Previews
[Preview] ‘Aliens Fireteam Elite’: In Space, No One Can Hear You Emote
While many horror fans would say the history of the Alien film franchise is a bit scattershot, its video game efforts are perhaps even more erratic. One of the series’ low points is Aliens: Colonial Marines, a 2013 Gearbox shooter that failed to do just about anything right, and its lasting blemish on the IP have left this summer’s Aliens Fireteam Elite with some skepticism from fans.
Distancing itself from the survival horror aspects of the beloved Alien Isolation, Fireteam Elite is much more akin to Colonial Marines, but after several hours with a good portion of the game, it feels like a much more competent shooter, albeit maybe still a curious use of the franchise.
In teams of three, players using their own customized avatars will star in Cameron-style Aliens action setpieces. The game wants you to play in co-op, but it will always fill out a team with one or two somewhat helpful AI companions as needed. The first campaign takes place aboard a spaceship not unlike those we’ve seen in the movies for decades and Cold Iron Studios nails the look in a way that immediately excites me. Analog computers and their scrawling green text, Working Joes ominously hibernating in their docking stations, and ample vents built into the framework of this first campaign’s spaceship setting make for a familiar and faithful scene.
It’s moody, but it’s quickly apparent this isn’t going to offer the slow-crawling tension of Scott’s original movie. In just seconds after I exited the starting area, I was greeted by hordes of xenomorphs. Most of the time, they were a basic type, with a slightly smaller frame and spawning in packs of a dozen or more. There were other types too, like a suiciding xeno that gets in close and explodes on players like an H.R. Giger-branded homing missile. Another spit its famous acid spit from a distance. Another stalked from behind corners or overhead and pounced on players, demanding they complete a QTE unless their teammates can assist.
The archetypes sound familiar, no doubt. The easy comparison to make for what Aliens Fireteam Elite plays like is – you guessed it – Left 4 Dead. I play a lot of games of that lineage, and admittedly I do grow wary (and even weary) of making the comparison when it can feel like low-hanging fruit, but sometimes the inspiration is too obvious to ignore. Fireteam Elite wants to be relentless, and in that regard, it succeeds. The past decade of Left 4 Dead-likes have passed or failed largely based on their ability to deliver proper pacing. Too much too fast, and it can feel pray-and-spray, but too few enemies mean failing to keep players on their toes.
Fireteam Elite betrays its franchise’s well-established rules of how even a single xenomorph is a catastrophic threat in favor of throwing hundreds of aliens at teams level by level. While this aspect is awkward and hard to ignore for the series’ purists, I was able to look past it once I saw how well-rounded Fireteam Elite is as a modern shooter.
Shooting from third-person feels great in Fireteam Elite, with optional waist-high cover available all over, though I didn’t find too much use in it, given how the aliens swarm from all over most of the time. Characters are split into classes, each given their own secondary items that use cooldown timers to reload. There’s even an emote menu with a few that are already incongruous with the typical Alien universe — is now the best time for a dance-off? Fireteam Elite is a modern co-op shooter first and foremost, and an Alien game second, and a deep menu of unlockable perks, attachments, weapons, and cosmetics reveal a long tail for this game once it launches in a few weeks. I think, ultimately, people coming to the game as merely Alien fans will need to squint to appreciate it as a part of their cherished franchise.
It’s going to take some appreciation for the genre, not just the familiar monsters roaming the ducts, but anyone who does enjoy both, as I do, I think they’ll quickly get sucked into the game’s reward dispersal schedule. It feels like pass or fail on any given mission, you’re always unlocking something new – or just about to, teasing you to go back in for another round. One of my favorite features is a perk system that demands players shuffle equipped bonuses like a puzzle akin to Resident Evil‘s inventory interface. I had several perks I earned, a few more I bought with the game’s free currency, and it was fun trying to squeeze them into my build like Tetris.
This is as unlike Alien Isolation as Aliens is to Alien, but Cold Iron overcomes skepticism with strong core mechanics, levels rich in homage despite a jarringly different pace, and an upgrade tree with countless branches for all types of players. It won’t be a game dedicated to its source material, but with about a month until launch, it feels like it could be a fun co-op shooter that just happens to have some famous aliens clawing at you and your teammates.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite preview code for PC provided by the publisher.
Aliens: Fireteam Elite is out August 24, 2021, for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, 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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