I’ve not dabbled with mods for many years. That might sound a little strange considering the high volume of PC games that I get through, but it’s partly because of the high volume of PC games that I get through: I usually play games with an eye to reviewing them, you can’t review them fairly if they’re plastered in mods, and over the last few years I’ve had little time to revisit games I’ve already played to see how they change. With the slightly more relaxed (or less obsessive, anyway) attitude I’m taking this year, though, I have the opportunity to do ridiculous, time-expensive things like reinstalling XCOM 2 along with the recently-released Long War mod for it to see what all the fuss is about.

As a mod, Long War 2 doesn’t do much in the way of the classic mod approach of adding new assets or enemies to the game. Well, no, that’s not quite fair, it does add a fair few new weapons and enemies, but that’s a comparatively low-key change and takes a backseat to what Long War 2 is really here for, which is a massive and comprehensive restructure of the mechanics behind the geoscape and battlescape layers of XCOM 2. The base game tried to run with the idea that XCOM was now a guerrilla organisation that had to work in the shadows to undermine the alien regime, but aside from starting most battlescape missions in concealment it didn’t actually do a whole lot to play to that concept, and in places it was painfully obvious that several of the mechanics (Terror missions, the missions where you can counter one of three Dark Events etc.) were simply hurriedly repainted versions of things that already existed in the first XCOM. On its surface Long War 2 is supposed to make the game longer and more intricate, just as the original Long War mod for XCOM 1 did, but what’s impressed me about this sequel is how nearly every single one of its geoscape mechanics embraces the guerrilla concept, weaving it into the game’s structure far more seamlessly than Firaxis managed.

So, here’s what’s still the same on the geoscape:

• You still fly around unlocking new regions with Intel.
• There’s still an Avatar Project counter along with associated Dark Events that you can counter by doing certain missions.

And here is what has changed:

• Literally everything else.

I really wasn’t kidding when I said this mod was comprehensive: nearly everything that the base game did with the geoscape has been either jettisoned completely, or else altered so drastically that it’s barely recognisable in its new form. Take the regions, for example: instead of being simple passive resource generators once unlocked, they’re now individual resistance havens staffed with named rebels who you can passively recruit, or – more likely – break out of prison in one of the jailbreak missions on the battlescape. Each haven can support up to 13 rebels, each of which can be put to work scrounging up supplies, slowly recruiting more rebels or gathering Intel.

Gathering Intel, again, now means more than just receiving an Intel income. Behind the scenes Long War 2 is periodically spawning prospective guerrilla operations around the world – but you’ll only find out about them if you have enough resistance members sniffing around for leads in the region where the operation has secretly spawned. The way this works behind the scenes is that aside from the familiar Intel currency used to unlock more regions, your rebels on Intel duty are also building up a hidden region-specific hoard of intel. Each operation has a minimum threshold of regional intel required to even detect it in the first place, and the chances of detection get better the more regional intel that you have. Checks for detecting an operation happen every six hours so in theory if you just beat that minimum intel threshold you’re going to get a lot of rolls on whether you detect a given operation regardless, but you still want as many rebels on Intel duty as possible because the higher the chance of detection, the earlier you’ll detect the operation in the first place. And this is very, very important because guerrilla operations do not stick around forever; each of them has a limited shelf-life of around 8-12 days after which they disappear from the geoscape, and so if your intel gathering is too anaemic you’ll only detect an operation with a single day left before it expires.

This is bad because of the new Infiltration mechanic. No longer do your strike teams instantly hurl themselves into action the moment they leap off the Skyranger; instead they must now spend multiple days infiltrating the mission area so that they can strike when opposition forces are at their weakest. The strike team will start building up an Infiltration percentage when they arrive, and it takes around five days for a six-man squad to get to 100% Infiltration. Each operation has a baseline level of opposition (ranging from Extremely Light/Light on most operations I’ve done so far to Swarming for HQ assaults) that determines how many enemies you’ll be facing – but you’ll only do this if you infiltrate your team to 100% or more. You’re free to attempt missions with less than 100% Infiltration if you want, but this will increase the number of enemies over and above the baseline; the one mission I tried at 57% Infiltration upped the opposition from Extremely Light to Moderate, which translated to facing 20-odd enemies in huge pods of 6 enemies each compared to the usual 3 x 3 man pods on Extremely Light. I successfully completed the mission, but at the cost of having to leave a sniper behind to stall the bad guys while the rest of the team sprinted for the Skyranger evac zone along with the VIP.

That’s another good thing about having high Infiltration: it means that when you call for an evac the Skyranger will turn up in one or two turns. Low Infiltration means it’ll take three, four, five turns before Firebrand turns up to evacuate the burned and shredded remnants of your team. Low Infiltration also means the enemies will patrol much closer in to your mission objective, as well as causing enemy vision ranges to be larger when your squad is in concealment — and if it’s too low you won’t start the mission in concealment at all. And finally enemy reinforcement drops have been made far more frequent once the shooting starts, making a prolonged fight with Advent forces a losing proposition. You want to spend as much of the mission in concealment as possible, and once you go loud you need to clear out the opposition in just a couple of turns or you’ll eventually be overwhelmed.

Infiltration has two knock-on effects for the rest of the game. First, stealth is now incredibly important. Concealment is far too valuable to be pissed away on getting a free shot in on the first enemy pod you see; instead you end up stalking pods around the map to see if you can potentially get past them without breaking concealment, or if you can catch two together with a rocket or a grenade. Some missions are ideally completed without breaking stealth at all, and — pleasingly — this is now perfectly possible if you drop in a one- or two-man team of the insanely mobile and stealthy Shinobi class. Second, though, and more importantly, while your squad is infiltrating a mission site they’re committed to that location on the geoscape and unavailable for any other activities. Infiltration takes a base of 5-6 days for a 6-person team to infiltrate to 100% – this incidentally means you ideally have to detect operations with at least that long left before they expire, or else make an unwelcome choice between compromising on force strength (fewer soldiers take less time to infiltrate) and facing those 6-8 enemy super-pods, which can quickly lead to things spiralling out of control in the early game. That’s at least five days during which you potentially won’t have access to your finest squad of alien murderers for any other juicy opportunities that might crop up in the meantime. Clearly the usual XCOM approach of having a single A-team with 3-4 reserves being trained up on rotation in case of mishaps isn’t going to work all that well here if the A-team is stuck infiltrating a mission site while the aliens hit one of your resistance havens in a retaliation operation.

This is why Long War 2 features massively expanded soldier rosters along with a named squad management system for convenience. Instead of having 3-4 reserves on rotation I found myself with three entirely separate squads on rotation in the early game, eventually adding a fourth to cover injuries (which take far longer to heal in Long War) and to provide an additional pool of manpower during the set-piece base assaults. I have 28 soldiers on the active duty roster with a further 6 recovering from poison and plasma burns following an unfortunate encounter with a brace of Muton and Viper pods. There are also 3-4 soldiers in training at any one time, either gaining additional abilities in the Advanced Warfare Centre or else being trained up in the Psi Lab or along the new Officer branch in the Guerrilla Tactics School, which confers one-shot abilities that can be used to boost your squad for a turn or delay enemy reinforcements from turning up. There can only be one officer in command on a given mission, but they’ll confer passive Will bonuses to your squad that increase the more missions they go on together, which in the mid-game means Sectoid mindspin attacks have a tendency to just bounce off your fired-up troopers and incentivises keeping the same group soldiers together instead of chopping and changing all the time (although often necessity forces you to do this anyway).

The soldier classes and progression trees have also been significantly changed up, mostly through the expedient of separating out each of the original classes’ ability trees and building a new set that focuses on one specific facet in more depth. Take the base game’s Grenadier, for example, who ran around with a heavy machine gun for suppression and a grenade launcher for demolition; in Long War 2, these weapons and abilities have been split out to the new Grenadier class, who gets the grenade launcher along with a choice between abilities that boost either damaging grenades or support grenades such as flashbangs, and the Gunner, who gets the heavy machine gun and the ability to suppress enemies and reliably destroy cover. (Grenades are basically useless for this now, and only the Gunner’s Demolition ability and the Technical’s rockets will destroy cover 100% of the time.)  The Ranger has been split out into the Shinobi, who gets the sword and the stealth abilities, and the returning Assault class which is built around sprinting through enemy overwatch fire and shotgunning people to death at close range. The Specialist’s drone abilities remain with them, but the rifleman skills go to the new Ranger class.All in all there are now 8 different classes in the game, each of which has a selection of new and familiar skills to choose from, and all of which can be built into a sickeningly powerful murder machine that provides you with an awful lot of options in a fight – if they survive enough missions. Yet another good idea Long War 2 has is to mostly decouple soldier experience from alien kills – you still get some XP for that, but it’s much reduced in comparison to the amount of experience you now get from simply going on a mission in the first place, allowing you to level up new recruits relatively easily without having to faff around arranging killshots for them.

I was deeply impressed by all of these new and altered mechanics and how they supported each other as well as the core fiction that you’re a guerrilla operation going on multiple hit and run raids that require forward planning. The base geoscape design of Long War 2 is one of the most elegant pieces of design I’ve seen in quite some time, and they can lead to some thrilling missions – sending in full 10-man squads to clear the 45-odd baddies populating HQ missions gets downright apocalyptic with the amount of fire and shrapnel that gets sprayed around. Unfortunately I have a bone to pick with the way the campaign has been balanced, and one that might seem a little unreasonable given the name of the mod: it’s too damn long. I accept that having three times as many squads means you now go on three times as many missions; I don’t think that that in and of itself is a bad thing, especially since the tactical decision space created by the new stealth and concealment mechanics is more fulfilling to engage with. I think Long War 2 is actually good enough to support sending your troops on 90 missions in a campaign (as opposed to the 30-ish of the base game).

What it can’t do, though, and what no XCOM game could ever do, is remain engaging through 150+ missions — and this, sadly, is what Long War 2 forces you to do. I am 40(!) hours into my Long War 2 campaign and I’ve just about hit the midpoint with a few regions liberated and the Shadow Chamber being built, and I haven’t even started on the first blacksite mission I got just after the game started. I welcome the meatier mechanics, the more detailed research trees and a more expensive and detailed manufacturing process that’s meant I’ve still been gradually teching up this whole time instead of just plateauing for long periods; there’s always been a sense of forward progress in my campaign. At the same time I look at the game and wonder if it’s really worth spending another 40 hours getting to the end; when I do almost nothing else with my free time for 3 weeks that isn’t playing XCOM¹ and I still only make it halfway through a single campaign, I seriously have to question the point of doing all that insanely good work on the design and then asking so much of the player that you ensure that only the tiniest fraction of the people who download Long War 2 will ever see it all the way through.

Oh, and also Long War 2 is, if anything, even worse than the base game at obfuscating its mechanics. It doesn’t explain a single goddamn thing about them, which is really weird considering how well put together they are; I have a suspicion that various regions increasing their Advent troop strength in response to my guerrilla activities is pulling resources away from the Avatar project given how slowly it’s progressing, but I have no way to link the two to prove the cause, and I wouldn’t have had a clue as to how gathering Intel related to unlocking missions if I hadn’t watched a couple of Youtube videos on the subject. There’s a specific chain of missions that lead to each region being liberated from Advent control, but the only way you can tell the difference between the mission that kicks this chain off and the generic guerrilla operations that otherwise spawn all the time is that the liberation chain will have the objective “Find a lead” and the generic operation will have the objective “Find a Lead”. I know Firaxis are the current market leaders at fucking up literally everything to do with communicating to the player how they should play their games, but just because Long War 2 is built on top of one of their products it’s no excuse for Pavonis to do the same thing here. I enjoy the more complex systems of Long War, but they really, really need to be explained to the player far better than they currently are, especially considering the huge time investment the mod is asking them to make – as it is you’re making far-reaching strategic decisions with almost no background information informing your actions, making it very easy for misunderstandings at the start of the game to eventually scupper a campaign 20 or 30 hours in.

I feel a little bad putting the boot into Long War for being too long, especially since it’s very easy to forget that it is “just” a mod rather than the full-blown (and far superior) remake of XCOM 2 that Long War 2 feels like. Pavonis have some crazy talent and it’s good that they’ve made the jump from mod team to independent developer, as I feel that they have some really good ideas about how to make strategy games that could end up creating something special if given the chance to blossom properly in a standalone game. However they suffer from a not-uncommon malady amongst developers of all stripes these days, which is that they lack somebody who’ll tell them when they’ve gone too far and when to reign the project back in scope. I prize focus above all else in the games that I play, but while Long War 2’s mechanics are admirably well-focused (for the most part) there was absolutely no need to bloat the game length the way they have here, other than that it was a sequel to a mod called Long War. I’d be very interested in a mod for this mod that adjusted the pacing so that it took half the time — the Short Long War, if you will. As it is, Long War 2 heroically staves off blundering into the trap of becoming a repetitive slog for a very long time, but that it does eventually fall in regardless is entirely its own fault and ensures it just misses out on being a version of XCOM 2 that I’d always choose over the base game.

The post Replay: XCOM 2 – Long War 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

About six months after my glowing review of the original XCOM reboot I wrote a followup piece that comprehensively laid into the game for flaws that had become apparent on subsequent playthroughs. The aliens’ completely passive presence on the geoscape. The introduction of new, tougher enemy types being linked to your completing plot missions that had no time factor involved, allowing you to game the system by researching endgame weapons and armour before tackling any of them. An inverse difficulty curve where the first three months of the game were by far the hardest as you desperately tried to keep your rookies alive with only basic weapons and equipment. A whole host of paper tiger systems (such as panic), where the various NPCs screamed at you to play the game in a certain way in an attempt to mask the fact that playing slowly and cautiously — and liberally vomiting explosives anywhere in direct contravention of Vahlen’s instructions — would result in flawless completion of 95% of missions. The Enemy Within expansion pack alleviated some of these flaws, but it couldn’t fix the worst of them as they were baked into the very structure of the game itself. Any trulycomprehensive cure would require a complete restructure of XCOM’s systems that only a sequel could provide.

Fast-forward three years, and my initial impression on playing XCOM 2 was that series lead Jake Solomon had been reading this blog¹ and had made a game that directly incorporated all of that feedback. At first glance XCOM 2 is specifically set up to counter nearly all of the criticisms that had become so apparent after several years with the first game. Just as with the first XCOM, though, “at first glance” is liable to lead to an unduly favourable impression of the game; it takes time to get under the hood and fully understand the new and improved systems and mechanics of the sequel, and my conclusion is that while XCOM 2 is a worthy sequel and a great game in its own right, it’s not quite the revolutionary experience it would like you to believe it is – both figuratively and mechanically.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twelve months you’ll be aware by now that XCOM 2 does do something pretty daring for a sequel: it sets itself against the backdrop of a future Earth where XCOM lost the first game in a matter of weeks. The aliens annihilated Earth’s military and gave XCOM enough hard knocks that the remnants of the Council were all too glad to surrender by signing an Accord that handed over control of the planet². Fast forward twenty years and the aliens have an ironclad grip on things via their quasi-militaristic front organisation ADVENT, which has gifted the population of Earth many marvellous scientific advances derived from alien technology that mask their nefarious true plans for the human race. There are various underground resistance groups fighting against these plans, coordinated by a still-operational XCOM that’s led by a scarred, embittered Bradford — whose sweater was presumably one of the many casualties of the First Alien War — but thematically there’s a definite role inversion here compared to the first game.  XCOM is no longer a legitimate entity fighting from a position of relative strength that’s backed by all the resources of Earth’s governments; they’re a quasi-terrorist organisation that has to engage in guerilla warfare against an entrenched alien enemy, and which is forced to scrounge up supplies (XCOM 2’s money) from a variety of sources in order to carry on the fight.

This is a great excuse to completely overhaul the geoscape layer – this is XCOM’s name for the strategic part of the game where you spend resources to research and develop new equipment and weapons, build new base facilities and decide which missions to take on next. In XCOM 1 the geoscape layer just didn’t work for long-term play; once you figured out what to research when and what you could get away with in terms of the panic meter and the plot missions it became an almost braindead experience. XCOM 2 attempts to throw nearly all of that out and starts from scratch, and the first step towards rebuilding it into something better is taken by giving XCOM a flying base: the Avenger. The Avenger travels around the globe to various mission sites and other points of interest, however it can only travel to regions where you have made contact with the local resistance cell. This is done by spending time and a secondary currency called Intel, however you can only contact a new region if you have enough “comms capacity” from the communications facilities inside your base – and the point that you understand this is the point at which you first realise that maybe XCOM 2 isn’t quite the drastic overhaul you were led to believe, since this is just a repackaged Satellites mechanic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely a big improvement over Satellites since opening up new regions now goes far beyond just giving you more income  (each newly contacted region gives you a boost to your monthly supply), but it is something that is indicative of XCOM 2’s general approach: nearly all of the mechanics from XCOM are still present in some form, they’ve just been retooled into something that is in the vast majority of cases an improvement over what came before.

So the Terror Missions where you have to save civilians from encroaching alien forces are back, they’ve just been recast as Retaliation Events where the aliens assault a resistance cell. The pick-one-out-of-three Alien Activity/Abduction missions are back, except they’re now Guerilla Missions where you can counter one of three alien Dark Events – should these come to fruition they’ll give the aliens temporary bonuses like additional armour for their grunts or sending a UFO to hunt the Avenger. Panic has received a more significant retooling into the Avatar Project counter – more on this in just a second – but it still fulfils that basic role of a thing that loses you the game if you let it tick up too much. Something that is quite conspicuous by its absence are UFO interceptions; XCOM doesn’t have any fighter craft so instead you just get occasional leads on disabled UFOs/ADVENT supply convoys fed to you by the Resistance. I think there’s scope to make an interesting mechanic out of interceptions but since they added very little to XCOM in their current incarnation I’m fine with being dropped until somebody can figure out what that interesting mechanic is.

The one genuinely new concept the XCOM 2 geoscape layer introduces is the concept of time as a resource. In XCOM 1 the geoscape was somewhere you went to kill time while you waited for the next mission to pop up or the next piece of research to complete. XCOM 2’s geoscape by contrast has you deciding on the best place to spend time, as everything you do there that isn’t just flying from point A to point B takes a certain amount of it. The map is liberally scattered with points of interest where you can spend a certain amount of time “scanning” in order to get some bonus resource income. Or you can spend it contacting new Resistance regions or building Radio Relay towers to make contacting far-flung regions easier. You can fly back to Resistance HQ and spend time there to get some passive bonuses for the Avenger – faster facility construction, faster recovery time for wounded soldiers, or gathering Intel (which can be quite hard to come by otherwise). Even gathering your basic monthly supply income takes time, as it’s dumped somewhere on the globe and necessitates you having to fly over and spend time grabbing it all up.

This works quite well in tandem with the new incarnation of the Panic meter: the Avatar Project. The Avatar Project is the thing that the first XCOM very conspicuously did not do: it’s a secret goal for the aliens that they’re working towards all the time, and almost completely independently of your actions on the geoscape. Every so often the Avatar Project counter at the top of the geoscape screen will tick up. There are certain Dark Events which, if you do not block them, add one or two ticks to the Avatar counter. The aliens periodically construct facilities around the globe to aid in their Avatar Project research; allowing one of these facilities to exist looks like it also speeds up the rate at which that counter fills up. There are only two ways you can reduce the aliens’ Avatar progress:

• Blow up the Avatar research facilities by sending your soldiers in to plant C4 charges. This will remove any ticks that that facility was responsible for adding – worthwhile when its got three ticks on it, less so when it only has one unless you’re really desperate.
• Complete plot missions.

The second point is by far the best way to reduce Avatar progress – in the one campaign I’ve completed so far there was still an element of waiting until I was good and ready before doing these objectives, but I got really lucky with my initial facility spawns and was able to knock four ticks off of the counter relatively quickly. I was also lucky in that I was able to block nearly every single Dark Event that added to the Avatar counter. Even so there was definitely a point several months in where I was feeling very pressured – I’d had time to research Tier 2 weapons and armour, but Tier 3 was very much beyond my reach before I had to start paying attention to the plot objectives. The Avatar Project functions adequately for the first 50% of the campaign as a way of keeping pressure on the player and making them very aware that time is precious; I think that once you understand how it works it’s far too easy to get on top of the Avatar counter in the late game and keep it down to 3-4 ticks (out of 12), but I also know that I had it relatively easy when it came to initial non-plot options for buying myself time. The counter could definitely stand to advance a little more aggressively — but then I was only playing on Normal. Classic might be a whole other story. Regardless it’s a huge, huge improvement over Panic, and any flaws in its implementation could probably be fixed with balancing tweaks rather than yet another overhaul of the fundamental mechanics.

Base facility construction has also received an overhaul, although it’s a substantially subtler one. Nearly all the facilities from XCOM return in some form; the big difference here is how you deal with engineers and scientists in base management. First, you get them as individual, named engineers scientists from mission rewards (and, occasionally, purchasing them from Resistance HQ and/or the black market) rather than as the abstract numbers the first XCOM dealt with. Each scientist you acquire gives a passive, diminishing bonus to research speed (so the first scientist gives +50%, the second +33% and so on) and you can build laboratories and assign scientists to them for further research boosts – but I never found this to be necessary in my game, as having 3-4 scientists just sitting around was enough to get tolerable research speeds. Engineers are a different story entirely, however. Engineers are used to excavate debris to create new construction slots as well as speeding the construction of the facilities you place in those slots, but their real utility is in being assigned to your various base facilities for huge bonuses in how those facilities operate. For example, a basic, unstaffed Resistance Comms facility increases your Comms capacity by one (or maybe two, I forget which). Adding an engineer raises that capacity by an additional two. Upgrading the facility with an additional station and putting a second engineer in raises that capacity by an additional four. It’s a similar story with the other facilities, with engineers increasing your power output, soldier healing/training time or the construction time of prototype weapons in the Proving Ground. Because time is so precious now Engineers are insanely valuable, and I found myself blocked on geoscape progression more than a few times because I didn’t have enough; I was regularly swapping around the ones I had according to what I needed most at the time.

In hindsight I’m kicking myself for never building the Workshop, which is a facility that provides Engineer bonuses to all adjacent facilities – but that’s not something you can really understand the utility of until you’ve already run into Engineer blockages. I found the base management part of the geoscape really tricky because it’s something you need to plan months in advance, and you can’t plan effectively when you’re still figuring out how everything works. I remember having that problem with the first XCOM too, where I mis-attributed it to the base management actually being difficult. I don’t think that’s the case with XCOM 2 but I do think there are much more interesting decisions to be made here, especially with the early availability of psionics (another thing I didn’t make good use of in my campaign, but which were devastatingly powerful even in the endgame) and the Proving Ground facility that provides most of your best utility items. What I can definitely say is that I’m excited to try it again on Classic with a more optimal strategy – it feels like there’s multiple viable options and plenty of room for refinement, rather than the one-size-fits-all strategy of XCOM.

Compared to the geoscape the alterations to the tactical battlescape portion of the game are somewhat lower-key, even though one of them is basically the headline feature of XCOM 2. Most of these changes are designed to counter the foolproof method of beating battlescape missions in XCOM — which was to inch forward a couple of tiles at a time with everyone permanently on overwatch — as well as the common complaint that it was always you finding the aliens rather than the other way around, which put far too much power into the hands of the player. Since your soldiers are now part of a covert resistance organisation engaged in hit-and-run attacks they start most missions in a state of stealth; they can run around unhindered as long as they don’t blunder into any alien line-of-sight (helpfully marked by big red eyeball indicators on the relevant tiles) and set up devastating ambushes on oblivious groups of enemies who are standing around in the open. As soon as you fire your first shot stealth is dropped and the gameplay transitions to the standard XCOM battlescape – where uncovering a new group of enemies gives them a free move to seek cover — so making effective use of this first ambush by setting up your squad in overwatch (which doesn’t have any of the usual penalties to aim when you’re firing from an ambush position) prior to firing that first shot is critical, especially since the bad guys now have many more nasty tricks up their sleeve.

The flipside of stealth is that every mission involving it also has a time limit for you to achieve an objective, which is usually “Get to a thing and hack it” although there’s also destruction/protection of communication relays and the VIP extraction missions (which are awful in a good way, as you’re forced to be a little more discriminating in your use of firepower). This is the antidote to the overwatch-creeping tactic above; not only does overwatch appear to be less effective in XCOM 2, but if you’re super cautious you’ll simply run out of time to complete the mission. It would seem a little draconian if the stealth didn’t give you a free hand in setting up your assault; as it is the two go together very well indeed, allowing you to freely move around in the opening turns of the mission while punishing you for dragging your feet and encouraging you to come up with solutions to inconvenient tactical fuckups on the fly instead of avoiding them entirely by being conservative in your play. The stealth missions are also broken up with more conventional gameplay according to the old rules of XCOM - but even here I found myself being more aggressive simply because I could afford to be.

This is because, pound for pound, the redone soldier classes of XCOM 2 are vastly more effective than their XCOM counterparts. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still weak as kittens to start with and you have to be on your toes even in the late game to avoid unnecessary losses, but they have a much wider range of useful skills and items to draw upon in combat. There’s new utility items such as Mimic Beacons (arguably the MVP of my completed campaign, and something that should be researched ASAP), as well as passive boosts to your soldiers’ stats through Combat Sims and weapon upgrades that provide free reloads and bonuses to aim or crit. The soldier skill trees are still split out into two branches per class, however this time around each of the branches is powerful and worthwhile. The Assault has become the Ranger, able to specialise in either scouting or melee combat; the Support is now the Specialist, with access to drones that can either heal and buff allies remotely or hack and electrocute enemies; the Sniper’s pistol tree has now been reworked for the Sharpshooter so that it’s arguably more powerful than the sniper rifle in combination with special ammo; and then finally there’s the Grenadier.

The Grenadier deserves a special mention. Instead of the Heavy’s rocket launcher they lug around a grenade launcher that doesn’t have as much range, but which is capable of indirect fire and which can launch any type of grenade in the game with a boost to damage and lethal radius. Explosives in general are even more important in XCOM 2 than they were in the first XCOM, as there’s a new armour mechanic whereby armoured units have between one and six points of armour that absorb a corresponding amount of incoming damage; only damage that exceeds the target’s armour value will make it through and damage their HP bar. In order to defeat heavily armoured enemies you have to either use abilities that ignore armour completely (psionic powers and the Specialist’s electric shocks are great for this) or else shred the armour first using — you guessed it — a copious quantity of explosives. The Grenadier also has a skill that lets their standard cannon shots shred armour, making them the go-to guys for armour removal, cover removal and softening up large groups of enemies for the rest of your squad. The new equipment options include a vastly expanded array of grenade types such as EMP, flashbang, incendiary and gas grenades, all of which can be plugged into the grenade launcher for that damage and explosive radius boost. There’s also specialised sets of heavy armour that come with special inbuilt heavy weapons, the default version of which is a rocket launcher.

As a consequence I always found myself carting around at least two Grenadiers on every mission, and my level of comfort with how a mission was playing out was directly correlated with the number of grenades and/or rockets I had left.  The increased availability and use of explosive weapons also shows off the new destruction and environmental burning effects; if there are enemies perched on top of a roof you can now destroy the ground underneath their feet, dropping them one or two storeys and dealing additional fall damage, while all explosives have a chance to set buildings alight – and this fire will continue burning and destroying terrain in subsequent turns, which did come back on me a couple of times as I accidentally dropped a building on my squads’ heads. It’s worth noting that the aliens aren’t without their own tricks and have a number of new and incredibly annoying abilities to offset your soldiers’ increased power, but on the whole I think it’s a net win for the forces of XCOM.

And while I’m talking about the soldiers, I should spare a few words to talk about the general art direction of the game. The cutscenes and writing are the usual bland Firaxis crap, but I think that the general art direction — and the soldier customisation options in particular — is actually pretty amazing. You can take a screenshot of nearly any action zoom event from XCOM 2 and use it as a publicity photo for the game; XCOM 2 absolutely nails stylish soldiers killing aliens in stylish ways thanks to new weapon effects (plasma rifles in particular now look like they hit hard) and a dizzying array of options for playing soldier dress-up. These don’t fully unlock until you’ve levelled them up a bit, but once you do you can alter just about anything you can think of – I was particularly taken with the metallic camouflage options for the last tier of powered armour, as well as the belated realisation that I could have cigar-chewing Grenadiers blasting enemy Sectopods with their plasma cannon. The new environments provide a fitting backdrop for the carnage, with the camera and lighting effects really accentuating the highlights of the ongoing battle. Watching a battlescape action unfold is a genuine pleasure, and one I don’t think I’m going to get tired of any time soon. That’s a big contrast to the usual XCOM problem of battlescape fatigue.

As usual in my reviews, though, it’s time for the inevitable criticism. XCOM 2 is a fantastic game in many ways, but the areas where it continues to fuck up are the perennial Firaxis bugbears: tutorials, UI and scripted events. The tutorials are complete garbage once again, alternating between too hand-holdy (the tutorial battlescape mission literally locks off all possible moves except the one you’re supposed to make) and almost non-existent – contacting new resistance regions and the Comms facility are extremely badly explained, which is ironic considering they made exactly the same mistake with Satellites the first time around. The base navigation UI is absolutely terrible, requiring way too many clicks to change screens and generally making it a chore to get around. And the scripted events and objectives…

…yeah, this is probably the single worst thing XCOM 2 does, since not only do the objectives and scripted events seem intentionally designed to fuck over new players so that they have to restart their campaign, but it’s all entirely avoidable by this magic thing the original original X-COM did called “Not having scripted events in your game of procedurally generated battle maps”. It’s an entirely self-inflicted wound. Usually in grand strategy games any objectives you are given are designed so that they provide some structure for first-time players, but in XCOM 2 this couldn’t be further from the truth. Even apparently harmless objectives like building the Proving Ground early on seem intentionally misleading, as players will waste time and resources building a facility that doesn’t really come into its own until the mid-game when they could instead be building the Guerilla Tactics School – which is possibly the single most important facility you can build for the early game. The really unforgiveable thing about XCOM 2, though, is that fulfilling its equivalent of “Interrogate enemy species X” objectives – which has been a core part of XCOM since forever — now immediately spawn in very tough enemies who will make mincemeat of an unprepared squad. You have no warning that this is going to happen, and if you haven’t gamed the system by waiting for tier 2 or 3 armour and weapons, or you haven’t made sure you’ve cleared out every other enemy on the map first, you’re probably going to get screwed the first time you do it.

The thing about this that I find particularly annoying is that it’s a trap that will only catch out first time players. Veteran players will know what’s coming and plan ahead, but if you’re playing the game for the first time you’re already at a disadvantage while you figure out the systems and you’re probably relying on following the objectives to guide you through the game. Instead XCOM 2 sees no problem with throwing these additional obstacles in your way — obstacles that have absolutely no place in a game that’s supposed to be designed for repeated playthroughs — and I actually think that kind of design mentality is outright offensive, since not only is XCOM 2 lying to you about how you should play it (again) but this time it’s being actively malicious in doing so. It’s different from even the Alien Base in the first game, since at least with the Alien Base you knew you were heading into enemy territory and could prepare for a tough mission. By contrast these screw-you events can happen at any time if you trigger them by having the temerity to actually do what the game tells you you should be doing. Fortunately it wasn’t so much of a problem for me, as I (somewhat) intentionally decided to test the limits of the geoscape by waiting as long as possible before tackling the plot objectives – there was even some good news there as I discovered that the aliens level up their troops independently of your progress through the plot. However it still came across as tremendously awful game design, and it stood out even more when you consider how well the rest of it is put together.

XCOM 2 is still mostly the same game as its predecessor, and perhaps a little more so than I would have liked; it makes plenty of iterative changes but on the whole retains a surprisingly large quantity of the DNA of its parent. I don’t think the geoscape changes are an unqualified success – it’s a bit more hectic and there are some marginally interesting decisions to be made, but I still ended up killing time in the lategame — but the base management is genuinely tense as you try and figure out where to invest your resources and the battlescape missions are as good as they have ever been. To me, though, the most interesting thing about XCOM 2 is that it shows full awareness of the games preceding it.Too often I play sequels that have regressed in scope in some way when compared to the original title, with the usual excuse being that there wasn’t time to add certain features or functionality and that it’ll have to wait for a patch or expansion pack. XCOM 2 by contrast is just as feature-rich as XCOM was with the additional Enemy Within content, and since it refines most of that content into a better state it is one of the few sequels I’ve encountered that is just a flat-out upgrade. It’s not a perfect game by any means and makes some entirely avoidable mistakes, but it is in almost all respects better than what came before, and I don’t think I could ask for more from a sequel to the already-great XCOM.

The post Thoughts: XCOM 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.