In 2021, Cold Iron Studios released Aliens: Fireteam Elite, a budget co-op horde shooter that may have been rough around the edges, but had a solid foundation and plenty of potential. Five years is a long time to wait for a sequel, especially when the first game left so much room for improvement. Sadly, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 feels almost unchanged, barely pushing the series beyond where it started. The bigger problem is that it’s plagued by bugs and technical issues, making it difficult to recommend in a genre that has only become more competitive. In 2026, your time is better spent elsewhere.

The campaign features fifteen missions across four biomes, with each mission clocking in around 30 minutes. Each biome nails the Alien atmosphere well. The Planet-Side Surface Colony, for instance, features abandoned industrial labs where aliens lurk in low lighting and thick fog. The environments do a great job in building tension, though they never reach horror levels since you’re with a squad. The serviceable music is not memorable but helps set the oppressive atmosphere.

Fireteam Elite 2 attempts to make its narrative a bigger deal than the original did, and I wish it hadn’t. The writing and characters are bland enough that I never found myself caring about anyone on screen, and the facial animation is so limited that every character shares the same handful of stiff expressions. The NPCs are also overly chatty during the missions themselves, and the audio mix blasted their voices far above the sounds of the guns. Worse, the game loads all players back to the hub after every mission, and if you or the host leaves, you have to endure a second loading screen.

When playing with randoms, I felt bad holding up the group every time I needed to talk to the story NPCs to unlock the next mission. In many cases, they simply moved on without me, leaving me to sit through a loading screen back to an empty hub. If I weren’t writing this review, I’d have skipped every dialogue scene just to get back to the missions and back to hanging out with friends, since that’s where the actual fun lives.

The objectives are also extremely limited and lack imagination. They essentially boil down to a handful of repetitive activities: kill a horde to move to the next area, press a terminal and kill another horde, kill enemies until a timer runs out, or kill enemies while holding a spot. The shooter is far better when playing with friends than solo. The AI companions and random players get the job done, but without friends to talk to, there’s nothing padding out how thin the objectives actually are, and the repetition becomes hard to ignore.

On standard difficulty, there’s rarely a reason to communicate at all since the strategy essentially boils down to huddling together and killing whatever’s in front of you. That changes on harder difficulties where enemies have more health and deal increased damage. Thankfully, it supports cross-play between PC and consoles, which should help keep matchmaking alive for a longer period after launch. That’s especially important because there isn’t a major draw to replay missions besides farming currency and exp for your classes. Frustratingly, there is no option to join a mission in progress, so you’ll have to replay missions for any friends that disconnect. As a side note, while there is in-game voice chat for coordination, I wish there were also gestures or pre-made messages for players who’d rather not talk.

Regarding the controls, it’s immediately clear that the game was designed for PC first. The menus rely heavily on cursor navigation, with the analog stick essentially standing in for a mouse. D-pad navigation is extremely limited, and apart from a few areas like class selection, the cursor never snaps to an option. Changing settings or your equipment feels needlessly tedious and laggy, which is particularly frustrating when you need to adjust your loadout between missions.

The two notable upgrades Fireteam Elite 2 offers are the jump from a three-person squad to four and a reworked class system. The addition of a fourth player makes a tangible difference when xenomorphs are coming at you from all sorts of different angles, covering additional blind spots that would’ve gone unnoticed. It does a better job at selling the feeling of being part of a squad while opening up more room for class synergy.

The six classes are the strongest element, each offering unique abilities and weapons that will appeal to different playstyles. While most classes equip one primary, signature, and sidearm weapon each, Duelists can equip two primary weapons. Machinists back up the squad with turrets and drones, which help conserve ammo, a genuinely scarce resource you need to scavenge from crates throughout missions. Health packs are also infrequent, so having a Medic in the team is vital for staying alive as the missions get harder. Hunters are great at buffing the fireteam’s attacks and good at eliminating major threats with long-range weaponry. 

My go-to strategy for clearing most encounters was to have a Medic drop a Trauma Station to create a healing radius as a medic while the Machinist deploys turrets around it. The whole squad would then huddle in the area around it with supporting fire from all four players. This made fireteams nearly unstoppable while also trivializing most encounters. The best class addition is the Specialist, which lets you mix and match abilities from classes you’ve already leveled. Having a Medic’s Combat Stims and a Machinist’s Sentry Turrets on the same build feels rewarding, and I greatly appreciated this addition.

There are numerous guns, all adapted directly from the Alien films. You can further modify each towards your playstyle by increasing the ammo capacity, applying different scopes, and augmenting them with buffs. It’s a highly customizable system that encourages player choice, offering various bonuses for tradeoffs, but it’s all marred by an overcomplicated UI and the recurring poor cursor navigation. 

While the builds are solid, the gunplay itself is unsatisfying. The difference between a flamethrower and an assault rifle is obvious enough, but the assault rifles themselves felt nearly identical in my hands. The audio design of every weapon also lacks any real punch and falls flat next to the movies’ iconic sound design. That carries over to the DualSense too, where every assault rifle rumbles the same, and the triggers offer zero resistance. The biggest factor going into the unsatisfying gunplay, however, stems from the enemies themselves, as some of them feel like bullet sponges; I don’t feel any reactive impact when shooting, so I’m just spraying them mindlessly until they’re dead.

Fireteam Elite 2 also suffers from performance issues and bugs. The frames routinely drop when moving from one area to the next and when too many enemies are on screen. On more than one occasion, an alien got stuck in a wall, and the fireteam was unable to progress the mission until I tracked it down and killed it. Other times, interacting with a terminal was supposed to advance the mission but didn’t, forcing a restart of an already lengthy level. When starting a mission, players would also T-pose and teleport across the room for a few minutes. None of these issues make the game remotely unplayable, but they are worth noting.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 Review: Final Verdict

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 only provides small improvements over its predecessor. The jump to a four-person squad and the new Specialist class are genuine improvements, and playing with a well-drilled fireteam to clear hordes is still satisfying, at least with friends on the mic. Everything else is buried under cluttered menus, unsatisfying gunplay, a mediocre story, and a handful of bugs. If you’ve got three friends and low expectations, there’s still a fun weekend to be had here, but solo players should let this one drift off into space.

The post Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 (PS5) Review: More Bugs Than Xenomorphs appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.