XCom 2
(Article generated from 'IGN')
There’s an air of white-knuckle desperation in the post-apocalyptic setting of XCom 2. Taking place 20 years after humanity lost the war we played in 2012’s excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown and we’re now fighting to overthrow a decades-long alien occupation of the planet. A very thematically appropriate scenario for a game about taking four to six-person squads into battle against initially-superior alien forces; a great backdrop for these unpredictable, tactically deep, addictive battles.
Just like before, XCOM’s high-stakes turn-based tactical combat dares you to become attached to your customizable characters, knowing that on any given mission they could be permanently killed off because of mistakes or just bad luck. XCom 2 is a game where you can theoretically do everything right and still lose to bad rolls of the dice, but on the whole a good player will generally come out on top. Deciding when and how to upgrade and use each soldier’s abilities, then crossing your fingers and hoping they’ll make their clutch shot, creates non-stop suspenseful, triumphant, and tragic moments.
Playing Russian Roulette with a six shooter with one bullet, your odds of survival are 83.3%. Those are pretty good... but you’d have to be crazy to put your life on the line with a 16.6% chance of blowing your brains out, because way more often than you’d like, you will have to!. XCom 2 asks you to make that same gamble, or worse, with the lives of your soldiers on virtually every turn.
Through the 20 to 30-hour campaign you’ll see a random assortment of weapon modifications, soldier stat boosts, special ammo and grenade types, psionic powers, bonuses for covering continents with your resistance network, and more. Will you get incendiary grenades, which are great for disabling enemy special abilities and inflicting damage over time? Or poison rounds, which impair accuracy while also dealing steady damage? Or trace rounds, which increase accuracy on top of their other upgrades? You can’t count on anything, but you will get something, and having to adapt to make use of what’s available is a constant challenge.
The same goes for the high-quality procedurally generated maps, and a good variety of mission types. Without knowing ahead of time where an objective will be or the location of the enemy, you’ll attack and defend, extract or kill VIPs, and blow things up. Some missions have turn timers that force you to make risky moves, or to make a hasty retreat.
Enemies seem geared to compensate for your concealment advantage. Several of them feature powers that make them much more difficult to kill if they aren’t taken out on the first turn. The Advent Shieldbearer is the best example of this: if he survives and isn’t disabled, he’ll activate a power that gives him and every ally around him an energy barrier that’ll absorb some significant damage. You definitely have to be careful about who you shoot first, because it makes a big difference who’s alive when they start fighting back.
XCom’s easy to understand two-move-per-turn system returns, and while these five soldier classes may be similar in theme to their Enemy Unknown counterparts, they play very differently thanks to new and diverse ability sets. The Specialist’s remote hacking and healing abilities, for instance, sets them completely apart and introduces some interesting risk-reward opportunities.p>
The completely redesigned world strategic map is also much more dynamic and replayable than in the previous game. Starting from a random location, your mobile base has to stay ahead of the aliens by darting around the map making contact with resistance cells in various regions, collecting supplies, and launching raids against the aliens. And there’s not a lot to the base-building this time, because you don’t have to worry much about adjacency in your flying aircraft carrier base. Instead, the variety here comes from the layout of power nodes in the layout of your captured alien vessel, where the special power-granting tiles might be accessible or near the end.
The Verdict
With a focus on variety and replayability, this sequel has an answer to most of my complaints about 2012’s excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and aside from some mostly cosmetic bugs, it comes together brilliantly. Thanks to a new spin on the same great tactical combat, plus unpredictable maps and randomized objectives and loot, XCOM 2 is an amazing game.
