Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 review – a disappointing step back for the co-op shooter series

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 lands as one of the bigger letdowns of 2026 — a sequel that manages to be worse than its predecessor in almost every meaningful way. The original Aliens: Fireteam Elite was a schlocky but enjoyable co-op shooter; this follow-up is overlong, repetitive, and, most damningly, just bland.

The visual downgrade hits immediately. The environments are sharper in resolution but emptier in atmosphere — long, misty corridors that feel directionless and artless, with the first half of the campaign barely distinguishable from one location to the next. The story fares no better: Weyland-Yutani experiments and Prometheus lore are present, but the revelations are telegraphed hours in advance and handled with a strangely breezy tone. A visit to an Engineer's ship — which should feel genuinely ominous — is undercut by a character chattering over comms about how jealous they are and how much fun you're going to have. Pre-rendered cutscenes look closer to arcade machine filler than anything expected from a PS5 release in 2026. Hub NPCs, who offered optional lore in the first game, now force long stretches of poor voice acting and worse writing on the player before they can skip out. The campaign ends on what the reviewer calls a "wet fart of a climax."

The original Fireteam Elite released in 2021 and found a modest but loyal audience as a straightforward Aliens co-op experience — nothing groundbreaking, but competent and atmospheric enough to satisfy fans of the franchise. Developer Cold Iron Studios had a real foundation to build on, especially given how rich the Alien universe is for this kind of game. Alien Isolation remains the gold standard for the license, but even the messier entries in the series have generally leaned into the iconography. Fireteam Elite 2 largely squanders it.

Performance compounds the problems — the game runs choppily on both base PS5 and PS5 Pro, which is a hard thing to overlook in a co-op shooter where responsiveness matters. Based on this review, fans of the first game should temper expectations significantly; this is a rare sequel that delivers less on nearly every front.