My rag-tag, six-man squad of escaped convicts and lone wanderers is in pretty decent shape. Sneaking below an overpass we manage to hack into a mech, then snipe his lone alien lookout in one fell swoop. Cover blown, I have the mech sprint towards the objective to do some damage while my squad repositions.
Mildly bemused by this turn of events, a hulking Sectopod emerges through the ceiling of a shrouded convenience store. The new lovechild of ED-209 and the Martians from War of the Worlds has, in an impressive feat of posturing, decided to raise its three-storey stilts inside the one-storey building, and duly strolls through the shopfront.
While the Sectopod charges its death ray like a mechanised Venosaur prepping a solar beam, my veteran specialist gets to work. Hidden well back in cover, “Professor” Katz’s drone zips off to a nearby coms tower, hacking the aliens’ network and reducing their aim. Making sure to spare the one guy I really need to take alive, the rest of my squad chimes in with a volley of rockets, plasma and sniper fire.
It plays out pretty near perfectly. With a smattering of injuries and only a few stragglers left, I close to melee distance on my ultimate target in a bid to advance the campaign. This being XCOM, a brand new enemy teleports in, and my entire team is obliterated. Welcome back, commander.
XCOM 2 feels more like a spiritual successor than a sequel to 2012’s genre-defining reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The pitch is a classic multiverse, Zelda timeline setup: what would happen if the aliens’ base assault succeeded, and your attempts to prevent the original invasion failed?
Thus the tutorial begins with your Commander being retrieved from alien stasis by the remnants of the original organisation. Twenty years have passed since the aliens destroyed XCOM headquarters and defeated global military forces, installing a world government known as ADVENT. Strange humanoid soldiers man security checkpoints on every block, people are disappearing, and the aliens’ human mouthpiece beams from every holoscreen and billboard, encouraging everyone to submit to gene therapy. The survivors don’t like it, and kit you out with an alien ship for one final fightback.
Functionally, this operates much the same as the base in Enemy Unknown. Rooms need to be cleared of alien clutter before they can be repurposed, while research and engineering tasks require staff and supplies. As a resistance movement however, your location and funding are a little less tangible. The ship can relocate to nearby regions to search for new dissidents, establishing outposts to arrange supply drops and tips for missions. Cast your net wide enough and you’ll happen upon the black market, where you can trade prized intel for funding, gun mods and valuable new recruits.
Most crucially, building those rooms and researching those technologies requires time – and that’s in even shorter supply. It isn’t far into the campaign before a counter starts its inexorable progress, and once it’s maxed out, well – game over man, game over. Much as in the excellent Long War mod for the original game, the aliens are now an active opponent, and undertake their own missions and research. Your objective, in the midst of building a global resistance, is to prevent all this from happening.
While leads will occasionally come in on bases crucial to the alien efforts, they are often in countries you can’t access yet, and other priorities constantly crop up. Making new contacts requires communications rooms that might be better used improving your research speed, and missions will constantly arise to protect your assets, save VIPs and prevent alien forces from gaining month long buffs. It’s a balancing act that brings some of the risk and decision making of battles to the previously functional base management, and the raised stakes feel completely merited.
XCOM’s meat and drink remains its combat, however, and it’s here that the format sees its most dramatic changes. The isometric grid remains, but where the first game could be staid and languid, a grand game of chess on a hundred square grid, XCOM 2 is hyperkinetic. The vast majority of missions are time sensitive – these being covert operations, there are always enemy fighters closing in, transports arriving or explosive countermeasures rigged. You’ll start most missions concealed from enemy vision cones, allowing you to sneak up on unwitting patrols and set up a storm of crossfire: soldiers on overwatch now pick their targets individually, rather than blowing their load on the first alien to put its head above the parapet. The 8-12 turns thereafter are a nightmarish dash to safety, as you shoot, slice and explode your way to the transport at the edge of the map.
The four classes – close combat Rangers, support Specialists, Snipers and Grenadiers – are broadly similar to the original, but major change comes in the form of secondary weapons and abilities. While the sniper retains their pistol, your heavies now have a grenade launcher to complement their minigun and other items, and the ranger’s shotgun and sword combo encourages mobility. Take the scout track and you can hide away, sneaking behind enemy lines for a critical hit; prioritise melee and your sword attack can tear across the map, a whirlwind of counters and finishing blows. With the exception of drone-wielding specialists, who are often best placed behind the lines dispensing aid, your new soldiers are far more malleable.
Action limits have also undergone a complete overhaul. Reloading no longer ends your turn if used first, and weapon upgrades allow you to reload multiple times for free. Instead of having a heavy switch to a pistol when their ammo runs out, you can now reload and fire, or move and reload – or use a later perk to fire all of your grenades for free. Specialists can heal from distance and then get a shot off. Melee manoeuvres can leave your soldiers outflanked and reveal new opponents, but are a great way to thin out numbers and get around cover. And as ever, almost any shot can and will miss.
With almost every existing enemy getting an upgrade and some new entrants to the fray, landing those shots is of critical importance. Sectoids can mind control your troops almost from the get go, while revamped Floaters and Muton Berserkers are soon charging into close quarters. On top of the perpetual hindrance of hit percentages, an agility stat now means your shots will frequently graze certain opponents, dealing only a small amount of damage. In the confines of the turn limit and with troops scattered across the map, a chain of misses both near and total can turn a fight on its head.
This is an objectively harder game than its predecessor, but it also tries to ramp up the fun factor. Any rookie can now be trained as a psi soldier with over a dozen offensive and defensive abilities. New weapons and items were to be expected, but the map and its occupants can also be potent weapons. Environmental damage is extended to collapsing roofs, while grenades can be shot or remotely detonated. As the game progresses you’ll gain the ability to hack or mind control even the most powerful enemies, opening up a whole army of new abilities.
While Firaxis’ alterations and additions are a marked success, there’s a disappointing amount left unfixed. Navigating multi-tiered buildings is still a travesty, with second floors almost completely inaccessible; it’s easier to blow a hole in the top of the building and fall through.
Other issues are even less excusable: many new features lack tooltips or adequate descriptions, leading to a trial and error process that will have doomed many an ironman run. Frequent graphical issues and poor optimisation should not be taken as unavoidable either, even if they are commonplace in new releases; nor should the removal of voice options including Russian and Polish, a much appreciated addition in Enemy Within. This and a slightly underwhelming choice of soldier customisations, while inevitably the subject of future mods, feels like DLC waiting to happen.
If you’re willing to go with the game’s new ethos and ignore a few cosmetic faults however, what XCOM 2 delivers is a perfect recipe for bravado. The changes are comparable to those between Dark Souls and Bloodborne: the risk/reward factor is ramped up, such that your team remains in perpetual motion. Strategies that would have played out over fifty turns in Enemy Unknown are now crammed into eight, and you're always looking ahead of time to who will cross which soldier's path when, and how their positioning, traits and the quirks of the AI will affect your most valuable assets.
Do I risk this 70% shot? Which enemy do I pick for a squad aim boost? Do I give my sniper poison ammo or one of the half dozen protective vests? With fewer turns, every decision has to be weighed with the utmost care and delivered with the greatest impetus. It would be easy to criticise Firaxis for imposing a play style with its time limits, but this is the positive kind of overhaul: one that commits wholeheartedly to its new offensive ideal, and furnishes it with a swathe of extra content.
“Visceral”