Aliens: Fireteam Elite on Steam Deck Settings and Performance

Overview

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is essentially Left 4 Dead, but instead of shambling corpses, it’s a family of bloodthirsty xenomorphs that want to ruin your fun. 

Team up with up to three other players and gun down wave after wave of aliens while earning new unlocks. That’s the hook, essentially. There is a story, but it only serves as a loose reason as to why you’re shooting stuff. Don’t expect something as intriguing as Alien Isolation, which also works wonderfully on the Steam Deck. 

Aliens: Fireteam Elite on Steam Deck Performance 

When it comes to Steam Deck performance, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a game of compromise. You won’t be able to get a smooth 60 frames per second. It’s just not possible. What you can get is a mostly 30 to 40 frames experience. For the most part anyway. 

Expect plenty of dips below 30 and above 40, but overall – even when the action gets busy – Aliens: Fireteam Elite manages to often stay within that limit. 

You could set the framerate lock to 30 and up some of the settings for slightly better visuals, but I’d argue that extra detail is lost on the Steam Deck’s smaller screen. Plus Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a fluid game that does a lot within the 30 to 40 limit. It’s not as smooth as 60, obviously, but you won’t feel like you’re missing out on anything or that the game is lesser for it. 

What’s important here is that when there’s a colony’s worth of aliens on-screen, the game keeps up. You’re never left trying to navigate an unworkable framerate, and that’s what matters. 

Aliens: Fireteam Elite Steam Deck Settings

The goal of my settings here is to get a mostly stable framerate of 30 to 40 frames per second with crisp and clear visuals. As mentioned, you will go above and below that range, but Aliens: Fireteam Elite will bounce back quickly when that happens. 

Although I’m saying go with low for the texture quality, it’s not anywhere near as bad as it sounds. The Steam Deck’s screen makes the textures look great, and FSR will take care of everything on the big screen so it’s not worth pumping the GPU into something unneeded like that. 

You could, hypothetically, drop the resolution down further and use FSR to upscale it for even better performance in handheld mode, but we’re only talking about a handful of extra frames which isn’t really worth it in my opinion. 

I do also recommend dropping the TDP down. 12 is ideal, but 10 also works.

Bugs and Issues

While I haven’t suffered anything too out of the ordinary, I wasn’t able to get the online working as such. 

It’s a weird one. I do believe the online works and will work eventually, but due to how old Aliens: Fireteam Elite is, finding a match, especially if you’re new, is near impossible. I queued up for a good 30 minutes waiting for a match and not a single soul joined. 

As I say, that’s likely a problem with population more than anything else. If you check on ProtonDB, there are plenty of reports that co-op works, so the population is likely the issue. 

Verdict

On a scale of Aliens: Colonial Marines and Alien Isolation, Aliens: Fireteam Elite sits somewhere in the middle. It’s a very average game with a weak story that’s best played with friends. In single-player, it’s fine, but don’t expect anything too revolutionary. You shoot, shoot some more, then get new things to shoot with. 

Is that a bad thing? Not really. Sometimes you want a gamey game that doesn’t require too much brain power to zone out to, and for that, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is the perfect game to simply enjoy blasting things in a setting you care about. 

Is it the best Alien game? Not by a long shot. But that doesn’t matter. Sometimes ‘serviceable’ is enough.

All images captured on Steam Deck hardware.