Aliens Fireteam Elite | The Best Challenge Cards

The cooperative fun in Aliens Fireteam Elite doesn’t just stop with the preset mission challenges you can undertake. You can also modify your experience with Challenge Cards. These tend to offer you a disadvantage in your mission, for the reward of increased experience and/or currency upon successful completion. But some of these Challenge Cards are better than others. This guide will show you some of our favourite Challenge Cards to look out for in Aliens Fireteam Elite.

By The Lowest Bidder

Rarity: Exotic

Benefits: 2.5x Credits, 1 Random Attachment

By The Lowest Bidder is one of the Challenge Cards in Aliens Fireteam Elite focuses on reloading. It occasionally will force your weapon to become jammed, which makes it useless against the swarms of Xenomorphs running at you at all times. However, it unjams with a reload, so if you’re someone that tends to reload frequently anyway, this can be a great way to earn extra credits. If you can combine it with attachments that improve reload speed, it’ll be even less of a hindrance for you, and so is well worth considering.

Coordinated Assault

Rarity: Exotic

Benefits: 2.25x Experience, 2.25x Credits

Coordinated Assault requires you to all work as a team to deal massive damage, but with a couple of caveats. If you can manage to accrue 1,000,000 points of damage in a mission (and complete it) then you will achieve a significant boost to both Experience and Credits. The catch is you must deal the damage directly yourself. That means you almost certainly need a fireteam of three humans and not rely on the synth AI. Also placed object damage doesn’t count, so this means turret and mine damage won’t count and will steal damage away from your total. This means in all likelihood, you’ll need to deal with the swarms with your guns and your wits alone. It’ll be tough, but the rewards are high in this one.

Game Over, Man!

Rarity: Uncommon

Benefits: 1.5x Experience, 1.5x Credits

In Aliens Fireteam EliteThe Game Over, Man! Challenge Card is a fairly straightforward one. You must complete the mission without anyone being downed at any point. If anyone in your Fireteam goes down, no one gets the bonus, so it’s important to work together to keep everyone alive. Be clever on how you use healing items, and it’s probably worth taking a Doc specialist with you on your mission for that extra healing power. That way you have the best chance of nabbing this bonus.

Hidden Knowledge

Rarity: Rare

Benefits: 2.0x Experience

The Hidden Knowledge Challenge Card is one of a few Challenge Cards that actually doesn’t have a negative effect to deal with. It simply offers you double the experience when you complete the mission. That’s it. So you simply get a bonus compared to the normal experience you would receive. Without the drawback, it’s a strong case for inclusion, but it is limited to only a single benefit, whereas other Challenge Cards offer two. As such, this is best used when starting out on missions you are unfamiliar with before moving on to other Challenge Cards with bigger risks and even bigger rewards.

Unexpected Strength

Rarity: Uncommon

Benefits: 1.75x Experience

Should you not have unlocked the Hidden Knowledge Challenge Card already, Unexpected Strength is a decent alternative until you do. It offers a similar bump in Experience. The only downside is that occasionally some stronger enemies – the Xenomorph Runner, Maintenance Synth, and Synth Guard – may end up spawning stronger than they otherwise would, meaning they’ll be tougher to take down. For the Experience benefit though, this slight downside is well worth the trouble.

No HUD

Rarity: Rare

Benefits: 2.25x Experience, 2.25x Credits

No HUD is one of the Challenge Card for those with some solid experience playing Aliens Fireteam Elite. Now you won’t have any inclination of where enemies are coming from, which means you’ll need to constantly keep looking in all directions and working as a team to survive. It certainly makes things more difficult, but the payoff in terms of Experience and Credits can make this challenge well worth it.

They’ll Breed, You’ll Die

Rarity: Uncommon

Benefits: 1.5x Credits

One of the Challenge Cards that’s useful early on if you don’t have many others to choose from is They’ll Breed, You’ll Die. You get a nice addition to the Credits you receive at the end of the mission, but with only a small penalty. The only challenge you have to deal with is that Xenomorph Runners and Maintenance Synths spawn at an increased rate, which shouldn’t hurt you too badly, for the nice benefit you’ll get to your bank balance.