XCOM 2

Reviewing XCOM 2 almost 5 years after its release is both a blessing and a curse. It’s great to play XCOM 2 at its greatest potential with all of the DLCs including the War of the Chosen add-on. XCOM 2 is a complex, challenging strategic game with potentially hundreds of hours of enjoyable gameplay. It’s unfortunate to report that even with XCOM 2 at its apex, the game is horrendously buggy, especially when playing vanilla XCOM 2 (without the War of the Chosen add-on). The previous games in the franchise XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within were also notoriously buggy with characters clipping through environments and random framerate drops. Unfortunately XCOM 2 bugs are even worse than those: there are UI bugs where menu choices can get obscured or behave erratically if you click too fast, turns that will feel like it takes forever to end and on rare occasions characters glitching through the environment such that it is impossible to move them afterwards. Even with all of these game breaking bugs they can be tolerated because XCOM 2 is that good.

XCOM 2 can best be summed up as the events following the bad ending of the original game. The aliens have taken over Earth and have begun their process of assimilating humans for their nefarious research under the guise of providing life-saving gene therapy. You play as the commander of the remnants of the XCOM force. XCOM is no longer a defensive global network but now an agile moving guerilla force. You are tasked with launching targeted attacks on alien supply lines, beacons and facilities with the hope of eventually overpowering them before the aliens complete their secret project to wipe out humankind.

The gameplay of XCOM 2 is mostly similar to the prior games. Each soldier has two action points and there is half-cover and full cover. The same XCOM quirks are still there, it is absolutely possible to whiff a 95% shot and also frustrating to get a soldier KO’ed with full health and in full cover. While there are many new twists to the gameplay like the ambush mechanic and the ability to hack mech units, the real key difference is in the enemy design. Every alien you encounter in XCOM 2 is a legitimate threat: there are the Sectoids that can mind control and resurrect dead units, the Vipers who can pull a soldier out of cover and asphyxiate them and even the lowly ADVENT grunts who can toss grenades to get your soldiers out of cover. The game also forces players to be on the aggressive as many missions require you to complete them within a limited amount of turns.

The War of the Chosen add-on doesn’t feel like some thrown together optional DLC but a requisite purchase to fully experience XCOM 2 at its best. The WotC add-on fixes many of the bugs that plague the vanilla version XCOM 2. It adds the Chosen which are 3 mini-bosses that randomly appear during missions and adds three new rival factions with their own unique units and meta-game layer. With all that said, I would still recommend playing vanilla XCOM 2 at least once to get a feel for what you need to do and play the two missions (Shen’s Last Gift and the Alien Hunters) that are not available in WotC. Playing XCOM 2 WotC with no prior experience might prove daunting as the missions come fast and furious often with few breaks in-between. Keep in mind that WotC runs in a separate launcher than vanilla XCOM 2 but is still more or less the same core game with new features and improvements.

XCOM 2 beyond its obvious bugs and excellent strategic layer has a lackluster story arc. While the first XCOM wasn’t exactly Emmy award winning material, it at least had a straight-forward objective of repelling the alien assault and destroying their mother base. The story in XCOM 2 on the other hand is aimless. There isn’t an overarching objective like the first game and instead you are tasked with investigating, researching and building several alien Macguffins until your team suddenly stumbles upon the final mission. The story is wrapped up in so much sci-fi technobabble that the final act is an incoherent mess featuring the “chosen one” powering up and overcoming the alien masters with (most likely) a millennial’s worth of experience and skill.

The ultimate reason why you should play XCOM 2 is not for its story but for its strategic gameplay and it exceeds. There are multiple viable soldier combinations to choose from, an incredibly diverse and unique map pool and constant surprises to keep you off-guard especially with WotC enabled. For the save-scummers out there, you will find that it is possible to escape almost any bad situation with correct positioning and ability usage. Even if you lose your best soldier, the game grants options to course correct like recruiting a highly ranked soldier from the Black Market or earning one by completing a very difficult mission. XCOM 2 is a more difficult game than the first XCOM but the payoff feels tremendous when you have a fully decked out squad of alien killing machines. The only problem is no matter what you do, the bugs will eventually rear their ugly head like in my experience. The jubilation I felt during the end of my vanilla XCOM 2 run was amazing until I saw the final FMV cutscene where the lip-sync was completely off and the World Statistics didn’t show up properly.