I was not expecting XCOM 2 to be as difficult as it is. It’s challenging enough that after my first failed attempt at a full playthrough on Normal, I bumped the difficulty down to Rookie for the next. Rookie, I thought, was surely going to be far easier for somebody going into this game blind. And it was, sort of. Not much. In true XCOM fashion, potential hits at the upper end of the percentage scale missed when I really needed them not to and my elite squad of badasses slowly began losing the war of attrition, until almost all of my people had been replaced by fresh face newbies, they themselves sent out to die and continue the horrible cycle.
‘Alright,’ I thought to myself. ‘I’ll start over once more. Weapons and armor,’ the thought continued. ‘That’s the ticket.’
My third playthrough had me focus on getting my weapons and armor at least to the upgrade, to give my soldiers more damage and let them survive just a little bit longer. Focusing my efforts there required making contact with as many resistance groups as I could very quickly, and the plan succeeded. My weapons did a bit more damage, and my armor gave my soldiers enough of a boost that they were coming home Gravely Wounded as opposed to dead.
‘This is fine,’ I thought, confident I had figured out the trick. ‘I’ll field two or three squads, keep them rotating, and I’ll be.. uh.. hey, why is there a countdown going?’
My fourth playthrough, armed with the knowledge that I both needed to quickly upgrade my weapons, my armor, AND be able to contact specific resistance groups to attack alien facilities, finally succeeded.
XCOM 2 is a complicated game, which is what you want from the strategy genre. Instead of just passively waiting while a globe spins until a new mission is spat out at you, you traverse the globe in a stolen alien spaceship, actually accomplishing tasks while waiting on those missions. In the previous game, your funding was determined by the production and launching of satellites — more satellite coverage meant more money each month, and the balance you struck there was reducing global panic to try and avoid having countires cancelling their monthly funding of you. In order to launch more satellites, you needed to build facilities in your underground base to handle them. In XCOM 2, you make contact with the aforementioned resistance groups in each region, which still requires you to build a specific building in your now mobile base of operations, but can only be contacted if you have previously contacted an adjacent territory.
The various missions will seem somewhat familiar to anyone who has played the previous game, as well. You still have your standard ‘kill everything’ missions, but often these have an extra objective. Similar to Enemy Within (the expansion for Enemy Unknown) these missions have you destroying a specific thing on the map or protecting something from enemy forces (while still killing everything) in order to succeed. Terror Site missions have been replaced with Retaliation Missions: you’re still rescuing civilians from enemy alien forces, but now it’s retaliation against your various contacted resistance groups. Escort missions seem largely unchanged, though now instead of only escorting VIPs to the extraction point, you will also sometimes be tasked with capturing or killing enemy VIPs. Base Defense, a mission type introduced in Enemy Within, makes a return, though now it’s your ship being attacked and shot out of the sky.
Base Defense in Enemy Within was my favorite mission, as it happens, and the twist to it in XCOM 2 is pretty neat. In Enemy Within it had you still needing to kill everything, but you were being attacked by huge numbers of aliens, and the fight would move across multiple sections of your underground base. In XCOM 2 you can’t win until you destroy some alien technology keeping your ship grounded, and the enemies never seem to stop coming. It’s maybe the best example of what XCOM 2 is about: there’s a lot of killing all the things, but there’s just as much running away.
In fact it’s the running away that probably makes XCOM 2 so engaging. One of the new mission types has you attacking enemy bases that pop up around the world, planting explosives and running away before things get too overwhelming. You can, in theory, accomplish these missions without ever killing a single alien — if you utilize the Concealment mechanic well. Instead of edging in, guns blazing, you can sneak around the entire map, approach the objective from the least defended point, plant your explosives, and bounce without ever firing a shot.
And, honestly, you’ll find yourself getting pretty damn good at these missions, because these facilities are tied to the timer that will end your run if you ignore it — the Avatar Project. As these facilities pop up and after they have remained unmolested for a certain amount of time, they will add pips to the Avatar Project counter at the top of the screen. If this fills, a month-long counter starts, and if the counter reaches zero, you lose. You can stop this from happening by succeeding at one of these sabotage missions, and you can sometimes halt the counter entirely by clearing the entire world of these facilities, earning you a brief repreive.
These breaks, few and far between already, seem like godsends in the grand scheme of things because there’s so much you need to be doing at any time. In addition to the more passive things that take time to complete, such as Research and Engineering projects and contacting resistance groups, you also have resources that appear on the map, which you must part at and scan for a number of days to collect. Any one of these will seem aggravating in short order, because you will constantly be interrupted by other stuff happening.
A perfect, regular example of this this: there are 200 resources on the map. I need to fly to it and scan it for seven days, so I fly there and begin scanning. I really need these resources to build a new communications room to contact a new area on the map. The resources tick down a day, and then suddenly a mission prompt pops up. I’m given the choice to either go do the mission right now, or ignore it. I click ‘ignore’ and press the ‘scan’ button again.. and then the mission prompt pops back up, except now it’s in red. I guess I better go do it.
So I go do the mission, which takes, say, a half hour of real world time. Having completed the mission, a new resource thing has appeared on the map, but I haven’t completed the one I was already trying to get. So I fly back to it and return to scanning. It ticks down, and down, and down, and then at two days the above situation repeats itself.
I’ve now been playing for more than an hour of real world time, trying to get this single resource pickup.
This series of events will play out over and over in XCOM 2. The alternative, clicking Ignore a second time, will make it so you need to re-contact the resistance in the area of the map where the mission took place. Contacting the resistance, you guessed it, requires you to fly to that part of the map and start scanning for a number of in-game days.
You can maybe see why you never want to ignore any of these missions, then, given the above example.
These interruptions aside, XCOM 2 still winds up being a good, long campaign. My first successful playthrough, start to finish, took me about 35 hours, and even by the time I got to the end with the best weapons and armor and soldiers tricked out just the way I wanted, the game remained really difficult right up to the finale. At one point near the end of the game, I had a momentary feeling of disappointment because it seemed like it was being too easy on me… and then as I inched a soldier forward I was greeted with a room filled with Chrysallids, all of which immediately started burrowing and zipping around. Those things can do that, now. It’s a bad scene.
‘OH SHIT,’ I thought, as I desperately tried to position the rest of my soldiers in such a way that everybody was covering every possible angle, so I didn’t end up getting steamrolled out of nowhere.
It’s moments like those that make the bad bits mostly bearable, and unfortunately there’s a decent number of bad bits. Playing the game for extended amounts of time leads to some serious frame-rate issues, and what seems like a gradual memory leak, requiring shutting it off and rebooting it to avoid a full crash-to-desktop. Sometimes, it’ll just crash-to-desktop regardless, seemingly without cause.
The weird camera issues people had in the previous game are still present, too. I can’t really count the number of times my screen was just the total blackness of fog of war on a map with the only thing to look at being the words ‘Alien Activity’, sometimes for up to a minute at a time. Occasionally you simply can’t move your soldier onto a specific spot, even if it’s well within their range. You can mouse over it, but it won’t let you click it. Sometimes, dealing with interiors of buildings, the game is unwilling to make the roof transparent — there was one round where I was moving soldiers inside a building while trying to pan the camera around while looking into the building through a window, instead of the normal top-down-through-the-roof perspective.
During a mission with a Sectopod, it stood up inside an alien ship and clipped up through the roof of the spacecraft. This had the inadvertant effect of making the enemy entire invulnerable from anywhere near the ship. I had to run my soldiers all the way out of the ship and way back away so they could take shots at the top of it, peeking through the UFO in order to damage it.
Most of these bugs are annoyances, and I fully expect them to be addressed quickly enough. The previous game had a fair share of bugs and most of those were dealt with in acceptable time. There was one bug that ended a run for me, though, and I’ve no idea what caused it. I’ve mentioned above how the game has a lot of timers — Research timers. Engineering timers. Construction timers. Scanning timers. — I encountered a bug where instead of all these timers finishing once they hit zero, they instead continued to count backwards, into the negatives. Events on the world map didn’t trigger. Research couldn’t complete. Wounded soldiers remained wounded. it required me to start completely over.
It was a bad time, to put it mildly. But, in the grand scheme of XCOM 2, it was a quickly handled bad time in a game full of good times. I liked my time with XCOM 2 quite a bit. From the plot that mirrors XCOM 1 in some ways (while changing things up in other, completely unexpected ways) to the character skills that make the actual soldiers wildly different and much more useful, to the utility items that let you actually plan out how to engage a mission depending on which enemy aliens will be present, XCOM 2 is a great followup to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and a more than worthy challenger in a genre getting more crowded every day.
This review of XCOM 2 is based on retail code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
About the Reviewer: Erron is an accomplished, die-hard PC gamer, with tons of experience in strategy games. He often plays games that are nightmarish in difficulty and challenge, but somehow enjoys them, If there’s a PC game worthy of our time, he’s played it.
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