XCOM 2 (2016) by Firaxis

XCOM 2's predecessor XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a fine enough game, though even with its expansion (Enemy Within) and mods such as The Long War, I often felt myself growing bored towards the latter half of the campaign. Snipers were too overpowered with the jet pack suit and high ground perks, the overarching strategy layer was tedious to manage for the majority of the game and non-existent once you got enough satellites up, and the UFO combat instances were pretty bare-bones and not very much fun. I often found myself getting into the game a bit before growing bored and putting it down. I've only ever finished it once despite my nearly 100-hour playtime on Steam, which does not include another 50-60 hours of playing time on the Xbox 360.

Most of this has been solved by XCOM 2's sheer added depth. The overarching strategy layer has been completely revamped from Enemy Unknown and now gives me an extreme sense of "just one more round" that I've gotten from some other games such as Firaxis' own Civilization series. XCOM 2 is incredibly addictive and weaves into tactical combat missions way more intuitively than the strategy layer in the first game ever did. UFO combat with your own fighters has been completely removed, replaced by UFOs that hunt your big airship and involve a specific mission type that I won't spoil because it's amazingly fun and legitimately surprised me when it first happened.

But more than anything, XCOM 2 features something I didn't realize was lacking in the first game until I played the second: A far more effective mise en scène and an immersive quality that the first game lacked. The first XCOM feels like a game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but XCOM 2 really puts you into the cast's predicament in a way the first game does not. There's something about the maps and the added character depth that I think adds this feel, but I can't put my finger on it. Perhaps it's the way the maps sometimes will feature the overgrown ruins of gas stations, towns, abandoned family homes, and ruined cities, or how engineers and scientists now have names and all of the soldiers have written backstories. It really provides the feel of a grassroots guerrilla effort in a conquered world, which was a much more interesting premise to me than the first game's invasion defense. The story is also more interesting, with a few more unique twists than I would have expected.

Storytelling, though, is obviously not this game's forte. The strategy layer is much, much improved from the first game, and though the tactical combat and RPG management system of both the Avenger (your aforementioned giant airship) and your troops and equipment is mostly unchanged save for a lot of added depth. Weapon mods have been introduced and there is now a new, semi-random way of developing the most powerful mods and utility items for your troops, which helps to add to the addictiveness of the strategy layer since you're constantly looking things to do in order to give your engineers time to develop the next shiny new toy for your troops to use. Armor types are more balanced and include flavor from the mechanized units introduced in Enemy Within. Psi Operatives have been completed retooled with their own twist that I think works incredibly well, certainly much better than the first game. The entirety of squad management has been retooled and streamlined.

The strategy layer and the tactical combat feature an added emphasis on creating tension, and while this works well and feels natural for the strategy layer, it sometimes comes off as forced with clumsily inserted mission timers in the tactical missions themselves. I don't mind the occasional timer, but I feel it could have been better implemented than just "blow up this common-looking piece of alien machinery before the timer ends" missions. The absurdly common mission timers served to keep me from buying the game for nearly a full year-and-a-half after its release before I finally found it on sale for ~$20, and shortly after some vanilla gameplay I ended up downloading a mod that removed them entirely. I would have greatly preferred having mission timers for much fewer encounters, perhaps only for one or two specific mission types. It feels like a crutch, like somebody at the top decided the tactical missions needed added urgency in order to create tension, and the people designing the missions either couldn't think of a good enough game mode to do this, or didn't have the time to do it.

The game looks just like an improved version of the initial XCOM, with some really nice lighting and particle effects. Unfortunately it also runs surprisingly poorly. I'm playing a nearly 2-year old game on a GTX 1080, and I'm experiencing regular dips down to around 30 fps when I'm zoomed out, or there's a lot of fog on the screen. That's pretty inexcusable for a turn-based tactical game like XCOM, and it's really disappointing that the team couldn't have optimized it better. It doesn't affect gameplay (which at this point is far less buggy than the original XCOM; I haven't seen even half the glitches in one full XCOM 2 campaign as I did in even half of a campaign of Enemy Unknown), but is quite an eyesore.

Another complaint I have is regarding the game's soundtrack. Michael McCann (of Deus Ex Human Revolution fame) did the first game's score, and it was fantastic. It lent the game a brooding, scary feel that the otherwise cartoony art design would not have imparted, and that feel is sorely missed in XCOM 2. The score here is utterly forgettable; the same cheesy, uplifting Hollywood tunes seem to play whenever you enter combat. It takes away the feeling that this is guerilla warfare against a technologically superior enemy that is committing various atrocities against your species, that you are hopeless outgunned and scratching and clawing at an enemy that has its boot on your throat. Instead it makes the game feel like a triumphant, heroic Hollywood action film; that you're destined to win in glorious combat. It clashes directly with the games maps, which feature ruined and decrepit homes and the absolute destruction of the human way of life, replaced with a polished cities that just seem off. It fails to impart the sense of an epic struggle, in which many of your own troops will die in the missions that you will not always succeed in. After about 15 hours I simply muted the music in the settings and resigned myself to getting by on just the ambient sound design of the tactical levels and the Avenger instead, which is really quite good compared to the stale, monotonously average soundtrack. At its best this soundtrack is a poor imitation of McCann's previous work, at its worst it's an overly loud cacophony, egregiously clashing with the tone the rest of the game tries to impart. I should note that the music is not bad, it's actually quite good, and composer Tim Wynn is obviously a talented man. I just feel that not only did it not fit the game, it actively dampened my experience. Perhaps this is due to the direction given to Wynn and not the man himself.

These criticisms are really not a big deal, though. XCOM 2 does not strive to be an artistic game, and so it probably should not be judged as one. It did, however, succeeded in grabbing me in a way that I rarely felt from XCOM: Enemy Unknown and that only the best of video games seems to do. It had me fiending for just one more scan, one more mission, one more piece of tech researched. It had me playing until midnight on a work night, skipping my runs and workouts to play for just a few more hours. And it held me throughout without fizzling out and becoming tedious. It's a great game and there is a serious dearth of good tactical RPGs on the market these days. Jake Solomon and Firaxis have succeeded in making a game that you can play forever a la Civilization.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 127 hours

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen (DLC)

So I really liked vanilla XCOM 2. I thought it added quite a bit and fixed some of the issues I had with Enemy Unknown and its expansion Enemy Within.

It's amazing how much War of the Chosen has done the same with XCOM 2. This is definitely a full-blown expansion and not just a DLC. Hell, it's maybe even more than that; potentially something between an expansion and a full blown sequel. It's clear that a lot of the ideas here were probably once potentially part of what they wanted to do with XCOM 3. So much content and depth has been added to the existing systems within XCOM 2 that they could easily have handled the bulk of a sequel if given time to pad out the narrative in a full development cycle.

I've seen a lot of people gripe about the $40 price tag, but to summarize this really quickly: If you liked vanilla XCOM 2 as much as I did, War of the Chosen is well worth that price. Pick it up now, no need to read the rest of this review. It's just a way deeper, way more polished version of vanilla XCOM 2.

Most noticeable is that there's an entirely new narrative layer added to the game. Vanilla XCOM 2 was somewhat sparse when it came to the main narrative, but I didn't find that too much of a drawback because I enjoyed the gameplay in both the strategical and tactical layers so much. Now there are several new enemies, an entirely new enemy type to add to Advent and Aliens, and several new allied resistance units that all play a role in this narrative. It pads out the game and adds a ton of mileage without adversely affecting the pace. In fact, the pace actually feels better now. In vanilla XCOM 2 I felt the game begin to drag towards the end. That's now been alleviated by having more to do. And these new characters and factions are all superbly well-written and intriguing, enough that I'd say they're more compelling than anything in the base game. The hero units they offer and the enemies (clearly inspired by Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system) all serve to scale up the balance as well. The strongest units in the game, both allied and enemy, are now nearly twice as strong as the strongest enemy units in the base game could have become. No exaggeration. It's an absolute blast akin to getting Orlandu into your squad in Final Fantasy Tactics... Except that now there are 3 enemy Orlandus to deal with as well. I love it.

Aside from this big stuff, there are also some great quality of life and depth changes to the game's foundation. Soldiers now bond with one another and gain perks when together on a mission, there's a newly revamped perk system with ability points you gain during combat a la Final Fantasy Tactics' JP, the UI has been improved, structure building has been rebalanced and streamlined, there are now hero units to recruit, units become fatigued and need to rest if you send them on too many missions, difficulty can be altered (including lengthening the controversial mission timers from the vanilla game)... And probably a ton more little things that I'm forgetting. I notice new things constantly every time I play, it's really amazing the work Firaxis has done in less than two years. It feels like they took XCOM 2 off the shelf, thought "we can make this game way better", worked on it for a couple of years, and rereleased it as a better version of itself.

The game also runs way better now, too. Some have debated the grossness of locking optimization behind a $40 expansion, and it is pretty grimy, but I felt the need to touch on that in this review. I no longer see the frame drops to 25-30 fps that I did in the vanilla game, and although bugs have occurred with more frequency than during my vanilla campaign, I chalk that up to XCOM 2 having nearly 2 years of patching and this expansion being less than a month old.

If you're new to XCOM 2 but like turn-based tactics games, you should begin by playing the vanilla game to completion first. War of the Chosen adds so much that it might be overwhelming to deal with on a first playthrough. And the vanilla game is good enough by itself to warrant a purchase and playthrough. And that way you'll come to appreciate War of the Chosen so much more for all of the great content it adds.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐