Aliens: Dark Descent is a top-down cooperative bug blaster, coming 2023

You're all spoilt for choice when it comes to blasting Giger's bugs with your pals. Not a year since the release of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, the franchise returns with a top-down take on team xenomorph hunts with the newly announced Aliens: Dark Descent.

And no, I don't imagine that subtitle isn't an Amnesia reference

While most of the trailer reintroduces us to the well-worn phallic monsters, the team co-op bent had us thinking this may be an expansion or sequel to last year's Fireteam Elite. But a few brief gameplay snippets revealed this to be a top-down twin stick take on Aliens, secretly making this a spiritual successor to Valve's criminally underplayed Alien Swarm.

Dark Descent is being developed by Tindalos Interactive, the Paris-based studio behind the quite good Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2. That's a hell of a genre jump for the studio, but hey—that experience in creating hellish interstellar derelicts should count for something.

Aliens: Dark Descent is coming to unannounced PC storefronts in 2023.

Natalie Clayton
Features Producer

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.