When 2K Entertainment bought the rights for XCOM in the height of the 7th generation, they had one real plan: To make it into a cover based shooter with a twist like so many others that dominated the market after the commercial successes of Gears of Wars and Mass Effect. Through some miraculous series of events they also authorized Firaxis, the company run by the venerable Sid Mayer, to make an updated version of the squad based tactics game that was in line with the franchise’s original formula. The release of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the resulting game was a somewhat subdued affair, while The Bureau: XCOM Declassified received heavy marketing despite the fact that (or maybe because) by the time it was released its core audience was, at best, skeptical. The Bureau now exists solely as an entry in Jared’s list of games he hates. Enemy Unknown, on the other hand, got an expansion and now a much deserved sequel: XCOM 2, which it is even better than Firaxis’ previous entries into the franchise.
Since most players lost their first XCOM run, Firaxis decided that the game’s “bad ending” would become canon. Apparently XCOM was fairly successful early on, but the alien threat managed to kidnap its Commander (that’s you) and decided to plug him into a neural network to help process tactical information. In the tutorial mission, the remains of XCOM rescues you, the Commander, and puts you back in charge. Twenty years have passed, and the aliens have taken over the world. You are now tasked with taking the Earth back from the aliens before they complete their sinister Avatar Project.
It would be dishonest of me if I didn’t admit that I wasn’t entirely on board with the canon presented in the new game. I worked hard to beat those aliens, damn it. But the new setting allows the game to experiment with some concepts that make gameplay better. There is a guerrilla warfare feel to the game that helps to explain things like why an XCOM unit has only 4-6 soldiers. In most missions you will be tasked with completing an objective and then evacuating instead of protecting a city from alien attack. Most of humanity is also not on your side. Civilians in most levels will get in your way at best and give away your position at worst. I have heard this game referred to as a “terrorism simulator” and the truth is depending which side of the story you are looking at a good case can be made that XCOM is a terrorist group. Ultimately the game skillfully dodges these issues by making the aliens unapologetically evil, and overall it’s probably better for it. XCOM 2 is difficult enough without making the player wonder whether their cause is even a righteous one.
Nercomancy: The Good Guy’s Tool!
The core gameplay is more of what you are probably used to, but there are many changes that alter how the game feels, the most obvious being the inclusion of timers in most missions. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was an essentially defensive game. The preferred tactic to advance was to move and over watch. Enemy Within tried to get you to take some more risks with the inclusion of Meld. This worked somewhat, but in the end it came down to a complex calculation of cost/benefit. Meld was a precious commodity, but it was entirely possible to skip canisters to keep a trooper out of harm’s way with only a minimal penalty (not having the Meld). Timers are different thing entirely. They will cause you to either fail the mission, or in some cases they will cause troops that are not evacuated to be captured. Because of the tight turn timer in most missions, you will now have to take greater risks. This can mean advancing faster through the map and risking alerting enemy patrols, burning through limited resources and abilities faster, or simply placing your soldiers in greater danger during combat in order to dispatch enemies faster. Ultimately these changes make XCOM 2 tenser and more dynamic than its predecessor.
Taking more risks means more injuries. It is very hard now to have a consistent team that will take on every mission. Rather XCOM 2 encouraged me to have several backups with a rotating team, and to even decide to save high level veterans for missions that I knew were around the corner. This also causes you to be more involved in the development of your soldiers outside of the ones that make that preferred dream team. Not only do you have to manage their development, but their recovery from injuries, and their mental state, as soldiers who are “shaken” panic more easily. The closest thing I can think of is the FIFA or PES manager modes, where roster management was a big and important part of the game as you rotate soldiers and manage your bench so to speak.
There are brand new classes similar to those in the last game, but with new tricks up their sleeves. The Ranger has supplanted the Assault class. It is a high risk/high reward class with a wicked melee attack that turns missions around by taking out the toughest enemies. Snipers this time around also come equipped with a side arm, and many abilities that make them even more lethal than before, such as free shots and massive bonuses to their damage and critical rates. These two classes will be your main damage dealers. Supports are back with a drone that can be trained to either heal or support remotely, or to hack and assist with attack bonuses. This gives the support an incredible range, as they can heal or assist comrades across the map. Granadiers replace the Heavy, and are perhaps the most tactically useful class in the game. You read that right. Granadiers have two important abilities that can make them vital to your team. They can shred enemy armor, which means that it will take away their damage reduction, and since most of the environments are destructible they can destroy enemy cover to allow your Snipers and Rangers to get in important shots on tough enemies. As the game advances you will unlock more classes, such as the Psi Soldier, which adds even more versatility and strategic layers to the game.
XCOM 2 is even more complex and inter-related than its predecessor. For example, the Ranger’s melee attack one of the best ways to bring down the mutton berserker. However, the regular mutton has a devastating counter attack, and a power melee attack that can easily kill the Ranger. There is also a concealment mechanic when the first round starts, where enemies don’t see your position as long as you don’t attack or aren’t in their line of sight. This can allow you to set up complex ambushes and terminate entire squads before they even know you are there. Or if you are a skillful (and maybe a little lucky) navigator you can even skip the first patrol entirely and engage the enemy closer to your objective. Remember, you are the invader now.
As the game evolves and new enemies are introduced things get more complex but even regular enemies have gotten upgrades. The humble sectoid now has psychic powers on par with advanced enemies in the first game, and late game enemies are even more fearsome. Firaxis pulled a very hard trick of making your progress feel significant and new items and abilities seem exciting while still making you feel like a rag tag group of rebels who are against daunting odds. Your mission feels even more hopeless and unattainable than before, and the triumph when you are able to defy those odds and emerge victorious feels all the sweeter.
The concealment system is an interesting addition.
XCOM 2‘s meta-game base building has changed quite a bit. Your rag tag band of freedom fighters has re purposed an old alien ship, which they use as a mobile base of operations. Rather than having a list of supporting countries, you start completely alone and must make contact with the resistance forces around the world. As you make contact with local resistance forces, they will provide you with supplies (the game’s currency for improving your operations), and open up new missions. The aliens won’t just sit still while you receive aid, and will launch retaliation strikes. Similar to the first game’s Terror Missions, the aliens launch attacks on sympathetic civilian citizens and it is up to you to try to protecting, minimizing civilian casualties. Instead of immediately receiving the support of all of the available countries, you will start with a monthly pittance and must expand to receive adequate funding to continue your operations, having your funding grow as you expand. I will admit this took me by surprise in the beginning, and saw me recklessly scrambling to make contact with new geographies as I entered the mid game stage.
XCOM 2 follows the rest of the franchise by advancing the alien’s tech, challenge level, and enemies will continue to scale up regardless of where you are in your own development, so adding contacts quickly is important. But in case that is not enough of an incentive to keep moving, there is the mysterious Avatar Project. The aliens are up to something, something that involves using the human genome, and the chances that they will be good for humanity are surely low. The avatar project will advance relentlessly, regardless of what actions you take. The best way to stall it is to take out specific bases, and to do that, you need to make contact with the resistance members that are in the places where those bases are housed. In addition to managing all the other activities you will need to keep your base running, your team healthy and equiped, and you are able to compete with the arms race, you also have to make sure to block the project’s advance. It can all feel somewhat overwhelming at first.
Sadly, for all the improvements in the game, some of the silly, nagging bugs from the first title are still there. There will still be strange attacks that seem to hit obstacles but are actually hitting the target. This happens for both you and your enemies, and its specially jarring when you see things like a ranger or a berserker attack someone through a wall or other heavy cover only to act like that did not exist. I understand that XCOM‘s combat is an abstraction, but small details like that that were present in the first game, bother me more than the they should. But those are small complaints that don’t really affect gameplay. Since its release, there have been widespread reports of performance issues with the game. They range from long loading times to issues that outright crash the game, or that prevent the game from continuing as experienced by our very own Doug. I have not experienced any issues with the game myself, save for some long load times. But be aware that the game might have performance issues in your build, at least as of this writing.
Pretend the cactus isn’t there.
I had high expectations for the sequel to the game that proved that squad-based turn-based tactical games were still viable outside of the Nintendo 3DS. I am pleased to report that XCOM 2 might have even surpassed them. It is a deeper game, which keeps the best parts of the original and manages to improve the pacing, while simultaneously increasing the strategic choices and complexity. It starts off easy and ramps up the difficulty, giving you the impression that every decision matters while giving you a greater margin of error than you suspected. When you combine this with the seemingly insurmountably odds the games throws at you, it makes for some very tense, but satisfying game play. In spite of reports of poor performance, if you are a fan of the genre, or if you are interested in getting into the turn-based strategy games, give XCOM 2 a go.
