Key Preview Takeaways:Nails the look, feel, and sound of Aliens.You’re never really comfortable, in a good way.The Specialist class that lets you custom-assemble your own class is the way to go.James Cameron has described the Director’s Cut of Aliens as “forty miles of bad road.” It’s an apt comparison for an intense and groundbreaking sci-fi action film that damn near everything since owes something to. What’s crazy is that so much of what would become iconic about Aliens isn’t in the theatrical release: Ripley’s daughter, the entire sequence with the turrets, Hudson’s monologue about being the ultimate badass… none of it is there. But it’s impossible to imagine Aliens, and the world it built, without those things – and everything else. It’s a lot to live up to. A lot of games have tried over the years, with varying degrees of success. Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is the latest to take a crack at it. But the age old question looms: is this gonna be a stand-up fight or another bug hunt? After spending about four hours with Fireteam Elite 2’s opening missions, it’s a bug hunt (complimentary).It’s a sequel, but you don’t have to have played Fireteam Elite to get what’s going on. Here’s the setup: the USS Endeavor received a transmission from a very sick looking woman named Dr. Pearce, to LV-558, a Weyland-Yutani mining colony overrun by Xenomorphs. The marines sent in Fireteam Banshee, an elite squad, to contain the situation. They’ve all gone missing. Your Marine has been transferred to the Endeavor to bring them home and figure out what the hell is going on. It’s classic Aliens stuff. The first Fireteam Elite wasn’t too focused on its story, but it’s a bigger emphasis here, and I think it works well so far. I’m fond of Raptor, the dropship pilot whose jokes are almost as bad as my father-in-law’s, and Wrench, who serves as everything from the ship’s mechanic to the guy who works on your guns and delivers cool facts about birds. After a brief “here’s your mission, get to it” conversation with General Shipp, an extremely funny name for the Endeavor’s CO (imagine if the commanding offer of a fighter squadron was named John Plane), you and Raptor head planetside to search for the missing members of Fireteam Banshee: Captain Ko, Lieutenant Piper, and Esther, the ship’s android.When playing solo, my four CPU-controlled android teammates were pretty good at cutting down Xenos, picking me (and each other) up if someone went down, and just generally Being Helpful. One of them even has a rad cowboy hat.After selecting my class – I went with the Duelist, which comes with your standard Pulse Rifle and shotgun for close encounters – it was time to make planetfall. Fireteam Elite 2 is a co-op game at heart, but my preview was played solo. Instead of other players, my squad consisted of me and a trio of those weird, pasty white androids from Alien: Isolation. This is one of the bigger changes for Fireteam Elite 2: instead of teams of three, you roll in a squad of four. I didn’t have one, so it was me and my android buddies. This kind of thing is always tricky, but I have to say, they were pretty good at cutting down Xenos, picking me (and each other) up if someone went down, and just generally Being Helpful. One of them even has a rad cowboy hat.Once we were on the ground, Fireteam Elite 2 settled into a familiar groove. We moved through the colony, gunning down aliens, searching for clues, and chatting with Raptor over comms while my marine spouted one-liners from Vasquez and Hudson. All the stuff you’d expect from an Aliens game is here: everything looks and sounds right, from the ping of the motion tracker to the screeches of the Xenomorphs themselves. If you pay attention, you can be ready for an alien before it flanks you, but if you’re not careful, or get overwhelmed, you probably won’t be looking at it. You’ll just be trying to survive.One of the best things about Fireteam Elite 2 is that it forces you to manage limited resources. You’re not exactly light on ammo, and your abilities – the Duelist has a shrapnel grenade and a souped-up shotgun, and these abilities cool down more quickly if you kill something with them – are nothing to sneeze at, but Fireteam Elite 2 throws a lot of stuff at you at once, and I was often relying on health and ammo pickups to stay alive.Fireteam Elite 2 also makes sure you’re never really comfortable. As I delved deeper looking for Ko, we learned that Wey-Yu had been experimenting on Xenomorphs again. Shocker. That wasn’t a surprise, but I was never safe, either. You’re always on the lookout for threats, managing your ammo, trying to pick the right weapon or slot in the right special ammo for the job if you’ve got it. Turns out Xenomorphs burn real good. But it’s always a question of what and when. Runners go down quickly, so they’re probably not worth spending anything fancy or consumable (like grenades or mines or special ammo) on… at least most of the time. But they come in big groups and they’re fast little buggers, so you can get overwhelmed quickly. Then you have the big dudes: the Warriors who will pick you up and try to get you with their second mouth; or the hit-and-run Drones (think the Alien from the original Alien) who leap from the shadows and retreat from fire; Prowlers, large red Xenos that pounce on you, and so on. Figuring out the right answer for everything while managing your limited resources is a lot of fun, and Fireteam Elite 2 wasn’t scared to mix it up. One section late in the level had my squad racing against time to reset the atmospheric processor and holding off Xenos in safe rooms while we waited for the process to complete. The mission ended with us getting Ko out, but we also had to hold out against a horde of aliens while we did. It tested everything we had (and since this was the first level, that wasn’t much), but it was a blast.Back on the Endeavor, I spoke to Ko – a deeply loyal hardass who cares about the marines under her command – and caught up with the rest of the crew. I’d gained some experience with the Duelist and leveled up some guns (and got a drum mag for my Pulse Rifle), but I still wasn’t sure what kind of ultimate badass I wanted to be yet, so I decided to roll with the smart gun-toting Marauder as we headed after Piper. This turned out to be a very, very good idea. Yeah, blasting Xenos with a shotgun is great, but a smartgun shreds the smaller ones and is great for keeping larger ones at bay, especially when paired with a perk that ups your stopping power as long as your weapons are hitting their targets. Oh, and the shoulder-mounted rockets and blast cannon are pretty cool, too.This level was substantially shorter and far more compact. We followed Piper’s trail (which led to one extremely funny dialogue exchange about her hiding in a closet), but we weren’t just up against the Xenos this time, though I definitely got pounced on by some Prowlers. Wey-Yu has their own androids, and they’re not exactly happy to see you. It’s a nice change of pace from fighting Xenos. Unless you’re holding a fixed position, you want to keep moving because they’re so fast. The androids require a more tactical approach, and taking them out often meant using cover and blindfiring if they got close. Oh, and you have to be careful, because sometimes they explode. What’s most interesting is when the androids and Xenos run into each other, allowing you to sit back and watch as they slug it out or pick a side. The mission ended after a hold out sequence in a cramped space. Fireteam Elite 2 pulled this trick often in my time with it, but it’s thematically appropriate and different each time, so I didn’t really mind. Plus, this time I got a deployable turret to play with, which was really good when the tougher Xenos came out to play and I was nearly out of ammo.Once we got out, it was time to figure out exactly what Wey-Yu had been doing here. Instead of search and rescue, we were hunting for clues. Like the Scooby gang, but with Pulse Rifles. So we went from terminal to terminal, listening to audio logs and piecing things together. Turns out, the Company hadn’t just been messing with Xenomorphs. They’d been using what they found in human trials, which put the way Dr. Pearce looks in that opening video into a much more potentially horrifying context. This time, I opted for the Machinist because I had so much fun with the turrets, and this let me put one down and summon a little drone. At first, I was worried it wouldn’t work because we were moving so much, but the Machinist’s turret and drone either travel well or have relatively short cooldowns. Pair that with my trusty upgraded Pulse Rifle and a plasma rifle you never need to reload unless it overheats, and I was golden. And when we did have to hold out in the end? All my extra stuff came in handy.But it got me thinking: I really liked the Smartgun, but I wanted to keep my turrets. I wondered if there was a way to do both, so I started looking through the classes. That’s when I stumbled on the Specialist, Fireteam Elite 2’s other big addition. As a Specialist, I could equip basically any ability, perk, or weapon I’d unlocked elsewhere. So I equipped a Pulse Rifle and a smartgun, decked them out with some of the decals I’d unlocked, took the drone and turret for my abilities, and equipped some perks like more health that I’d already earned. Finally, I had the class I wanted.That last mission went really well, right up until it didn’t. We found and rescued Esther, with the combination of turrets and smartgun making quick work of androids and Xenos alike. But there was one problem: I was running out of ammo. Often. Thankfully, the pistol comes with Solid Snake’s bandanna; I wouldn’t need to resort to harsh language today. I thought we had it in the bag, despite everything. We’d held off a horde of Xenos from a raised platform, and the end was in sight, when I went down trying to disable the second of two turrets that had been chewing us up. Turns out, you can get downed too many times, and then you just die! So that’s what that little red bar that was gradually filling on top of my health bar meant. Whoops.Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 gets Aliens and understands that "forty miles of bad road" Cameron envisioned.I could have called it there. After all, it was two in the morning. But I wanted to see this through. So I threw on a couple more upgrades, and tried again. This time, I was more careful with my ammo management, using the pistol against smaller enemies, and when we assaulted those turrets again, I got them both. Then we had to hold out against a horde of aliens bigger than anything I’d seen at that point. It took everything we had: mines, drones, my turret, another one I found on the ground, special ammo, several trips to the ammo box, and more than a little luck – I honestly thought I was a goner when one of the Big Bad Booty Daddy Xenos picked me up and tried to kiss my forehead with his second mouth. But we made it, somehow. It was awesome. Am I a little bummed I didn’t get to play with friends for this preview? A little. But if I was having fun with Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, I imagine me and the boys will have an even better time.Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 seems like one of those lazy Sunday games, where you kill part of an afternoon playing a couple hours with friends. It gets Aliens and understands that forty miles of bad road Cameron envisioned. As a co-op game, it’s not going to change the world. Aliens already did that. But it’s a great excuse to play around in that world again, and I’m eager to see what else LV-558 has in store. While you're here, check out these previews of other big upcoming games we've played recently!Star Wars: Zero CompanyMarvel's WolverineStar Wars: Galactic RacerWill Borger is an IGN freelancer. You can find him on Bluesky @edgarallanbro.