October 9
th, 2012: XCOM: Enemy Unknown hits the
shelves, and blindsides the gaming community with a brilliant rebooted IP that
nobody saw coming. It was a no-frills
turn based tactical combat game that taught you to play as you played, and
forced you into scenarios where you would need to improvise and adapt to in
order to bring all of your troops home alive.
It wasn’t perfect, what with the occasional crash, almost roguelike
difficulty curve, and remarkably loose definitions of “line of sight”, but overall it was a functional, surprisingly accessible,
and ridiculously fun reboot of a franchise that I didn’t know I needed in my
life.
Fast forward to today. Firaxis,
not content to rest on their laurels and create the pedestrian sequel we’ve all
come to expect from the AAA gaming industry, has given us a massively reworked
envisioning of the XCOM experience. Did it work? Short answer: Yes. Long
answer: Well…
XCOM 2 is set twenty years
after the events of the first game. While your HQ staff is completely different
than it was in EU, you are still the same Commander that led the XCOM forces to
victory in the first game. Apparently, in a new wave of attacks, the XCOM
Headquarters from the first game was sacked, and you were captured by the alien
forces and kept in stasis while they took over the planet and created a
sinister new world order called “Advent”, putting themselves at the head. They patrol
their city streets with alien shock troops with human DNA spliced in, so they
can seem humanoid around the natives.
If that sounds a little
familiar, you’re not alone in thinking that. My first thought on seeing the
Advent troopers was “Okay, so they’re like the Combine from Half Life 2, I can
dig that.” Then, I was written out of decades’ worth of plot to allow the
aliens to take over and set up shop all over the planet, so the new story arc
could happen. “So… I’m Gordon Freeman. “
I thought. Then I was expected to head up the resistance efforts by
micromanaging small squads of- okay, so Firaxis may or may not have
inadvertently ripped their premise straight from Half Life 2. However, give
that this is a game about a resistance movement against an alien occupation,
there’s only so many ways you can set that up. There’s enough games about
resistance forces on earth (you know, like “Resistance”) that setting up an oppressive
alien empire is practically done by handbook at this point.
If you disregard the
same-ey premise, the rest of the story holds up quite well in terms of quality,
and remarkably, Firaxis harnesses each element of the game’s presentation in
order to enhance the immersion and the feeling that every move, very choice,
every allotment of resources counts, which in turn strengthens your connection
to the story. XCOM 2 is no longer the story of earth defending itself, in a
heartwarming tale of remarkable international cooperation, but rather the tale
of an earth already lost, and you’re fighting an uphill strong from the onset.
“The Ticking Clock” is an almost
oppressively pervasive theme in the plot of XCOM 2. You are constantly reminded
that you have neither the time, nor the resources to accomplish every task, and
while some things require various kinds of resources to produce or implement,
EVERYTHING costs time. Picking up your supply drops takes time, flying your
mobile helicarrier (Named “The Avenger” like we weren’t gonna notice that
cheeky joke) takes time, Research, including weapons development, takes time.
This is all time that is on an insane premium. As the story goes, Advent is
working on a sinister Flubotinum/Hand-Wavium world-ending technology of some
kind, called the “Avatar Project”, whose progress bar is always at the top of
your world map screen in bright red “this is the time to panic” color.
Remember in the first XCOM, when
you were presented with a primary objective, you had literally forever to get
it done? When you were on the offensive
on every mission, until enemy Within came out, bringing Exalt with it? XCOM 2
will make you long for those days. The aliens are working on their “definitely-gonna-kill-everyone”
doomsday device, and they’re not going to wait for you to finish working on
that new armor or weapons tech that you wanted before taking the next major
objective. Every time you hit the “scan” button to advance time to collect
resources and intel, or make contact with a new resistance cell, you have to
cross your fingers and pray that Advent won’t decide to raid a resistance camp, or advance
the Avatar Project’s process, or any one
of a plethora of other monkey wrenches they can throw in your already slapdash
plans. “The Ticking Clock” barely covers it. XCOM 2 is like playing three separate
games of speed chess, with half of your pieces missing. To expand on that
point, the vast majority of your missions are either timed (hack this, capture
that, extract the VIP), or require the completion of an objective that if you
don’t act quickly enough, the Advent Forces will force you into failure (Retaliation
missions, XCOM 2’s equivalent of Terror missions from the first game). This would be bad enough if your old friend,
the baldy from The Council, wasn’t always telling you “The clock is ticking,
commander”, or the Avatar Project’s progress bar wasn’t slowly ticking up, as
you watch it count down to your inevitable doom, or the Loading Screen Hints
would stop saying “You can delay the Avatar Project, but you cannot stop it.”
This constant onslaught of timed vents makes the juxtaposition of those
missions where you can take your time and set up careful approaches a welcome
breather that you’ll be happy to have.
All of this would serve to create
enough dramatic tension, but the cherry on top of this wonderfully immersive
cake is the soundtrack, which is a fantastic score that sounded like what The
Bourne Identity’s tense, thrilling soundtrack might have been if it had been
set inside of a space epic. XCOM 2, then, is the kind of rare production where
the elements of gameplay, visuals, sound, and story all blend fluidly together
into a must-play experience. The sound effects for weapons and gadgets have
been reworked, and I have to say, I’m enjoying the clear level of care applied
to the weapons fire sound effects. You’re obviously going to hear a lot of gunfire
throughout your game, and hearing the satisfying, visceral chugging of your
Grenadier (Heavy Weapons) firing her massive minigun never gets old. So, too,
have the soldier’s voices been revamped. Not only can you opt to have the
soldier’s language match the primary tongue of their home country, but they
will speak it in a variety of accents, and even phrase things in different ways
depending on their personality, all of which you can tweak with just a few
clicks in the frankly ridiculously deep customization suite you have for each
soldier.
Combat is
the same familiar turn-based tactical challenge that it was before, with some
notable differences. The skill trees have been refined for enhanced game
balance, and the classes are different enough from their predecessors that you
will need to adjust your tactics accordingly, which provided a welcome
challenge for a salty XCOM vet like myself. The changes, likes the rest of the
game, are clearly deliberate moves to make the gameplay fit the theme. Snipers,
for example, no longer have the snapshot ability which allowed them to move and
fire in the same turn like they could in XCOM: EU, but they start with
Squadsight, and from there can get a host of remarkably effective pistol
abilities, or aim/damage bonuses for long range engagements. The “Ranger”
(Assault class) has a shotgun, but their secondary is a sword that they can use
to make sneak attacks and powerful strikes up to their full dashing move
distance. The feel of the skill trees and the way the classes are deigned puts
a strong emphasis on the Guerilla tactics focus of the game, most exemplified
by the addition of the new stealth mechanic: Concealment.
On the missions where Advent isn’t
already aware of your presence, your squad will start off Concealed, which
means that as long as they aren’t flanked or in highlighted spaces that show
the enemy’s vision range, they will not be spotted until you do something to
alert them (like shooting them in the face). You only get one shot at this in a
mission, and once you’re revealed, it’s back to the “I spotted them, so they
spotted me and scatter to cover” conditions from the first game. This is a
welcome addition to the core gameplay, as there is a very satisfying feeling to
setting up all but one of your squad into nasty positions, in overwatch near an
enemy squad, then letting a sniper or grenadier kick things off with the
appropriate flavor of bang, then watching the startled enemies dash for cover
only to be cut down by your squad’s ambush. Overwatch has also been tweaked so
that everybody doesn’t shoot at once at the first target, but rather they shoot
one after the other, and if the target is eliminated, they’ll switch to the
next, fixing a frustrating flaw in the gameplay from the first game.
A word to the wise on
stealth mode: Don’t try to cleverly sneak past all of the enemies to accomplish
the objective sight unseen. Advancing an objective invariably alerts everyone
in the entire universe to your presence, so your squad will quickly find itself
surrounded by all those dupes they crept past. It’s far more advisable to use
it to set up the first round of contact with the enemy forces on the map, then slug
it out from there. If you’ve minded your flanks well, you’ll be far better
situated to spearhead your way to the objective.
If the first XCOM made you feel
like you had to keep a lot of plates spinning, XCOM 2 will have you feeling
like you have to keep a lot of plates spinning while the stage is on fire… but
in a good way. Each moment to the next is tense and exciting, and one fatal
mistake could bring down your whole carefully constructed house of cards,
forcing you to take on a tough mission with nothing but rookies armed with pop
guns, none of which have apparently ever been in a firefight before, because
they all panic the first opportunity they get. XCOM 2 is unforgiving, frantic,
and dynamic, and it serves as an example of when a team that has earned the faith
of its fans sets out to improve on their craft, listening to the feedback from
their community, and keeping faith with their audience. If you enjoyed the first XCOM, or even
Wasteland 2, you owe it to yourself to try XCOM 2 and see what a polished game,
crafted with a love for the art looks like. It’s an incredible game, and I absolutely
recommend it. If you’d like to discuss it further, message me on Steam.
I’ll be playing XCOM.
Tl;dr:
A great name made an awesome game with tight controls, that’s so immersive that
you’ll obsess about your tactics even when you’re not playing it. It’s got new
game modes and classes to master, fully customizable soldiers, and seriously
why are you still reading this? You should be playing XCOM 2!
6:42 PM
