Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a three-player cooperative third-person survival shooter developed by Cold Iron Studios and released on August 24, 2021. Set 23 years after the original Alien trilogy, the game follows Colonial Marines from the UAS Endeavor as they respond to outbreaks across the Katanga refinery, LV-895, and Engineer ruins.
Players build specialized fireteams, fight through swarms of Xenomorphs and hostile synths, and customize their loadouts with classes, weapons, attachments, perk boards, and challenge cards. The game focuses on replayable missions, escalating pressure, and squad coordination under constant threat.
Each mission sends a three-marine fireteam into hostile environments packed with chokepoints, ambushes, and large enemy waves. Squads can be formed with other players or with AI teammates, and success depends on movement, lane control, class synergy, and concentrated fire.
The game supports multiple difficulty levels, challenge cards that alter mission rules, and a large progression system built around weapons, attachments, cosmetics, consumables, and class perks. Every class changes how the team approaches combat, whether through crowd control, healing, sentry defense, ammo support, or burst damage.
Launch classes include the Gunner, Demolisher, Technician, Doc, and Recon, with later updates expanding the roster further. Each class comes with unique abilities, favored weapon categories, and a perk grid used to shape distinct builds.
Weapons are divided across Rifle, CQW, Handgun, and Heavy categories. The arsenal includes pulse rifles, shotguns, flamers, smartguns, magnums, grenade launchers, and more, with attachments and perks used to tune accuracy, stumble, stability, fire rate, reload speed, and status effects.
The base game campaign is split across four operations: Priority One, Giants in the Earth, The Gift of Fire, and The Only Way to Be Sure. Each campaign contains three missions and moves the marines deeper into infestations, abandoned facilities, ancient ruins, and full hive environments.
Enemy forces include Eggs, Facehuggers, Runners, Bursters, Prowlers, Spitters, Drones, Warriors, Crushers, Praetorians, several classes of hostile Synthetics, and later the mutated horrors introduced in the Pathogen expansion.
Pathogen continues the story after the base campaign, sending the Endeavor crew back into LV-895 to investigate a mutagenic infection spreading through the ruins and hives. The expansion adds a new three-mission campaign called Promise of a Flower, pushing players into stranger environments and harder fights.
The DLC introduces new enemy variants and a new final boss in the Pathogen Queen. Major threats include the Pathogen Runner, Pathogen Blight, and Pathogen Brute, with altered hive spaces, environmental hazards, and a heavier emphasis on endgame-level resistance.
Pathogen also adds new weapons, cosmetic rewards, and fresh reasons to revisit the game’s class and build systems. It is designed as a more intense follow-up to the main campaign and expands the infection storyline introduced in The Gift of Fire.