Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a pretty alright game: not too ambitious, not too clever, but taking the swarm shooter blueprint from your Left 4 Deads and Vermintides and executing it well enough. Now, the co-op squaddie shooter is getting a Season Two launch on December 14.
The highlight among the freebies inaugurating Season Two is a new game mode, Point Defence. Based on the dev blog description, it's a wave survival mode in which you must defend and repair three separate control points. Between each wave you get to use Fabrication Points to buy consumables and defensive bits like turrets and traps. Sounds like fun, even if it does sound kind of similar to the game's existing Horde mode.
Other than that, Season Two will also bring a bunch of cosmetics, weapons, attachments, and a Lifetime Stats feature that lets you keep track of how many xenos you splatter with each kit.
If you're really committed, you can grab the Nostromo Salvage Pack for $10, which contains 25 cosmetic items from the original movie (here's hoping it includes the original xeno costume worn by Bolaji Badejo in the movie, so you can plip-plip aliens while looking like one of them). As with all the paid DLC, the Nostromo Salvage Pack is free for owners of the Deluxe Edition and the Endeavor Pass.
All this should give Aliens: Fireteam Elite a boost to coincide with its arrival on Xbox Game Pass on December 14. After quite a big opening month, the game currently only has a few hundred concurrent players on Steam, who will soon be joined by the Game Pass battalion.
The fact that it's coming to Game Pass just a few months after release could suggest the game's not performing as well as publisher Focus Home Interactive had hoped. It does beg the question why crossplay isn't being implemented, especially in a co-op game where there's no competitive advantage to be gained by playing with keyboard and mouse.
On the bright side, it's good to see that the terrible matchmaking that blighted the game when I reviewed it has been largely fixed, and it now has a Quickplay feature that throws you into a random mission alongside online players.
Gear up, Marines!
