Pooka's "Tl;Dr": XCOM 2

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!