Revisiting Aliens: Fireteam Elite ahead of the sequel

With Cold Iron Studios officially announcing Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 for a Summer 2026 release, I decided to jump back in and finally finish the first game. I originally played this a few years ago with my mates, and it was a genuinely fun time despite the painfully obvious low budget and janky nature of it all. Firing it back up now actually made me realise a lot about its core design. When you stack it up against the slop we get in more recently released co-op games, AFE gets a hell of a lot right.

Customisation that puts modern shooters to shame:

The gun customisation is where this game truly shines. Both the unlocking process and the sheer quantity and quality of the weapon skins absolutely bury recent multiplayer co-op shooters like Helldivers 2 or John Carpenter's Toxic Commando.

The attachments themselves are actually fun to use, which is a bizarrely rare thing in this genre. Yes, they heavily rely on base stat boosts, but many of them feature totally unique effects. Equipping an attachment that triggers an explosive blast on a weakspot hit or gives you a chance on kill to drop a flame AoE makes tweaking your loadout highly addictive. I give the developers massive points for actually trying to make the attachment sandbox interesting and genuinely fun to experiment with.

The undeniable low budget jank:

Obviously, because of the low budget nature of the project, the game has its fair share of problems. You cannot ignore the blatant copy-paste corridor designs that repeatedly pop up throughout the campaigns. Combine that with lingering bugs, uneven content balancing, a tedious progression grind, and those absolutely brain-dead CPU bots, and you get a very bumpy ride.

An exceptional mechanical foundation:

Even with those rough edges, the mechanical foundation they laid for this first game is exceptional. The systems are packed with far more detail than most modern titles bother with. Take the Perk Grid system. Instead of a boring linear skill tree, you get a literal spatial puzzle. You have to carefully slot different shaped modifiers and core perks onto a grid, linking specific nodes to drastically alter how your class abilities function. It forces you to actively think about your build.

Then you have the Challenge Cards. Dropping one of these cards before a mission fundamentally mutates the rules of the level. They throw chaotic variables at your squad like forcing headshot-only damage, jamming weapons, elite kill squad terminators etc. all in exchange for a massive XP and currency payout. Combine that intense replay value with the massive variation in base weapons, each boasting completely distinct stats and fire rates, and you realise they built an incredibly deep mechanical toolkit.