We play alien invasion sequel XCOM 2, the most exciting strategy game of 2016
I’m in trouble. I need to put a soldier on the back of a flatbed truck, so I can hack the device it’s carrying and abscond with the alien secrets inside. As it happens, the truck is on fire. It shouldn’t be, but I used a grenade to take out the Advent trooper standing next to it and things sort of got out of hand. I’ve got three soldiers left – the fourth having died earlier – and I don’t want to lose another to a fire I’ve made them stand in. Sadly, I can’t see an alternative, so I pick the XCOM agent with the most health and tell them to burn themselves alive. That’s when the Sectoid shows up.
“The aliens are brutal in XCOM 2,” says lead producer Garth DeAngelis. “I’m really proud of that. If you look at the Sectoid, for instance, of Enemy Unknown versus XCOM 2, the Sectoid in Enemy Unknown could mind-merge and they could shoot their gun. They can shoot their gun in XCOM 2 as well, but they can also do an attack called ‘mind spin’, which will panic or disorient you. Or mind control you. That can happen as well. The first alien in the game can mind control you.”
That isn’t what happens in my playthrough. It’s the second mission, and, after battling through Advent troops, I’m now experiencing my first alien encounter. One of my soldiers is now on fire. The Sectoid waves a hand, and a psionic purple tendril reaches out to a dead Advent soldier. He gets up. It turns out Sectoids can reanimate people, too. This is bad. The zombie has the drop on my burning soldier. I have been outflanked by a corpse. My soldier is able to take down the reanimated agent, but not before he removes a significant chunk of her health. A turn later, uniform aflame, she succumbs to the fire.
DeAngelis smiles as I recount my experience. “That’s great to hear,” he says. “You have the Advent administration on the front lines. They’re tactically interesting to fight, but we want the surprise – the really cool stuff – to come from these aliens that are emerging from the shadows as the XCOM resistance grows stronger. In this world they’ve always been behind the scenes. Humanity doesn’t really know if the aliens are there or not. They just know there’s this Advent administration that are their saviours. And now XCOM is pulling these more sinister aliens to the front, and you have to fight and face them.”
Cut Loose
Two of my soldiers are dead. The remaining two are critically injured. The Sectoid could finish me off here, but I have a secret weapon: a Ranger. His sword attack is a guaranteed hit, and does huge damage. In any other situation it would be a risk – leaving me out of position, and vulnerable to assault. Here, there are no other enemies. I’m clear to take down my troublesome foe and leave with the remnants of my team. I remember XCOM: Enemy Unknown as a game about caution, about sticking to good cover and using overwatch to punish aggressors. In XCOM 2, DeAngelis explains, encounters more resemble combat puzzles.
“The battlefield is your playground,” he says, “so where do you move? How do you take advantage of cover and flanking? That’s the puzzle aspect. Also, predicting what the aliens want to take advantage of. You learn that as you go. You might need to get tongue-pulled a few times before you get the hang of it, but eventually you’ll know how to counter that and get in front of it.” In short, the aliens are Firaxis’s attempt to counter the go-to strategies of Enemy Unknown players. Or, to put it another way, to fuck with their fans.
Overwatch still has its place, and has been significantly improved. In the four missions I played, it once again functioned as the cautiously sensible default action – now with the added bonus that the second soldier in an overwatch chain will no longer attempt to fire on an enemy killed by the first. But the new classes offer a more interesting selection of abilities and upgrades. Better opportunities exist aside from just moving and shooting. Right now, my favourite new class is the Specialist, whose Gremlin drone can hack objects at range and be further upgraded with new assault or defensive options.
Panic a Hack
These upgrades are invaluable in early battles, when you’re in charge of weak-willed rookies prone to freaking out mid-mission. The Specialist’s Revival Protocol upgrade – available once they’ve been promoted to Sergeant – can remove negative status effects, including panic. With it, you can spin a disastrous affliction into a net positive. Later in my hands-on session, a rookie loses it during an encounter with a Viper. He takes an automatic panic shot, hitting the snake lady, but not finishing her off. Using the Gremlin, I remove the effect. The soldier now has a regular full turn with which to finish off his foe. Not that this is a tactic you want to rely on, as panicked soldiers can just as easily grenade the wall you’re using as cover – blowing it out and leaving you harmed and exposed.
The Specialist also saves my skin during a timed mission to hack into an Advent network. I had eight turns, most of which were spent dealing with Advent troops outside a petrol station. When I finally reach the building that houses the terminal, I have one turn remaining, but the only soldier in range of the terminal has been grabbed and bound by a Viper. Fortunately, I realise, I can send in the Gremlin. Hacking a terminal has a guaranteed effect – in this case breaching the network – and also provides a chance of picking up two bonus rewards.
The likelihood of unlocking these bonuses is based on the difference in tech score between the hacker and the terminal they’re trying to unlock. I’m offered a permanent bonus to my Specialist’s hacking score, and a four week upgrade to my home base’s scanning ability. Other potential rewards are more immediate, such as blinding nearby enemies for a couple of turns. I receive nothing – my Specialist’s score is too low. Luckily, this time there isn’t an associated penalty. Later in the campaign, failed attempts can trigger negative effects.
Spoils of War
Timed missions aren’t XCOM 2’s only trick for putting the player under pressure. Enemy Within’s Meld resource is gone, but a new loot system takes the same trick and applies it on a smaller scale. Downed enemies have a chance to drop loot that will selfdestruct after three turns. That loot takes the form of weapon attachments – everything from scopes that increase aim to repeaters that have a chance to instantly kill a target. It’s a bonus less essential and abstract than Meld, but useful enough to be desirable.
The effect is lots of small-scale, focused bursts of risk/reward decision making. If loot appears at the start of a battle, there’s no guarantee it will still be around when it’s over. Retrieving it could be disastrous, but better weapons means being better equipped to deal with future missions. Between the new abilities and the external pressures, XCOM 2’s challenge isn’t just about the brutality of the aliens – although they are brutal. There is also plenty of scope for for shooting yourself in the foot through poor decision choices.
“We wear that as a badge of honour, that it’s a challenging game,” says DeAngelis. “In fact, we want it to be brutally challenging. We want you to have to overcome those odds, because the sense of triumph is truly powerful. We want players to be able to learn that and earn that on their own.”
It’s not all failure and disempowerment. In XCOM 2, each mission starts with a moment of empowerment – a chance to ambush the enemy and take them out unseen. This concealment phase is in keeping with the idea of XCOM as a guerrilla force. When your soldiers arrive on the map, they’re undetected, and will remain so as long as they don’t open fire, move too close to the enemy, or create excessive noise by smashing through a door or window. In this way, I’m able to surround a group of Advent, setting the majority of my force to concealment overwatch – a special ambush variant that tells your soldiers to only open fire if detected.
Once the trap is set, I tell my final soldier to attack. This reveals the squad, triggering their overwatch. The entire attack plays as one continuous scene – the camera tracking from soldier to soldier as they take their shot and wipe out the enemy. Concealment only works for the first encounter of each mission, and even then it’s easy to mess up. My first ambush failed when I positioned a soldier near some civilians.
“They’re scared that there are these humans running around with guns, because they think they’re in a utopia,” DeAngelis explains to me. “They think they’re safe.”
Alien Experiments
The sense I get of XCOM 2 is that it’s more open to experimentation. Its difficulty feels designed to punish ill-judged plans, rather than penalising the player for not following a specific, linear solution. The meta-strategy of the Geoscape is the perfect example of this, in that you can no longer lose the campaign purely based on specific factors. Building a resistance is a very different prospect to stopping an alien vanguard, and that’s had a pronounced effect on how you interact with the world. For one thing, there are no longer any satellites to screw you over.
“I think that’s why I lost my first playthrough of Enemy Unknown,” DeAngelis says. “I still remember it vividly. There were other ways you could lose, of course, like if you tried the alien base a bit too early, but satellites were something you had to prioritise early. The beautiful thing with XCOM 2 is I’ve played through multiple times and it’s always like, what do I want to do first? There seem to be a lot of options that could potentially work, or ways I have to adjust based on how the game’s panning out.”
Failure in XCOM 2 is tied to something called the Avatar Project. It’s represented by a bar at the top of the Geoscape that tracks progress towards something incredibly bad that the aliens are planning. Your strategy lies in balancing the need to grow the resistance against the requirement to stop the aliens from completing their evil masterplan.
Final Countdown
“If I prioritise trying to get to tier two armour first,” DeAngelis says, “I’m forgoing building the resistance and finding a new region. That could end up biting me in the ass because I don’t have time to get to a facility, and the Avatar progress rose. It’s constantly a balance of how do you pull that off, and it feels different every game because the rate of Avatar progress being filled changes every game.”
Dark Events similarly mix things up, and feel like an attempt to level the power curve as your squad becomes more effective through research, abilities and new gear. Dark Events function as alien research, and will enhance your foe in a variety of ways. Examples include improved Advent armour and additional reinforcements during missions. Counter-ops will be available to prevent the enemy gaining these upgrades, but again, it ties into the overall Geoscape balance. Preventing an enemy advantage may come at the cost of completing some equally important project.
It’s clear that Firaxis has thought carefully about the particulars of Enemy Unknown. Every aspect of XCOM 2 feels like a response, from the procedural maps that provide longevity over multiple campaigns, to the shifting, broad and open-ended strategy layer, and the opportunity of experimentation that it provides. This isn’t a sequel that only offers more of everything that made its predecessor so enjoyable. It’s a total rehaul, and an opportunity to take the basic formula and recontextualise it in a way that’s well suited to XCOM’s punishing difficulty. It’s a sequel designed for its fans, and, based on what I’ve seen, next year’s most promising strategy game.