Update: XCOM 2 has been nominated for IGN's 2016 Game of the Year.
Above: Watch some XCOM 2 gameplay.
Just like before, XCOM’s high-stakes turn-based tactical combat dares you to become attached to your customizable characters (I made most of IGN’s staff in the character editor) knowing that on any given mission they could be permanently killed off because of mistakes or just bad luck. As with Risk, Monopoly, Warhammer, poker, and anything else involving chance, 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.You need to have a backup plan, or else you can’t complain when you’re dead.
Think of it this way: Playing Russian Roulette with a six shooter with one bullet, your odds of survival are five out of six, or 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. But XCOM 2 asks you to make that same gamble – or often much worse – with the lives of your soldiers on virtually every turn. You might think an 80% shot is guaranteed to hit… but in the one time in five that it doesn’t connect, you need to have a backup plan for what happens, or else you can’t complain when you’re dead.“
Above: See an XCOM 2 Retaliation mission.
Not being dead on your first game is one thing – you almost certainly will die as a result of walking into countless unknown traps, especially if you play above the normal difficulty (as I mostly did – normal, or “veteran,” is a cakewalk for anyone who knows XCOM). But one of XCOM 2’s biggest strengths how it resists your efforts to fall into repetitious patterns. By comparison: after the first real-world month or two of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it became apparent that anyone who intended to play it for that length of time would have a base build order down to a science, know exactly what to research when, and memorize the best routes through the pre-built maps and have an idea of where enemies would appear on them. XCOM 2 defeats most of those assumptions by introducing randomness throughout its campaign, so that you can’t count on the route that took you to victory one time to deliver you to the same results the next.You can’t count on anything, but you will get something.
Likewise, every time 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. I can’t say I ever had a mission where I lost because the map wasn’t fairly laid out (though I definitely had some tough-to-cross stretches thanks to my use of explosives).
Above: Watch an XCOM 2 trailer.
And because you start most missions in concealment, keeping your squad hidden while you set up a lethal ambush is a new and different kind of challenge with a potentially big and cinematic payoff. Concealment is an interesting concept, in that it’s basically XCOM 2’s aliens telling us, “Go ahead: take your best shot.” It’s a simple system at heart: when you start a mission, the enemy doesn’t know you’re there until you get within a certain radius, or you open fire. And usually it is simple, unless you dash ahead without looking (as I’ll admit, I sometimes did). If you exercise caution, though, you can set all but one of your squad into Overwatch mode around a group of enemies, then hit your highest-priority target and watch as your squad (hopefully) dissects the enemy in a beautiful slow-motion slaughter that suffers none of the typical Overwatch penalties.If the Shieldbearer isn’t disabled, he’ll give every ally around him an energy barrier.
Enemies seem geared to compensate for the concealment advantage, though, in that several 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.
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Above: We play two missions with Firaxis.
Plus, when you take out two of the three aliens in a group, the last one is sometimes smart enough to retreat and group up with another nearby group. That’s fantastic, because not only is the AI displaying a rare will to survive, it gives you another thing to think about when engaging: leave no survivors, or the next fight might be harder.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, especially against robotic enemies. Augmenting those abilities with weapon upgrades is also excellent: I combined a Sharpshooter’s Killzone skill with a high-capacity ammo mod, which lets him take up to an incredible six reaction shots in one turn.
But considering what they’re up against, they don’t feel overpowered. Some of these aliens are absolutely vicious, and the AI usually knows how to use them effectively, especially on higher difficulty settings. They’re also fun to mess around with in the head-to-head multiplayer mode.
Above: 10 Ways Each XCOM 2 Game Will Be Different.
XCOM 2’s most annoying problem is that it’s prone to animation glitches and inconvenient bugs. Most of the time, they’re harmless but distracting. Aside from attack animations routinely clipping through objects and overwatch shots connecting with targets despite solid objects in the way (as XCOM: Enemy Unknown has taught me to tolerate) there are all-too-frequent instances where XCOM 2 will hang momentarily before or after an attack, locked in awkward slow motion, for upwards of 10 seconds before moving on with the business of shooting things. I’ve also seen Specialists stop animating altogether, and stand motionless as the enemy takes damage from their supposed attacks or warp to their new position. Sometimes a button on the rank-up interface won’t register, and I have to go to the solider screen in the armory to choose the skill I want.I’ve seen instances where XCOM 2 will fail to show me the floor of a building I want to see.
Most annoyingly, though, I’ve seen instances where XCOM 2 will fail to show me the floor of a building I want to see, no matter how much I adjust the camera. So I’ll see an outline of the square I can move to, but the building around it fails to cut away and let me see what’s actually there; alternatively, the top floor never draws in and all I can see are the squares floating in space. Also, I played the final mission without the benefit of the shield icons that tell you if you’ll be in full cover or half cover, and whether you’re being flanked, if you move to a new position. You don’t know how valuable those are until they’re gone.Issues happen often enough that my confidence that I’ll be treated somewhat fairly is shaken, so I’ll wait a few patches before attempting an Iron Man run. On the bright side, I haven’t yet seen anything resembling the dreaded enemy teleportation bug of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. (Unless it’s on purpose.)“
XCOM 2 usually looks fantastic.
And performance-wise? Let’s just say I’m glad this is a turn-based game, because it can’t hold 60 frames a second even on above-recommended hardware. The problem doesn’t seem to be related to on-screen action, since it’s often most pronounced when my six soldiers are sitting in the Skyranger drop ship on the way to the battle, and less so in the heat of the action itself. The tradeoff for that, of course, is that XCOM 2 usually looks fantastic thanks to extremely detailed character models and textures, expressive animations, and creative creature design. And the ability to blow big holes in buildings, especially when enemies are standing on them, is great.“
Big Picture Mode
You have to read the map and adapt.
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. You’re in a race against the enemy, as it moves its victory counter up by building new facilities and making breakthroughs, and you destroy their structures and complete story objectives to move it back down, buying yourself more time. There are a lot of decisions to be made here, including where to expand, what resources to chase down, and what research projects to work on first. But again, you have to read the map and adapt.“
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.
Above: How XCOM 2's Strategy Layer works.
One great change is the way we have to manage our engineering staff by assigning them to specific rooms. They can accelerate build times or accelerate progress on things like soldier healing times or increasing power output. Importantly, we see their names and faces once in awhile, making them feel like people rather than a number on a spreadsheet, even if they don’t have unique stats. Unfortunately the science staff doesn’t get the same treatment – they have names, but after you recruit them you’ll never see those names again..I can generally make something that at least vaguely resembles the person I have in mind.
Those names, like every other name in XCOM 2, has a chance to be drawn from your custom-made character pool, and I’ve put more than a couple of hours into that alone. The character creator here isn’t the most flexible out there – there’s a very limited number of faces available with no sliders to adjust them, the only body type is peak physical condition, and accessories like hats and glasses are sparse – but I can generally make something that at least vaguely resembles the person I have in mind. You can even set certain people to only appear as assassination or abduction targets, so you even have a reason to make people you hate. Then you can save, reuse, and export and import characters so you can share your creations with others.“
However, it’s bizarre that XCOM 2 insists on mixing in its own randomly generated characters to the recruitment pool, even when I have a big list of pre-made people. I made those characters because I wanted to play with these people, not randos, so it’s frustrating when my starting recruit pool contains only a handful of them.
I hate to say "Modders will fix it," but for the majority of my gripes for this largely amazing tactics game, that's probably true. Firaxis has promised nearly unheard-of levels of support for the mod-making community, including several mods available at launch made by the developers responsible for the famously punishing Long War mod for XCOM: Enemy Within. Aside from the base-level technical problems, which are up to Firaxis to fix, we can expect another big dose of free post-launch variety, available from the Steam Workshop integration.
