Aliens: Fireteam Elite scurrying into Season Two (and Xbox Game Pass)
It brings with it a bunch of cosmetics and a new game mode.
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Aliens: Fireteam Eliteis 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 thedev 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 canplip-plipaliens 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 hasa 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 thatthe terrible matchmaking that blighted the game when I reviewed ithas been largely fixed, and it now has a Quickplay feature that throws you into a random mission alongside online players.
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Robert is a freelance writer and chronic game tinkerer who spends many hours modding games then not playing them, and hiding behind doors with a shotgun in Hunt: Showdown. Wishes to spend his dying moments on Earth scrolling through his games library on a TV-friendly frontend that unifies all PC game launchers.
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