Aliens: Fireteam Elite came out around this time in 2021. As online co-op shooters go, it was a solid Aliens-inspired take on the genre, but it felt rough in places and offered little post-campaign content beyond replaying stages with different Marine classes. Five years and several DLC releases later, we have a sequel. While it makes some improvements, it often feels like little has fundamentally changed.

You play as a nameless Colonial Marine transferred to the USS Endeavor. After a distress call comes from LV-558, a scientist reports being infected with something mysterious. The fireteam from the previous game was sent to investigate but has since gone silent. As the leader of a second fireteam, you're tasked with rescuing them and investigating the Storr's Boon mining facility to discover what's happening beyond the xenomorph infestation.

Despite being a sequel, no knowledge of the first game is required. The story is straightforward, with the only significant connection being the characters you rescue. They appear in cut scenes and occasionally speak to you, but don't expect much more. The story ultimately exists to give you an excuse to shoot things, offering little beyond what the movies have already established.

Like the first game, you create a character and assign them a class. There are six classes, although the returning ones have been renamed. The Technician is now the Machinist, relying on traps and turrets for additional firepower. The Doc becomes the Medic, a dedicated healer who now has a portable triage station capable of treating more teammates at once. The Marauder carries heavy weapons, including the iconic Smart Gun, and adds a shoulder-mounted cannon to its arsenal. The Duelist specializes in melee combat, increasing damage at close range. The Hunter provides crowd control by freezing areas. Finally, the Specialist unlocks after leveling several other classes and combines abilities from them. For example, you can heal teammates while using the Marauder's shoulder cannon to hold back a horde. The Specialist's major drawback is that it can only use abilities you've already unlocked, making it most useful late in the game or during campaign replays with other players. More broadly, the class changes don't feel substantial enough to make these roles seem genuinely new.

The campaign consists of roughly 15 missions across four environments. Objectives vary, but most of your time is spent fighting waves of xenomorphs. Alongside standard drones and eventually a queen, you'll encounter stronger red drones, acid-spitting variants, and other specialized enemies. Synthetics return as another enemy type, fighting more like humans but without particularly advanced tactics. Their presence adds some strategic consideration because weapons have elemental properties. Electrical attacks are effective against synthetics, while thermal attacks work best against xenomorphs.

The biggest combat change is the addition of a fourth fireteam member. More firepower, coverage, and opportunities for revival are obvious benefits. Cross-play, which was added to the original through a patch, is now included by default, giving the sequel a larger potential player base. The original three-player setup arguably encouraged more strategic class selection, but the versatility of a four-person team is a worthwhile trade-off.

Despite that extra slot, Fireteam Elite 2 remains designed primarily around online multiplayer. You can play solo, but you must select a private session before starting each mission. Empty slots are filled by synthetic teammates, ensuring you're always playing with a full squad. The bots are generally competent. They'll kill plenty of enemies, revive you when you're downed, and provide cover while you're opening doors or using a welding torch. Unfortunately, they frequently wander into your line of fire or block your view when you're aiming. Considering how much shooting the game requires, this happens often enough to become a persistent annoyance. It was a problem in the first game, too, and the fact that it remains five years later makes it even more frustrating.

That issue is symptomatic of a larger problem: Fireteam Elite 2 often feels like the same game with a new name. Level layouts and mission flow are largely unchanged. There are still jump-scares, but you'll often know when an ambush is coming before your scanner even detects it. The renamed classes and minor ability changes don't make the roles feel meaningfully different, while most firefights still boil down to holding off waves of enemies whose primary tactic is rushing toward you.

There are some branching paths and variations in encounters, but the core formula hasn't evolved much. It's still fun to mow down hordes of xenomorphs, and the sequel certainly aims to be bigger, but after a five-year wait, the changes don't feel substantial enough to justify an immediate return for most players.

The lack of variety extends to the post-campaign content. You can replay campaign missions to unlock class perks, and there are more horde-mode maps than before. However, the campaign already feels like an extended horde mode, so repeatedly fighting waves of enemies quickly loses its appeal. If the sequel follows the original's roadmap, additional DLC will likely bring more maps and potentially another campaign, but the base game doesn't offer much reason to keep playing after the main story unless you're a completionist.

Technical problems make the sequel feel even less polished than its predecessor. Despite cross-play, finding a match can take a while, with connections sometimes slow to establish. Once you're in, performance is generally fine. However, a cut scene near the end of the prologue causes the game to crash on both Windows and Linux. Enabling FSR or DLSS bypasses the crash, but only for that scene; other cut scenes work normally without upscaling.

The crashes expose another problem with the game's reconnect system. After a network issue or crash, the game attempts to reconnect you to your previous session, but I've never had that process successfully restore a game. Although the sequel saves more frequently than its predecessor, that doesn't help much when a failed reconnect forces you to restart the entire mission.

Visually, Fireteam Elite 2 is barely an improvement. Put the two games side by side, and they look remarkably similar, from the particle effects and camera angles to the character models. The biggest difference is the lighting. The sequel is considerably darker without becoming difficult to see, making the flashlight more important and giving the game a stronger horror atmosphere while retaining the action-oriented feel of the films.

The audio, meanwhile, feels like a downgrade. Many sound effects are muted or missing entirely. The pulse rifle, for example, sounds lower quality than it did in the first game, and several other iconic effects suffer from the same problem. It's particularly strange because the original handled these sounds well. The music remains appropriately faithful to the franchise, and the voice acting is fine, although neither can completely compensate for some unlikable characters.

Linux performance is otherwise solid. Steam Deck players can run the game using its default settings, although tweaking them is worthwhile. The default configuration uses the Epic preset with FSR set to Balanced. Surprisingly, the game manages around 30fps with occasional hitching. Dropping to Medium increases performance to roughly 55-60fps, while the visual downgrade is minor enough that the game still looks good on the Deck's screen. Battery life is the bigger concern: A full charge lasts around 90 minutes, which is enough for perhaps two missions if your team moves quickly.

Your opinion of Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 will largely depend on whether you've played the first game. Newcomers will find a straightforward co-op shooter that captures the spirit of Aliens, albeit with technical issues, repetitive combat, and little reason to continue after the campaign unless they're completionists or simply love blasting xenomorphs. For returning players, the fourth fireteam slot is welcome, but it doesn't make up for the lack of meaningful changes elsewhere. After five years, Fireteam Elite 2 feels more like an expanded version of its predecessor than a true sequel. It's not a bad game, but more substantial gameplay changes, technical fixes, and a sale would make it much easier to recommend.

Score: 6.0/10