XCOM 2 - All You Need to Know Before Making Your Purchase

Are you a human or a number on a spreadsheet?

Taking place 20 years after humanity shockingly lost the war we played in 2012’s excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown, you lead the rebel squad in a fight to overthrow a decades-long alien occupation of the Earth. In XCOM 2, you march a four to six-person squad into battle against -superior alien forces.

What I love the most about the XCOM series is its unpredictability and dare of attachment to your customized soldiers. While playing I consider myself a tough as nails Commander that makes the best decision possible given the intel i have on my enemy. But XCOM will make you shed a tear while watching your squad of rebels get wiped out from the roll of the dice turn-based combat engine. Sometimes their is no upgrade that can counter your bad luck, or a poor decision that results in your squadie getting left in the open exposed to an alien's overpowered attack.

Turn-Based System
If you're results-oriented or a big fan of percentages, then you will love XCOM 2. Before you attack, you are given a display of your success rate percentage or your chance to kill and damage you enemy. Deciding whether to take cover near by half or full shielded areas reduce or increase your defense from enemy attacks.

Diversity Matters
Nothing like being enslaved and facing the end of the world to make you band together for the common cause of freedom, lol. In XCOM 2, developers wanted to focus on ensure diversity inclusion was a top priority.   Developers stated that gender, race and nationality do not play a factor in your attributes, so each character was designed with random attributes to benefit the squad.

In a interview, Firaxis Senior Producer Garth DeAngelis said, "The company philosophy is to build game experiences that stand the test of time—it just follows that most of our games have this natural representation of diversity. Since the world is a part of our game experiences, for both Civ and XCOM, it speaks to a global audience more naturally. But all in all, we’re a gameplay and experience-driven studio, and we simply want to create engaging and fun experiences for all types of people."

Intelligent AI

This time around, enemies are geared to compensate for the concealment advantage. The Advent Shieldbearer is a prime example of this: if an enemy survives and isn’t disabled, it’ll activate a power that gives it and every ally around him an energy barrier that’ll absorb some significant damage. You have to be careful about who you shoot first, because it makes a big difference who’s alive when they start fighting back.

When you take out two of the three aliens in a group, the last one may be smart enough to retreat and group up with another nearby group. The AI displaying a will to survive, gives you one more thing to leverage when engaging enemies: leave no survivors, or the next fight might be harder.

What is new?
XCOM’s five soldier classes received an upgrade with new and diverse ability sets. The Specialist’s remote hacking and healing abilities introduces risk-reward opportunities, especially against robotic enemies. Augmenting those abilities with weapon upgrades such as combining a Sharpshooter’s Killzone skill with a high-capacity ammo mod lets him take up a six reaction shots in one turn.

One great change is the way you have to manage the engineering staff by assigning them to specific rooms. They can accelerate build times or accelerate progress on things like soldier healing times or increasing power output. You can see their names and faces once in awhile, making them feel like people rather than a number on a spreadsheet, even if they don’t have unique stats. Unfortunately the science staff doesn’t get the same treatment – they have names, but after you recruit them you’ll never see those names again.

The character creator very limited with a small number of faces available with no sliders to adjust them, the only body type is peak physical condition, and accessories like hats and glasses are sparse. Oddly, modders will fix this problem.  

For base-building you don’t have to stress out about adjacency for resource bonuses.  Instead, the variety here comes from the layout of power nodes in the layout of your captured alien vessel, where the special power-granting tiles might be accessible or near the end.  Reading the map and adapting is important. Starting from a random location, your mobile base has to stay ahead of the aliens by darting around the map making contact with resistance cells in various regions, collecting supplies, and launching raids against the aliens.

Overall

With a focus on variety and replayability, XCOM 2 tried to fix all the complaints gamers had with XCOM.  The game isn't perfect with a few cosmetic glitches and bugs, but it can be fixed in a patch.  If you are a good decision maker under pressure and love a challenge, then XCOM 2 is worth the investment. Overall, with new tactical combat, unpredictable maps and randomized objectives and loot, the game is solid and has a lot of potential to keep those interested in a turn-based, strategy game hooked for hundreds of hours.