Aliens: Fireteam - Left 3 Dead with Xenos

Drinking bird sighted! Though sadly not animated in-game.

There’s a ton of little details I love in this game. Like the Alien queen painted onto the cards here:

And the artificial person badass that accompanies you on solo adventures:

Plus how excited the pilot is to see me:

What the heck is going on with the back of your head? It looks like a facehugger got confused.

-Tom

Facehugger? What, you guys can’t tell that’s a female Predator with an updo? She dyed.

what does the special (left L1 trigger) for a basic marine do? The R1 throws a grenade and then it is on a timer. For the L1 the screen turns green-ish for a couple of seconds, but I couldn’t figure out what it does.

They really took the sounds from the movie. I wished the alien scanner sound would be more prominent.

It’s a strong damage boost effect (which I think works for the whole team?)… very useful for taking down the elites.

Massively buffs your fire and reload rates. You can hover over perks on the perk customisation screen (that’s the tetris grid thing) to see what they do.

I too feel the scanner isn’t anywhere near prominent enough. Amongst other things, it really lacks that little tock style sound when there’s nothing about. It’s a lot closer to Halo’s radar than anything from Aliens really, and I doubt that’s an accident, but you’d have hoped they’d at least make it something you could alter somewhat in the audio options.

For all its many (many) faults, Colonic Marinade had better sound design than this. Who can forget this amazing sequence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8SzBhjqaQ

You can get a lot of info from the motion detector. Anytime it beeps, there’s an enemy incoming. It shows all enemies within 40 meters, except for ambushes (those are announced with a vocal cue). It also lets you see patterns during the tower defense sequences. It shows the bearing of enemies who are out of range along the outer edge. And all signals, in-range and out-of-range, are color coded. Regular enemies are white, enemies with special abilities are green, and elites are red or orange. I think there’s even a separate color (blue?) for the drones that continually attack and retreat into the walls until you kill them.

But you’re right that it’s like the scanner in other shooters, with a couple of important differences. The first is that it picks up signals behind you, but it’s can’t read distance unless it’s pinging a target in the 180 degree arc in front of you. So you have to constantly look around to update your situation. More importantly, it comes into play a lot more when you’re not playing on casual or standard; on any of the harder difficulty levels, enemies aren’t highlighted when you bring up your sights. This means it can be a lot harder to spot them, so you’ll need to use a combination of the motion detector, your knowledge of the level geometry, and your good old-fashioned eyeballs.

Micro changes in air density, @fox.ferro!

-Tom

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the scanner as-is is certainly very useful. Mostly I just miss the constant pinging SFX from the movie and most of the other Aliens games. Visually it’s great, perhaps lacking in some of the fluff for the sake of UI clarity, just feels a bit too muted audially. The constant pinging adds a lot to the atmosphere, especially in the quieter moments, and I miss it. Though that said I can understand some probably find it annoying.

So no matter how chaotic some of the fights can get, you never get this sorta thing going on;

Maybe someone can mod it in at some point, who knows.

I meant the sound effect, too. Should be a tick louder.

When I am shooting, sometimes a red x or cross is popping up, what does that mean? Alien is dead? Shot missed?

Also, are hats/helmets only cosmetic?

Red X is a dead alien (so start shooting another one) and if you hear that little du-dun stab SFX at the same time, good on you, you got a headshot kill! (still go shoot another one).

Helmets/hats are cosmetic but a dapper facehugger coiffure is all the rage with the spaceladies anyway.

thanks, just watched a video. You can actually disable the floating red x in the settings. Not sure if I should. Playing on PS5.

I just saw the perks grid, wow. That looks very flexible. Maybe this will replace EDF for me because I don’t like shooting ants and spiders. Although, the Aliens kinda look like insects. But they look less creepy to me than spiders…

Some may prefer the red X off but, honestly, having it on tends to save on ammo. I do find it a consistent problem in swarm shooters trying to read whether or not one target in a pile of corpses is or isn’t alive. May not be realistic but Fireteam is stingy with the ammo on harder difficulties anyway and I’m grateful for the inclusion. Plus it’s optional! Doesn’t get better than that.

The motion detector certainly can get lost in the background, can’t it? The audio balance in this game is a bit of a mess. I know some folks have complained about the muted weapon sounds (although I think that’s an intentional part of giving different weapons different personalities). The trademark alien squealing is also kind of muted. And then there’s the roar of the elites, which is a cue that they’re arriving and later – and even louder – a cue that they’ve died. Why is that so loud compared to everything else?

I’m no audio expert, but to my laymen’s ears, the sound edit could have used another pass (i.e. the audio equivalent of “tightening up the graphics on level three”). And I can only imagine what a noise soup it turns into if you’ve got the godawful generic music playing.

Mostly I agree. But there’s a set piece near the end of the game in a room with tubes running along the ceiling. I vividly remember seeing the line of incoming signals, looking in the direction, and seeing nothing. That happens a lot, and you quickly learn, “ah, they’re on the ceiling”. But in this instance, I look up at the ceiling, and there’s nothing there! Shortly thereafter, I’m jumped by aliens.

It was only later, replaying the level, that I realized there were coming in along the top of the tube, where I couldn’t see them. That was a really cool moment and a perfect example of how this game can do things World War Z or Left 4 Dead can’t.

This game has too many hats and not enough hairdos. It’s virtually impossible to roll up Space Sarah Palin in this thing.

-Tom

You know, @newbrof, I think you’ve put your finger on what this game reminds me of. It’s like an Aliens-themed EDF with a more concise and manageable swarm structure. It’s currently my go-to for a shooter about shooting a bunch of stuff that just needs shooting.

-Tom

I loved EDF until I just could not see any more ants or spiders… I hope I don’t get the same level of disgust with Aliens. But I love the movies, so …

is playing with randos actual fun? Is there a rating system to get paired? I guess you don’t want to mix noobs with experts…

Only in that it’ll let you get through the harder difficulty levels. Which, in my opinion, are an exponentially better way to play this game. But I’ve had some great matches with randos…when I can find them.

Sadly, the matchmaking in this is inexplicably balkanized so players will never find each other’s games; Aliens: Fireteam Elite will be utterly dead in less than a month. To get the most from it, you’re going to have to wrangle your friends into playing. And even then, they’re going to have to stick with it long enough to unlock the harder difficulty levels if you really want to see what the game has to offer. :(

As a multiplayer game, it’s an absolute, unmitigated, shameful clusterfuck.

-Tom

I know, right? What the hell were they thinking not supplying a quickplay option. Worst is they’ve said it’s “not a priority” for them to implement which is… so stupid it beggars belief.

You’d think every multiplayer game designer would have “don’t fragment the playerbase” as their top consideration for every decision made but apparently not here. Why isn’t there at least a “I don’t give a shit” option for challenge cards enabled/disabled?

I’m somewhat fortunate in that I bought three copies of the game and haven’t really had to search for players. I said above that, hey, here’s a game that for once seems to get the multiplayer working at launch, and while I’d still stand by that to some degree it simply didn’t occur to me at that time that it’d lack something like quickplay! It’d be as bizarre and stupid as if they’d put it out without mouse support.

I’m grateful that they seem to be doing more with post-launch stuff than, say, Outriders, since they’re putting out new content tomorrow (8th) I think, but if they have a lick of sense they’d drop everything and focus on getting actual flexible matchmaking in there.

100% agreed. It’s already become occasionally difficult to find players at peak times in the UK. People will bitch about that, which will put others off, and the player base will fall like a brick. The devs are idiots.

I’ve played several matches and only once was I able to get a human team mate.

Where are they even communicating with the player base? I’ve seen pretty much no news, updates, or announcements about this game, and as far as I can tell, the developers can’t even be arsed to do patch notes.

-Tom