Cold Iron Studios have recently unveiled its upcoming project, titled Aliens: Fireteam. This third-person, co-op action-adventure title set in the Aliens universe has caught the attention of many gamers, and is scheduled to release on all major consoles and PC this year.
Ever since the first piece of Aliens: Fireteam‘s gameplay was revealed to the world, many fans started drawing comparisons to Valve’s Left 4 Dead games. That’s not a bad comparison to be made. Aliens: Fireteam draws a lot of inspiration from Valve’s co-op shooter, and it’d be best if Fireteam capitalizes on Left 4 Dead‘s existing popularity for its own benefit.
Aliens: Fireteam, much like the Left 4 Dead games is based on co-operating with friends to get through hordes of zombies. Valve’s offering uses much of its co-op mechanics to ensure the team’s survival as it’s very easy for an individual to get surrounded by zombies. While Aliens: Fireteam should also include such mechanics, much of its co-op elements focused on a new-found sense of team roles.
Unlike Left 4 Dead games, Aliens: Fireteam includes team roles in the form of 3 classes — Technician, Demolisher, and Gunner. Each of these classes is assigned to a specific role and would have two special abilities on a cooldown, aiding other teammates in battle. The technician can deploy turrets for support, the demolisher can utilize his arsenal for clearing out hordes, while the gunner seems to be an all-rounder with the most generalized weaponry.
The developers have already stated that the team would need to work together and would need to adhere to one role to get out alive. However, such a new-found emphasis on team roles could mean that the game would lose the Left 4 Dead‘s signature arcade-y feel, but the seemingly forgiving aiming systems could balance such anomalies out. Left 4 Dead‘s co-op mechanics were mostly light on teamwork which worked well enough of the game, but Aliens: Fireteam‘s ability to pump it up a notch means that it resembles and builds upon Valve’s co-op shooter at the same time.
The Left 4 Dead games have a pretty neat trick up their sleeves, known as the Director. The Director is an AI system that tracks the team’s health pools, ammo counts, locations, and skill level in an effort to calculate the survivor’s stress levels. The Director accordingly changes the location of item drops, enemy spawns, and enemy locations to either ramp up the challenge or give a required breather if things get too heated. In addition to this, Left 4 Dead 2‘s Director can also change parts of the level to make sure the team is experiencing an ample amount of “stress.”
While the Aliens: Fireteam wouldn’t create an exact replica of such a system, the developers have stated that they are using AI algorithms to add “variations” to the experience, which would increase the game’s replayability. Much isn’t known about the extent of such a system in Aliens: Fireteam, but the team should definitely try to capitalize on the success garnered by Left 4 Dead‘s Director to make a strong case for the game’s replayability factor.
Valve’s Left 4 Dead games are also famous for the sheer variety of enemies that a team gets to fight during escapes. There are equal parts nimble foes, who’d claw out the survivors if let loose, and other tank-like enemies that require teamwork to take down. In addition to the standard assortment of the Infected, there are a couple of boss enemies as well which require the team’s immediate attention whenever they spawn. Aliens: Fireteam also boasts a variety of enemies, which are termed Xenomorphs. The developers have stated that they have expanded upon the Aliens universe to create 20 different variations of enemies, which should provide some great variety.
In addition to a diverse roster of enemies, the Left 4 Dead games come with a bunch of different campaigns for players to go through. The first game consists of six playable campaigns, while Left 4 Dead 2 ramps it up to 14 playable campaigns. Aliens: Fireteam is also touted to have multiple campaigns, with four available at the game’s launch. While it remains to be seen how the post-launch support pans out, it’s expected that newer campaigns and game modes would definitely be added to the main game sometime soon.
Competition seems to be tough for Aliens: Fireteam, as Back 4 Blood also looms over the horizon with a scheduled release date of June 2021. However, if Aliens: Fireteam uses its similarities to draw out parallels between its obvious inspirations, its nuanced mechanics could carry it forward and possibly garner a decent amount of audience for some time. Alien: Isolation has already set up a high bar for the franchise’s video game adaptations, and Aliens: Fireteam should double down on its best aspects if it wants to carry the torch forward for co-op zombie shooters.
Aliens: Fireteam is scheduled to release on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X in 2021.
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