To judge this sequel you have to remember what the first one was, because almost every change answers a specific complaint.
Fireteam Elite, in 2021, was a third-person shooter for three players, somewhere between World War Z and Gears of War. You rolled to dodge, you took cover, you blind-fired, and you carried three weapons.
Five classes, each locked to its kit: the Gunner with a rifle, the Demolisher on heavy weapons, the Technician on turrets and electric coils, the Doc with a rifle and pistol and a deployable trauma station, the Recon you had to unlock by finishing the campaign. Customisation, on the other hand, was generous: reflex sights, extended magazines, flash hiders, and upgrades that could turn a turret into a heavy cannon.
Twelve missions of twenty to forty minutes, plus a Horde mode. And three flaws everybody noted.
The level design was lazy, with a mechanical alternation between narrow corridor and semi-open arena, and a lack of objective variety.
The bestiary was scripted. The synthetics with sniper rifles or shields, the genetically modified xenomorphs, all of it only appeared at the moments the story had planned.
And the ally AI was a disaster. The bots charged straight in and you spent the mission reviving them, which made solo play painful as soon as the difficulty climbed.
What worked best, oddly, was not the missions. It was the World War Z-style survival phases, when the squad had to prepare, lay traps and hold a point together.
Hold on to that last point, because the sequel learned from it.
You go from three marines to four. It sounds incidental. It is not.
At three, squad composition was a permanent compromise: you chose between healing, crowd control and damage, and always left one role out. At four, coverage becomes complete, which lets the studio harden encounters without making them unfair.
That is what it has done. Enemies are faster and more cunning, they flank more, and coordination is no longer a bonus but a condition.
This is the big piece. The five original classes have not been rebalanced, they have been rebuilt, with new names and new tools. And above all, the per-class weapon lock is gone, replaced by hybrid loadouts. That was the first game’s main rigidity, and it disappears.
The Marauder takes over the Demolisher’s heavy role. A shoulder-mounted Blast Cannon and Titan Rockets whose effects can be configured. Its interesting perks are Rampage, which stacks speed and firepower bonuses on every kill, and Reactive Charges, which knocks back in melee. Where the Demolisher had one big gun, this one has a choice of explosives.
The Duelist replaces the Gunner, and it is the best idea of the bunch: two primary weapon slots, with mid-mission swapping between them. The fixed rifle-plus-close-quarters pairing is gone. Its Burst Configuration adapts between a Fragment and a Precision variant, and its Stay on Target perk ramps damage on consecutive hits.
The Machinist succeeds the Technician but swings to the offensive. Energy weapons, a modifiable Sentry Turret, a flying Bodyguard drone. Its Cross-Platform Synergy perk gives damage resistance to allies who stay near the turret. The shift in philosophy is clear: the Technician placed an object and stepped back, the Machinist fights at the same time.
The Hunter takes over the Lancer’s role and focuses on control and weak points. Particle Pulse and Stasis Bolt with freeze variants, plus the No Mercy and No Rest perks that lean on stopping power. It is the class that sets the pace of an encounter.
The Medic follows the Doc and becomes life insurance rather than an infirmary. Its Combat Stims come in several variants, and its Advanced Trauma Station can upgrade into a buffing or a poison station. Bedside Manner and Surgeon’s Hands speed up revives and stop you being knocked back while picking a teammate up. It is the soundest design change: the Doc healed afterwards, the Medic keeps the squad standing while it advances.
Here is what did not exist at all in the first game.
The Specialist is a sixth class, but it is not a sixth job. It is a buildcrafting class, unlocked late in progression, that lets you mix the abilities, weapons and perks of the other five into a single marine.
The mechanism is well judged: you only draw on what you have already unlocked by levelling the other classes. So the Specialist is not a shortcut, it is an end-of-road reward. Demonstrations show assemblies along the lines of the Machinist’s Bodyguard drone, the Hunter’s particle beam and the L56A3 Smartgun in the same loadout.
It is the smartest answer to the first game’s problem. Where Fireteam Elite assigned you an identity, the sequel lets you build one, and specifically fill whatever hole exists in your friends’ squad that evening.
Add customisable sidearms, considerably wider perk grids and deeper weapon augments. The first game was already generous here; the sequel digs.
Remember: what worked best in the first game was holding a position. The studio understood that and made Horde a full pillar, with several dedicated maps at launch instead of a mode grafted on afterwards.
The format changes too. Where you had to hold ten waves before cashing out, you now play in rounds of five waves, each running roughly twelve to fifteen minutes, with rewards that grow the deeper you go.
The change looks technical, it is structural. A fifteen-minute session can be agreed between two people on a Sunday evening without blocking out an hour. And choosing to push on or leave with the loot becomes a real, repeated decision instead of one exit point a long way off.
Challenge cards, which altered a mission’s rules in the first game, return with more depth.
The bestiary has expanded considerably, and more importantly it no longer just shows up at scheduled moments. The variety of new xenomorphs forces you to stay mobile and watch what comes in from the sides, where the first game could be played by holding a corridor. That is the most noticeable improvement in the hands.
On equipment, two additions change habits. Stun batons finally give an answer to melee, which was the first game’s dead spot whenever something crossed the line. And pyro and electric ammo exist to whittle the front down before it overruns you.
Technically it is clean. It looks good, the animation is careful, the weapons carry weight, the corridors have the right texture of damp metal. Cold Iron Studios delivered the sequel it was asked for.
One reservation, and it comes straight from the first game: solo play depended entirely on bot teammates who charged straight in. Going to four increases the number of bots to babysit if you play alone. That is the thing to check first in the coming weeks.
Everything above describes a genuine sequel. The problem is not there.
The Alien universe rests on an idea science fiction rarely dares: humanity is alone and it has plateaued. You travel slowly, in hypersleep, aboard industrial ships that leak. Three powers share colonised space in a cold war that does not speak its name, and one of them, the Three World Empire, was born of the merger of Britain’s Weyland and Japan’s Yutani. Weyland-Yutani holds a seat in its parliament, alongside the British and Japanese prime ministers. The corporation did not infiltrate the state, it founded it.
In that setting the xenomorph is not an enemy, it is a strategic accident. Recall the canon’s numbers: in Alien, one specimen kills six crew out of seven. In Aliens, it takes an entire colony turned into a hive to justify sending a detachment, which is decimated in the first half hour. Everything rests on two properties: the creature is rare and very nearly impossible to kill cleanly.
Remove the scarcity and nothing is left. A creature you drop in batches of thirty is no longer a secret three superpowers compete over, it is vermin. And there is something delicious about selling specialised ammunition to whittle down the ranks of a beast whose blood eats through three decks of steel.
The counter-argument exists and should be given: the original sin dates from 1986, Cameron himself turned the single monster into a swarm, and the first Fireteam Elite already owned up to drawing from that film rather than Ridley Scott’s. Except Cameron showed his marines lose immediately, which preserved the threat, and he produced exactly one swarm sequence in the whole film. For him the swarm is the tipping point; here it is the gameplay loop.
Six. It splits two things that do not weigh the same.
What lifts it, and it is substantial: classes rebuilt rather than rebalanced, the end of the weapon lock that was the first game’s main rigidity, a Duelist that swaps primary weapons mid-mission, a Machinist that fights instead of placing an object, a Medic that keeps you standing instead of repairing afterwards, a Specialist class that rewards progression by letting you build your own marine, a Horde mode promoted to main content and cut into short rounds with real cash-out decisions, a bestiary that finally punishes standing still, and a move to four that makes coordination mandatory. This is a real sequel, not an update sold at full price.
What drags it down: a reading of the licence that contradicts what makes it unique. Scarcity replaced by numbers, invulnerability by the right ammo type, fear by rate of fire. And one of the richest political settings in popular science fiction reduced to wallpaper.
If you want a solid co-op shooter to play as a four, it does the job and does it better than its predecessor on just about every measurable point.
If you love Alien for what Alien says, none of these improvements will settle the unease. And there is no difficulty setting against that.
We are discussing it on the InsertCoins Discord, where Alien unites everyone until somebody mentions Prometheus.