Aliens: Dark Descent – How To Increase Squad Size

Aliens: Dark Descent is an action RTS in which four Colonial Marines must make their way through xeno-infested territory to find survivors, reclaim lost tech, and generally survive. With just four Marines to use, you can’t afford to make any slip-ups out on the battlefield, as anything less than four pairs of hands just makes your hard job even harder. While it does take a while, players can actually increase their squad size in Aliens: Dark Descent to five Marines in total.

To increase your squad size in Aliens: Dark Descent, players must get to Mission 6, Atmospheric Nightmare. This is quite a lot of story progress, and players can expect it to take 10-15 hours to reach this point in the game.

Once in Atmospheric Nightmare, players then need to find their way to the Basement 1 floor, which they will do as part of the main objectives and requires you to survive a large infinite infestation (we’d recommend you swap out your squad afterwards to lower alien aggressiveness). When you take the elevator down, make your may over to the following location on the map.

This is where the APC is located; you will need to decrypt and unlock the door either with a Tecker or with a marine with the upgrade. As soon as that is done, a cutscene will play and the APC will take you and your squad back to the Otago, unlocking the five-man squad in the process for the next deployment.

Having five marines make your life so much easier in Dark Descent, especially if all of your soldiers have different roles and kits to allow for maximum synergy. It doesn’t make the game easy by any means, but it does increase the margin for error. It also makes the pretty strong Team Spirit attribute extra viable, as it improves your Command Points by 1 for every two soldiers with it unlocked, meaning you have extra room to use a soldier with other attributes.

Aliens: Dark Descent is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X & S.

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