Summer is over, and with the end of summer comes the tide of new, exciting AAA video game releases. I also have a new (functional) computer with some fairly decent graphical specs, which means I can partake of this new and exciting wave of games from my PC instead of my PS4. In fact, I’ve already done so in the form of two modern, fairly-safe sequels to successful reboots of old PC games from 4-5 years ago! Weirdly specific? Absolutely. Convenient? Yes.

XCOM 2

2015 was not a good year for me and turn-based strategy. Of the multiple new turn-based games I played last year, I think the only one I really enjoyed was Disgaea 5, and even then I didn’t get anywhere close to finishing it. The rest… I’ve already talked about. In detail. By contrast, 2016 has been a venerable cornucopia of tactical junk to fill my need for moving things around on squares or hexes in a turn-based manner, and by that I mostly mean that I liked ⅓ of Fire Emblem Fates a whole lot and I think this new XCOM is pretty solid too. Hey, remember how XCOM 2 came out this year? Well, it did, and I think it’s a marked improvement on Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within (a game I probably like a little less in retrospect than I did in 2012 when I gave it my GOTY) even if I have some of the same problems with it.

If I wanted to get all reductive, I’d say that XCOM 2 is “XCOM but more” and I’d probably get away with saying it. The core and fundamentals present in this game are the same as the ones that were in Enemy Unknown. You still fight aliens in a turn-based manner, equipping your various soldiers of various classes with different abilities and weapons, hiding behind cover and taking overwatch every other turn. However, the devil is in the details and in the details there are 4 years worth of refinements present in the way XCOM 2 handles things. The addition of concealment is a neat mechanic, fitting in with the game’s theme and giving the player some leeway when scouting and setting up ambushes. The way the classes are set up allows for a lot of interesting trade-offs on paper, though there were a couple of trees I found to be far more dominant than others (I found the pistol stuff for the gunslinger to be a lot more useful than the sniping stuff, for example.) In general, I found the added layer of complexity or depth to a lot of the game quite welcome, given that EU strayed a tad too close to simplistic and straightforward at times, substituting raw difficulty and RNG garbage for interesting early-game mechanics. XCOM 2 is also asshole hard at the beginning, but the hit percentages lie far less (in fact, they lie in your favor on lower difficulties) and there are more sources of guaranteed damage than just grenades, like the ridiculous sword toting ninja soldiers who do impressive amounts of damage early on. I know some people had serious problems with the time-limited nature of a lot of missions, but I actually enjoyed the time limits. It forces a certain level of aggression from the player and gives a nice layer of tension to the entire thing. That tension was probably a good thing too, because I made the mistake of playing the game on “Veteran” (Normal) the first time through. It’s fair to say that every XCOM game ever made has a murderous early game, but eventually reaches a breaking point where the player’s power curve vastly exceeds the game’s difficulty curve and you just start steamrolling everything. In my case, I feel like I hit that point somewhere around 10 hours before I actually finished the game, around the time my investment into psychic soldiers was paying off (psionics are very effective in this game) and I started getting plasma weapons. That might be as much a length thing as a difficulty thing, but even the (poorly designed) final missions didn’t cause me too much of a problem. This is obviously a very personal issue and one that is definitely going to differ from person to person. I’m not going to pretend I’m some super-pro strategy god (I took one look at The Long War mod for Enemy Within and said “This doesn’t seem like something I’d enjoy,”) but I know my way around a square grid. If I ever play this game through again, I think I might install a few mods and tweaks, possibly go for a couple of Commander/Ironman attempts and see how far I get. The tactical combat is still sharp enough and fun enough that such a thing could presumably happen.

I can’t give the same level of praise for the strategic meta-layer, which is a progression from the last game in that it’s significantly less irritating than EU’s satellite coverage focused “you can only go to one of these 3 countries and the other two will have a panic increase” bullshit, but instead is just kinda boring. Admittedly, I almost got a game over because I let the avatar project meter get a few ticks away from filling up, but it turns out that’s because the game does a bad job of telling you what to prioritize early on. You still have to focus your resources and attention on one stupid thing to the expense of everything else early on (increasing the number of radio contacts you can have at one time and expanding your influence) but once I nailed that down the rest came pretty easily. That might also be a difficulty thing, but even if it was more difficult I don’t think cruising your ship around scanning things would be any more fun or interesting.

It’s worth mentioning that I played the game with both of the major DLC packs; Alien Hunters and Shen’s Last Gift. Both have special, obviously unique scripted missions with a weird focus on story (like I really need more story details in this XCOM game) and some really neat, but maybe not game-changing, additions. Alien Hunters adds a weird wrinkle to the game in the form of superboss aliens who run away if they take too much damage and also get free reaction moves every time one of your troops take an action. They’re actually sort of ridiculous, and if I had encountered them early on instead of doing that mission fairly late I’d probably be more inclined to call BS. You also get some unique items, both in a random event and from beating the bosses, and while these items are neat and powerful, they’re not exactly significant in the grand scheme. Far more significant are the addition of SPARKs, who are just MEC Troopers from Enemy Within under a different name and without the goofy cyborg stuff. I didn’t invest much into them on this playthrough, but I get the impression from looking at the high level abilities that they’re similarly effective to MECs. Neither of these DLC packs really compensate for a full expansion, and I might question if they’re worth the extra $20 or whatever for the season pass. Of course, if you’re starting the game for the first time at this point, you might as well, right? Just wait for a sale.

But yeah, as a whole I liked XCOM 2 a lot. That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve played it with 6 months worth of patching, while those who bought it at launch had to deal with myriad technical issues, both small and serious. The game only crashed a few times for me, though I assure you all of the weird, janky-looking graphical issues were still quite present, be it the camera focusing on walls, models behaving in odd ways and plenty of other things that you probably remember if you played the last one. Hardly a game-breaker, but if Firaxis could fix that for whatever Terror from the Deep-themed sequel/possible expansion they’re making, that would be great.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

If I wanted to get all reductive, I’d say that Deus Ex Mankind Divided is “Human Revolution, again” and I’d probably get away with saying it. If XCOM 2 feels like a safe, but natural progression from Firaxis’ first attempt at rebooting the franchise, then Mankind Divided is an exceptionally safe, incremental progression from Eidos Montreal’s first attempt at rebooting the franchise. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy playing the game, far from it, but when the credits rolled I felt a little hollow about the whole thing. Make no mistake, on a base mechanical level Duce X: Medical Doctor is a better game than its 5-year-old predecessor. If you want a game whereupon you can sneak through a vent or shoot everything (and why would you shoot everything?) they made it, and the shooting and sneaking feel a little tighter than they did in Human Revolution. I sure did beat the game without killing anyone, and I would’ve beaten it without setting off any alarms too if I wasn’t careless with my saves. All of the augs you know and love are back, alongside some experimental ones of dubious usefulness outside of the remote hacking and the mid-range mass nonlethal takedown. Like everyone else on the internet, I initially invested in all the stuff that would let me sneak or talk around things (a decent level of hacking, poison resistance, high jump, conversation module, cloaking) and by the end of the game I had more than enough points to do what I wanted. Being that I went obsessive quicksave-heavy no kill/no detection, I didn’t engage in the gunplay all that much, but based on the little that I did, I get the impression that reaches a level of tolerable competency with a decent variety of firearms and mods for said firearms.

I think that was enough for most of the game. While I did give the Director’s Cut thing a look when it came out in 2013, I hadn’t played Human Revolution the entire way through since it came out, and I feel like the developers might’ve taken advantage of that. These sorts of games don’t exactly come out very often (It’s basically these games and Dishonored on the list of “Games vying for the throne of the original Deus Ex”) so I was willing to excuse Mankind Divided for being a super iterative game with an underwhelming main story because the side quests were pretty good and the gameplay itself was still solid. But somewhere around the game’s final act I turned on it a little, cemented after it ended on a bland note with a bunch of super obvious plot strings dangling in the wind for the obvious sequel to pick up. I think where it broke for me was the realization that I spent something like 75-80% of my 23 hours with the game in the Prague hub area, doing mostly B-tier side content in the same groups of alleyways, sewers, and apartment complexes, made even worse in the third act by making you sneak through everything like it was the hub area from the Thief Reboot (which, as the one weird person who actually liked that game, I am more than willing to admit isn’t great.) There is a distinct lack of the kind of big, sandbox-y handcrafted levels that help make Deus Ex what it is, and I have to wonder how much shorter the game is if you decide to beeline through all of the story content and avoid the (admittedly interesting) side stuff. There has been some conspiracy talk that parts of the game were cut to use in the sequel, and I might be willing to believe that’s the case. The plot certainly doesn’t go anywhere interesting, and even if I have a soft spot for video game protagonists with dumb gruff monotones, there’s definitely some… questionable voice acting going on.

All of this led me to reinstall the original Deus Ex with the revision mod, which it turns out required a bit more patience and concentration than I was willing to give at that time. I also haven’t played the original game since 2011, it turns out, and my memories of the original Deus Ex being simultaneously super impressive and janky-as-hell still hold up quite fine. I dunno what that has to do with anything, but if nothing else, this all has the side effect of making me very excited in seeing how Dishonored 2 turns out. As an ardent fan of that first game, I don’t think it will be very hard to please me, but after Mankind Divided left me ambivalent, I’m more than ready for a “Find the Vent” game to succeed beyond a basic level.

It's kind of a bummer how Xcom 2 just came and went. I have some minor complaints, as you mentioned, they haven't fully realized the meta game they're going for, and the difficulty curve is maybe even more insane than it was in its predecessor (but in kind of an awesome way). But despite that and its technical difficulties Xcom 2 might be the most pure fun I've had with a video game all year. I had some hopes for the mainstream success of strategy games after Enemy Unknown, but after the tepid reception to this awesome game, it's starting to feel like EU was just a matter of being the right game at the right time. I remember 2012 being a pretty dull video game year at least.

I'm doing my first play through of Human Revolution with a friend right now and its been pretty underwhelming so far. It seems like for everything this game does well, there's some other game that does it way better, which is probably the doomed fate of any game that tries to let you play whichever way you want. At the very least I would hope having such a huge budget would allow it to do some interesting things with the setting, but the world building feels really lazy. My favorite part so far is making fun of Adam Jensen's voice. Hearing that the sequel is kind of just more of the same probably means I won't play it.

I mean, at least Fire Emblem has broken sorta mainstream, right? All they had to do was compromise on perma-death and throw in a bunch more anime dating stuff and now it's suddenly considered one of Nintendo's core franchises after being on the verge of extinction. Whether or not I'm necessarily happy about that stuff is another matter (another, lengthy, matter), but I think it's fair to say that there is a class of strategy stuff that has definitely become gaming community-level mainstream.

I think you're probably right that Enemy Unknown wouldn't have attracted the attention it did if 2012 wasn't a fairly weak year (Did I really put Borderlands 2 and Halo 4 on my list that year? Okay, but then why isn't Dragon's Dogma higher?) though I also think some of the tepidness on XCOM 2, even beyond the serious technical issues, was that it definitely feels like more of a pivot towards that hardcore PC strategy audience with stuff like the timed missions (something that more that a few people have cited as a turn-off) and a general increase in complexity. I wouldn't call it the most pure fun I've had with a game this year (that award goes to DOOM) but it's up there for me.

If Human Revolution isn't doing it for you, then Mankind Divided won't do much more. It improves the mechanics on a basic level, gets rid of the garish yellow and black filter, dials up the surface-level social commentary and speculative sci-fi stuff another notch, but basically feels like it's going for par instead of taking any risks, which is something I find a little harder to deal with when there's a 5 year gap (yeah, there was a totally okay Thief reboot in-between, but I'm to understand that Eidos Montreal is a big studio and that was a separate team. I'd be very interested in hearing some behind the scenes stuff about that game, I'll put it that way.

Also, I kinda love Adam Jensen's voice 'cuz it's so goofy. I turned a corner on Geralt's gruff monotone after dozens of hours with The Witcher 3 and genuinely think it's a solid performance, but Jensen still falls into the irony camp for me.