My team touches down, concealed. Two psionic soldiers, a ranger, a specialist, a sharpshooter, and a grenadier, all at Colonel or Magus rank. It’s near the end game and I’m feeling confident. I’ve got all the best armor and weapons, and have had a string of nearly flawless missions. I begin my advance on the alien facility I aim to destroy. I first move my sharpshooter to the top of a nearby building, then the rest of my squad one by one. No enemies yet. My final move of the turn, I choose to dash my grenadier out to what I believe is a safe cover point. But alas, just outside my field of vision sits a Gatekeeper and two Archons, and they’ve now spotted us. I breathe deep and end my turn. The newly revealed enemies proceed to kill off my grenadier with extreme prejudice and severely hurt my sniper. All previous built up confidence has been lost.
It’s at this point I’d love to tell you that I bucked up and salvaged an initially disastrous mission, revelling in the punishment that XCOM 2 doles out with reckless abandon. The dominant narrative, after all, are from those that choose to play the game with as much difficulty as possible, accepting the consequences as they go. But alas, the way this tale ends is with me reloading, save scumming, and getting yet another “Excellent” mission rating. Despite my thinking that this would be the time I play XCOM as I “should”, after a few early disastrous missions I quickly bumped the difficulty down to Easy and proceeded to install some mods to make the game even easier, including ones that slow down the Avatar project’s progress and make sure that my melee attacks actually hit. This left me with a conundrum; was there any value in my experience now that I chose to subvert the developer’s intent so significantly?
Let me get this out of the way, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with XCOM 2 and wholeheartedly recommend the game despite the wealth of bugs it currently has. The tactical combat and the empowering progression systems combine to make a tight gameplay loop that had me obsessing over the game these past few weeks. But at the end of it all, I lost no soldiers of significance and was given the luxury to expand and develop my resistance group with no real time pressure. This resulted in a strange bit of ludonarrative dissonance where the story was told with an urgency not reflected in the gameplay, but not to a degree that it ruined the plot. All told, it is difficult to say that the game I ended up playing was representative of the experience that Firaxis had intended, but what resulted was a fun game that pushed all the right buttons for me.
I originally planned on writing up a review of XCOM 2 once I had completed it, but now that I’ve changed the core game so significantly, it doesn’t feel right to assign it a score or definitive judgement. That’s not to say that the only “pure” experience would be to play on Normal or higher without mods, but there is a fuzzy line where authorial intent is subverted by modification. Where that line exists precisely I do not know, but I certainly believe that I crossed it by making the game significantly easier. It’s strange, but I feel nervous writing this blog post as I feel less qualified to write about the game when I “cheated” myself out of the difficulty the game is known for. But I rationalize this with the fact that I experienced the game’s thrilling highs, such as tactically outmaneuvering my enemies or using newly developed equipment in battle, both of which remained great experiences despite the changes I made to the game.
After completing the main campaign (which ends quite well narratively), I think I’ll be taking a break from XCOM 2 before returning to it in a few months. Perhaps then I’ll be more willing to engage it on its own terms and post a more level-headed review. The beauty of Firaxis games is how well they tend to age, and I fully expect that after some time with mod development, patches, and possibly game expansions, the game will shine even brighter than at launch. But for now, it’s still very good and more than worth your time, modded or not.
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