Aliens Fireteam reveals new gameplay details, including customization, classes, enemy types, difficulty

The upcoming third person co-op shooter Aliens Fireteam is fast approaching its projected release window of Summer 2021. On June 16, Cold Iron Studios CEO Craig Zinkievich and creative director Matt Highison revealed a great deal of new information about the game and its features and gameplay as part of Gamespot’s Play For All 2021 presentation.

As expected, much of Aliens Fireteam’s design revolves around co-operation. To that end, the game’s five playable classes — Recon, Doc, Gunner, Technician, and Demolisher — each fulfill a different role, and can be further customized to make their abilities, items, and weapons more specialized. Aliens Fireteam also has a ping system, which is a standard feature in shooter games at this point, since players need to communicate but voice chat isn’t always the best way to do it.

Fireteam players will want to communicate frequently, because much of the core loop revolves around solving the different “combat puzzles” presented by the game’s roster of enemies. Aside from the traditional close range xenomorphs, Aliens Fireteam also has players fight against exploding enemies, flankers, and firearm-carrying synthetic soldiers, each requiring a different approach. The game also has a cover system, which comes into play when fighting against ranged xenomorphs and synthetics.

To better tailor the gameplay experience for all types of players, Aliens Fireteam also features a layered difficulty system. Aside from ratcheting up the strength of enemies, at higher difficulties the game becomes more challenging in other ways, including removing enemy outlines from the UI, and enabling friendly fire.

We expect Cold Iron Studios to reveal more Aliens Fireteam details and gameplay footage ahead of the game’s launch, which is happening sometime between now and October.