March to War Month: XCom 2

The original X-Com, which I'll call X-Com OG to try to be easier to read, is permanently lodged in my brain. I've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of it, and through at least one successful campaign of its sequel, the highly derivative Terror from the Deep, or Lobster men from the Ocean rise from the depths to touch your no-no zone.

I couldn't get into the XCom reboot, as it felt too close to X-Com OG while not offering much, if anything, to really get over my subjective distaste for the game. It reminded me too much of the usual dumbing down of strategic games, but it sold really well and lots of people liked it, so I'm not saying I think it's bad. Just, you know, it didn't quite line up with it. It's still very cool that they made a triple A big budget strategy game, even if I'd somewhat pull away from calling this a strategy game.

As for X-Com 2, the reality is, I have a 12 month humble bundle sub rolling and I was getting this game whether I liked it or not. Having clearly put the money in, well, I wasn't going to be deterred on giving it a try and wasn't going to be deterred by the first hour being bad since damn it, they already had my money.


The best thing about this game is the immediate point where it diverges from the sequel to X-Com OG: It's not about fish men rising from the deep or inter-dimensional weirdos attacking a megacity. No, it's about fighting back after the aliens have won. You are not a clandestine government agency, you're a small band of fighters that aim to unify the human resistance and strike when and where you can on the now incumbent alien presence. This is just so very good and it builds into such a satisfying, if at times a bit plot holey, story.

Stemming from this is the huge variety of missions, one of the elements the original stunk at pretty bad and its sequel did a bit to fix but you saw rarely due to weirdness in the RNG. The story's individual scenes aren't going to blow your mind and they are clearly working to build a sequel hook (or two, even) but I have to admit I don't mind. It worked, it was good and I enjoyed this.

The first two hours or so of this game are some of the most miserable gaming I've done in a long time. The tutorial is pretty willing to be brutal, which is fine, but then you're sort of thrust into a game that behaves along its own system in a way that isn't too well explained.

If you talk to people who remember their first experiences with X-Com OG, you'll find they usually did a downed small UFO or a terror mission. If they did a small UFO, they probably succeeded but lost most of their troopers. If they did a terror mission, odds are, they straight up lost. Looking back, you'd say that the terror mission is probably not something the game should roll in the first month. XCom 2, on the other hand, just feels like doing that first terror mission.

(A terror mission, in X-Com OG, is an alien strike on a civilian populace, where the aliens slaughter civilians on a usually urban map. They are generally very easy, in the first game, but your instincts are to protect the civilians, which is quite hard to do effectively)

Except you have four soldiers and very limited moves. The actual contrast between that legendary "first terror mission" and the first terror mission analogue in terms of design is hilarious, actually. The alien forces 'retaliate' in XCom 2, striking at resistance bases. In the X-Com OG, terror missions usually had some build up before they got to killing civilians. As you got better gear and better troops, it became possible to reduce or completely prevent civilian deaths. In this game, the aliens immediately start killing civilians.

Regardless, there's a sharp and frustrating learning curve, which takes a good ten hours to master without looking up guides. I really didn't want to get spoiled on the game - X-Com OG's story wasn't impressive but it had a subtle charm to it - so I trudged through. Once you get a handle on its somewhat bizarre systems, the game is pretty good, but it doesn't behave in a very logical fashion when you think of turn based games.

Anyway, let's talk about the core elements of the game.

There's two cores: The geoscape/avenger planning rooms and the actual missions. The geoscape could basically not exist, it's largely just yes or no options coupled with a map that does very little but waste time. The original geoscape was incredibly important; positioning and placement was key. You could find alien bases, or patrol supply routes, and your radar worked based on where you were positioned in the world.

But XCom 2 holds onto this for really no purpose; your position doesn't do much and you just fly around to sites, without radar or real concerns. It's not a bad way to sort the game, but it's a bit of a hassle when you could really just have an available missions panel pop up. I modded the game to reduce time wasting animations in this section as well.

The missions are mostly just an isometric display of a battlefield, but most of your time in the game goes here. The game is very watered down as strategy goes, with cover being mostly an object you hump instead of "line of sight" and most options being removed from X-Com OG. It's still a pretty deep game, but it takes a long time to open up. You get two moves per turn unless you have special abilities, and some of those can be a little unreliable.

Combat doesn't have a ton of options. Morale is an issue, but it's way less finessed than in the original. You can move and shoot, or move a lot, and you want to always end in cover facing the direction you expect an assault. Weapons also have like, three shots each, so reloading is a bigger part of the game than I feel like it should. You can get special loot (really? yes, really) that increases clip size or auto-reloads early in the fight too, I guess. Grenades are weird in this game; they have no timers (you could set timers in the original) and can't be thrown very far, but they also can not miss. So most grenades are pretty worthless except for shredding armor, but the one class can 'shoot' grenades which again can't miss and ends up being a huge source of reliable damage for you.

Which is strange, but it works well within the game's systems. Just takes time to get accustomed to.

And yea the game has a minor bit of almost diablo-esque looting, where enemies drop items that will disappear in a few turns that you need to rush to pick up. It's very, uhm, not a good addition to the game.

The visuals are hard to articulate without feeling like I might be slamming on the wrong person in the production. The animations are good, enemies and your units have lots of personality. The models are good, the textures aren't great, except the NMM effect on armor is nice. But the game zooms in on everything doing everything and it just doesn't look right. The zoom in thing gets pretty tedious to begin with, except during the cinematic overwatch pararoma.

It's hard to say. There's stuff I like the look of and was impressed with, but there's also broken animations, clipping and the usual unreal engine garbage. Physics breaking on corpses, which ragdoll infinitely, feels downright regressive.

Music is pretty generic. Completely non-stand out. X-Com OG had decent music for its time, and this just sounds like generic military music. Maybe if it didn't feel like such a western, rubberized guerilla campaign they could have used something a little more exotic. The game plays it very safe in this category, it's bland.

I had a couple audio bugs. I'm not even certain what the one noise was, but it involved a repeated squishing sound, over and over for an entire mission. Not great.

Voice acting is good, but the dialogue gets grating. Your soldiers can have several different voices, which helps tell them apart, but honestly it could use another 16 or so packs. Also, it does that thing D:OS does where different voice actors read identical lines. I know this isn't going away but it just stands out as so goofy. I guess at least in this case they're soldiers so some of the dialogue repeating made sense, but each voice actor should have different scripts.

The engine is rather buggy and sluggish. The game jerks you around and makes you wait a lot, and loading times can be pretty bad. It hard crashed more than once, and failed to load saves a few times as well. There's the usual physics, audio looping and variety of nonsense not especially well optimized games suffer from.

There are five classes in XCom 2, and more in the DLC I didn't get. The classes all feel good, and all have deep talents, though the weapons... Don't really feel all that different. The game's over-simplification comes into play here, not enough room to make them feel unique. A shotgun has slightly higher damage ranges and is worse at range, a heavy weapon user... Doesn't feel different from a rifle at all, though it seems a little more effective? Some of the classes have really weird abilities though.

Rangers can remain stealthed longer than their peers, but you really need their firepower in the early game. Specialists can hack from a distance, but failing hacks is such a huge penalty I can't imagine using it without save scumming until you had all the bonuses. I'm not really sure why hacking a computer should have greater difficulty and penalties than mind controlling an alien, but there we are.

The game is a little ... 4th edition D&D? I'm not sure how to articulate it... As classes level. It feels kinda weird having magical powers. Some of the enemies do, too, like snake-women who fire their tongues through solid objects and bind up your guys.

There's a good amount of variety in missions and assets that make up missions. You can undertake a lot of different little jobs for 'the resistance'. Sometimes you're raiding a supply depot, other times hunting for a hackable terminal or protecting a data tap. There are even missions to kidnap alien friendly VIPs, which includes knocking them out with the butt of your gun and putting them over a soldier's shoulder as you whisk them from the scene. That's a huge improvement from the original.

The timed mission mechanic - which is basically that the game sets a timer around how long you have to accomplish a given objective - is sloppy, poorly balanced and needlessly punishing. I'm playing the game on veteran and it isn't exactly what I'd call easy. Stressful and irritating aren't words I usually couple with 'easy'.

Also, stupid. Why is the "advent network" locking down in ten minutes at some random site? Why is it always eight turns on these missions, regardless of the distance? Hell, the distance you're given to run in the tiny time frame doesn't even make sense. They'd see the stupid jet landing a block away.

There's a thing in Magic the gathering design where they talk about "feelbad" play permutations, where certain processes regardless of outcome worsen player enjoyment. I like the core idea of timing missions, and when reading about it found them acceptable, but the implementation is something I just found frustrating but not innately feelbad. It's hard to know where you are in the game's progression, if you're supposed to be better or worse geared, so it's hard to tell if you're just undergeared or undermanned for it.

Ultimately I did a lot of modding on the game, pushing the timers up first. Which annoys me - some of the timers seemed really well tuned, adding some good tension, and some of them just seemed over-tuned, but it's a good mechanic when well used and a miserable mechanic when it is. It's over-used, either way, more than half the missions are on tight timers and that just gets oppressive. It also doesn't feel like missions with timers are built any different than missions without; a mission without should have harsher opposition that requires you fighting through a dug in position. It didn't feel that way.

The worst part of X-Com OG was the base missions; viciously dangerous, but ultimately a tedious slog for most of them. X-Com 2 avoided this issue for most of the game, right until the end, which was another boring slog to match all other boring slogs. The game's encounter designer or the general encounter philosophy was a bit off in a lot of points. Weird thing is the last fight of the last mission was good, but the stuff before it, not so much.

I think if X-Com 2 didn't have those four letters for its title, many of my early misgivings wouldn't have come up. The timer is still kinda pointlessly annoying throughout the game, but X-Com 2 is basically its own beast. It's very watered down, timer based combat with cooldowns and ranges a toddler could quote unquote "hit each other with crayons at" but that's just what it is. It's still a fun game once you get away from thinking its XCom.

I wouldn't call it great, but I would call it fun and solid enough outside the bugs. I'm not precisely certain who X-Com 2 is for, but maybe watered down strategy has a wide appeal, given it sold well? If it sounds appealing, I think it will - pardoning the odd technical issues - satisfy. If not, well, I'd probably just avoid it.

I'm interested to know where the sequels are going to go, though.