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    XCOM 2

    Game » consists of 4 releases. Released Feb 05, 2016

    The aliens have won and the remnants of XCOM must strike to take back the Earth in this sequel to Firaxis' 2012 reboot.

    First campaign postmortem (and thoughts on ironman)

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    Sunjammer

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    Finished XCom2 today, after 60 ish hours or so. On one hand I was surprised to have completed the first campaign i started, but then I remembered the sheer amount of save scumming I did to cope with what I felt were bug-related failures and then I just felt kinda down about it. I did not save scum my way through Enemy Unknown, so having depended on it so heavily here was a real bummer.

    Here's the real takeaway: I don't know if I'm any good at these games as they were designed. I basically never attain a sense of mastery, and that seems.. Bad. Feeling high on ending the campaign I decided to bite, and started another on ironman. First few missions went really well, or as well as can be expected with rookies, but with the first failure (the first retaliation mission was a stun lancer glitchmare) costing me what was at that point my A-team sent me into a spiral of wounded rookie management and repeated mission failure as enemies just got more powerful against my useless rookies my instinct was just a resounding "fuck this".

    I just don't know if XCom 2 is as good as it thinks it is. I'm curious about how the balancing and pacing has been thought out. In my experience it's just a total demoralizing war of attrition early game and a rolling snowball of death later on, just steamrolling every map. I really wonder how much of my success was me being better at the game and exploiting the stats, or how much of it was just worse balance. Snake dudes (really troublesome earlier on with poisoning / pulling) stopped showing up altogether, and I don't think I was hit by a berserker once. The late game enemies just don't put up much of a fight, while dealing with sectoids and snakemen early is complicated and difficult (and long-term punishing via wounding).

    Not entirely sure this game works as intended. If it does, it feels kind of random to me. Like it's out to whip you for one half and then give you a power fantasy the next.

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