bastards.
As the demo continued, the squad reached an elevator door, and yep, you guessed it, there’s gonna be a bit of a wait for the elevator itself arrives. So begins the siege as the squad sets up shop for an incoming Xeno onslaught. One Marine had a shock trap to stun the oncoming horde, another had an automated sentry gun akin to the one seen in Aliens, and this kit helped keep the Xenos at bay as the clock counted down toward the elevator’s descent. Once the elevator door opened, the squad hurried to get in whilst still holding off the Aliens. Unfortunately, one member was downed just outside the door, but he managed to crawl his way into the elevator whilst his buddies continued to defend the slowly-closing door. By the skin of their teeth, the squad makes it.
Just a taste of what Aliens: Fireteam could be, but it certainly gave a fair indication of the mood Cold Iron Studios is going for. This is undoubtedly the Aliens to Isolation’s Alien in terms of action and style. It’s comforting to see the San Diego-based development team know that longevity will be important to the game’s chances, and with 20 enemy types (11 of which are Alien types including an acid-bombing variant known as the Burster), customizable Marines, and variance to the set missions, it seems to have a strong start ahead of it.
As with Alien Isolation, it would be great to have more fresh stories and visit new places in this universe. While the narrative doesn’t appear to be quite as much of a focus for Fireteam as it was for Isolation, there are undoubtedly fresh places to visit, and perhaps an interesting look at a world of Aliens outside the cycle of Ripley.
I think the key to Aliens: Fireteam working will be in the Aliens themselves. Thankfully it’s not looking like it will be just a mindless swarm and the odd boss fight, as there’s other types with their own behaviors. The developers noted the Drone Alien will effectively play hit and run all throughout a level, constantly popping up to surprise you at the worst possible time unless you take them out early. When quizzed on what the toughest enemy is, the developers said that the lowly facehugger has the most potential for ruining your day with their small stature making it hard to spot them in the dark and the chaos. As such, player tactics should be more than just point and shoot.
Horror-led multiplayer games look like they’re having a big year, with Fireteam joining the likes of Evil Dead: The Game, and Back4Blood. The competition will likely mean one doesn’t stay the course as long as the others even if all turn out well, but having a choice of horror shooters like this is very welcome indeed.
Aliens: Fireteam is out this Summer on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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