XCOM 2 Review

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XCOM 2 Review

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Tue Feb 09, 2016 1:28 am

Well, it showed up last Friday, and I've already done a playthrough. Here are my thoughts:

XCOM 2 builds rather nicely on it predecessor, placing you back into the shoes of the commander of a rebel force attacking ADVENT, the group that's taken over governing of Earth and the squishy humans within. Why yes, it is kinda like Wolfenstein: New Order, in that you play the terrorists to the terrible bad guys who've taken over a willing populace. Quite a lot feels the same about this game, but much has changed and most of it for the best.

I'm gonna go in depth, but the most important piece is the technical part. You may want to pay most the attention to that.

Combat - Combat has remained mostly the same, albeit with the addition of armor (which saw an introduction in The Long War). Armor serves to basically negate chunks of damage, so if you do ten damage to someone with two armor, it does eight. There are also powerful abilities for your troops, including ones by the end that will let you kill multiple enemies one after another (Mine was four). Psi Operatives have gotten a huge boost, which was rather nice. There is a hacking addition to it too that can add benefits both in and out of combat. You can also ambush now, as most missions start with you concealed from the enemy until you decide to attack them.

The only gripes I had was the addition of burrowing chrysalids, who break the turn-based part of the game by popping up and attacking you immediately if you get close enough to them (and you won't be able to see them). Otherwise, everything there was perfect.

Base-Building - You no longer have a base, but instead have a giant ship that you build rooms into, assigning engineers to clear and build rooms--and later even assign them to rooms to up their bonuses. I have to say that this was the only part that I felt was weaker than in the original. There are a very limited amount of rooms, and it just feels a lot more simple than in the first one.

Strategic Level - There is no longer a council, and instead you're racing against the slowly progressing Avatar Project. You can stop its progress on occasion, or even do missions that will set it back, but if it fills up, you lose. On the strategic level, you spend most your time and resources establishing the resistance in each zone (of which I believe there are 14). That's how you get more upkeep each week. Apparently, you can build radio relays in each zone, but it must have never been important because I went without buying a one.

Technical - This is the real weakness of the game. First off: this game is currently terribly optomized. Despite how good my comp is, I was constantly hitting nasty frame drops, missions took entire minutes of a time to load, and passing time on the world map completely confused my computer. The game froze several times, CTD'd once and occasionally glitched out in ways that didn't allow me to continue my mission. The audio dropped out on some of the sound effects for no reason, sometimes.

All in all, would recommend to: people who enjoy tactical games, turn-based games, strategy.
Wouldn't recommend to: People who can't survive without story, people who aren't fans of tactical games, nerds.

Still, I would recommend you hold off until Firaxis or 2K releases some updated drivers. As it stands, the game's playable but ultimately a mess on the technical end.
  • 5

Doodle Dee. Snickers
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