Some games just click for you. You get in with your friends, you have a blast, and all you want is more. Well, the team at Cold Iron Studios heard that ask and responded with…well, exactly that, based on what we saw in our hands-on time at Summer Game Fest 2026. Paired up with three (Yes, the game now supports four soldiers in a fireteam instead of three!) other press members, we once again faced hordes of xenomorphs, synths, and much worse in the upcoming just-announced Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2.
Set five years after the events of the first game (which places it 28 years after the Aliens movie), the team is responding to intel from their onboard Synth that there is a Weyland-Yutani warship orbiting a colonized planet, LV-558. This planet, home to the colony of Storr’s Boon, is part of a mining operation. Or at least, that’s what it looks like on the surface. Of course, it doesn’t take long before the team uncovers some sort of experiment. I’m starting to think these Weyland-Yutani guys might not have everyone’s best interests at heart.
The Colonial Marines, having boarded the Weyland-Yutani ship Demetrius, begin searching the ship for clues and intel on what’s actually going on here, and ultimately on the surface of the planet below. In touch with the pilot of the dropship Raptor, the team begins discovering recordings that reveal what the company is doing here, but nobody on board will mind much – they’re dead.
The previous game gave us classes including Gunner (offensive direct damage class, shotguns, smgs), Demolisher (launchers, flamer, smartguns), Technician (deployable sentry guns, handgun only), Doc (medic, rifle, handguns), and Recon (support gunner, PUPS scanning drone, ammo replenishment), with the Phalanx (deployable shield, shock pulse attack), and the Lancer (Particle Lance, close-quarters combat) both introduced in the Season 1 and Season 3 updates. Rather than just rehashing the same classes, the Cold Iron Studios team rolled up their sleeves to give us a whole new set of soldiers.
In Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, we’re introduced to (and got to play) the Duelist, Hunter, Machinist, Marauder, Medic, and Specialist. The Duelist is a single-target specialist, capable of equipping two primary weapons, as the name suggests. The Hunter focuses on a steady stream of continuous fire and burst DPS with SMGs and shotguns, keeping a barrage of bullets ripping into incoming enemies. The Machinist can deploy an attack drone, turrets, and plasma weapons to great effect. Marauders are an AoE class, bringing flamethrowers, rocket launchers, and plasma weapons to the field, making them powerful but slow. Medics…well, they’re medics, helping patch up the crew with healing, but also damage buffs to keep the team alive. Specialists weren’t playable in the demo, but they mix and match all class unlocks to create their own class of sorts, making them powerful generalists. These new classes would need to be top-tier soldiers to face the new threats we found in the field. Let’s talk about the depth of the problems we’re about to face.
While we didn’t see all of them, there are several new foes in addition to the ones we faced in the previous game. Synths were the first we found, with combat, engineers, and self-destructing versions giving us problems at all ranges. Taking the heads off of several, they’d keep marching towards us at high speed. Blowing a hole the size of a watermelon through others just gave them a comically large hole to see through. These are far tougher than the synths we faced before, but the real threats were the new xenos.
Given the mass of xenomorph types we faced in the first game, I sincerely doubt that what we saw was all of the creatures we’ll eventually end up fighting. New ones, Runners, Spitters, and Crawlers are exactly what their names suggest. Exploders are pustule-covered variants of the runners that detonate when they close distance on players, but they also hint at what Weyland-Yutani might be up to at the mining facility below. Bursters are young variants of the same, but they’re the “jump and lay eggs in your mouth with their ovipositor" type that also happen to be covered in exploding pustules, because they weren’t gross or dangerous enough already. While you’ll still face the classic Drone type and their larger warrior brothers, the wall-running Prowlers, Crawlers, Spitters, and Bulwark are returning too. It’s the damned Sirens that caused the most headache. Sirens summon additional enemies, serving as an angry, bitey alarm system until killed. While there are many new foes to face, that’s actually not the change that made the biggest impact.
One of the best parts about Aliens: Fireteam Elite was the claustrophobic corridors. There are moments in that game that open up, giving us outdoor spaces and massive structures complete with large, creepy stone monolith heads. These spaces were always cool, but most of what you faced occurred on either the floor you were on or the floor just above or below. Now you have a new problem – far more verticality. When you face a foe that can sit far above you, spitting from a distance, or a screeching siren somewhere out of sight, the panic sets in quickly. At the end of the demo sequence, we were stuck in a massive open space with entirely too many ingress points, multiple floors, vents, doors, and the guttural screech of pissed-off aliens in all directions. The room practically reverberated with the skittering of claws on steel as these vicious killing machines scrambled through the pipes and vents. By the time the Synths joined the party, it was almost laughable because all I could hear was our impending death from the screeching monsters closing on all sides.
While we did, somehow, survive our encounter on LV-558, heading back to the central hub to refit and rearm as we did in the first game, I came away from the demo with that same familiar itch I had before. I couldn’t wait to get in here and see what horrors the Cold Iron team had in store for us. What we played at Summer Game Fest felt very close to finished, which tracks as this game was just announced, but practically shadow dropped with a “Summer 2026” release date. The addition of a fourth gun made a lot of difference in the field, but the refreshed AI and enemies that can scurry across any surface, spit acid, explode, and call their friends made it commensurately more dangerous to match. We wanted more, but Cold Iron gave us not only more, but better. In the end, what more can you ask for in a sequel?
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 heads our way very soon on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Stay tuned – the amount of Xeno statues I have on my desk and shelves suggests this might be one I’m excited to tell you more about in an upcoming review!
