Concealment is an interesting concept, in that it’s basically XCOM 2’s aliens telling us, “Go ahead: take your best shot.” It’s a simple system at heart: when you start a mission, the enemy doesn’t know you’re there until you get within a certain radius, or you open fire. I can’t say I ever had a mission where I lost because the map wasn’t fairly laid out (though I definitely had some tough-to-cross stretches thanks to my use of explosives).Īnd because you start most missions in concealment, keeping your squad hidden while you set up a lethal ambush is a new and different kind of challenge with a potentially big and cinematic payoff. Some missions have turn timers that force you to make risky moves, or to make a hasty retreat. Without knowing ahead of time where an objective will be or the location of the enemy, you’ll attack and defend, extract or kill VIPs, and blow things up. The same goes for the high-quality procedurally generated maps, and a good variety of mission types. Will you get incendiary grenades, which are great for disabling enemy special abilities and inflicting damage over time? Or poison rounds, which impair accuracy while also dealing steady damage? Or trace rounds, which increase accuracy on top of their other upgrades? You can’t count on anything, but you will get something, and having to adapt to make use of what’s available is a constant challenge. Likewise, every time through the 20 to 30-hour campaign you’ll see a random assortment of weapon modifications, soldier stat boosts, special ammo and grenade types, psionic powers, bonuses for covering continents with your resistance network, and more. You can't count on anything, but you will get something. XCOM 2 defeats most of those assumptions by introducing randomness throughout its campaign, so that you can’t count on the route that took you to victory one time to deliver you to the same results the next. By comparison: after the first real-world month or two of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it became apparent that anyone who intended to play it for that length of time would have a base build order down to a science, know exactly what to research when, and memorize the best routes through the pre-built maps and have an idea of where enemies would appear on them. But one of XCOM 2’s biggest strengths how it resists your efforts to fall into repetitious patterns. Not being dead on your first game is one thing – you almost certainly will die as a result of walking into countless unknown traps, especially if you play above the normal difficulty (as I mostly did – normal, or “veteran,” is a cakewalk for anyone who knows XCOM). You might think an 80% shot is guaranteed to hit… but in the one time in five that it doesn’t connect, you need to have a backup plan for what happens, or else you can’t complain when you’re dead.Ībove: See an XCOM 2 Retaliation mission. But XCOM 2 asks you to make that same gamble – or often much worse – with the lives of your soldiers on virtually every turn. but you’d have to be crazy to put your life on the line with a 16.6% chance of blowing your brains out, because way more often than you’d like, you will. Think of it this way: Playing Russian Roulette with a six shooter with one bullet, your odds of survival are five out of six, or 83.3%. You need to have a backup plan, or else you can't complain when you're dead.
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Deciding when and how to upgrade and use each soldier’s abilities, then crossing your fingers and hoping they’ll make their clutch shot, creates non-stop suspenseful, triumphant, and tragic moments. As with Risk, Monopoly, Warhammer, poker, and anything else involving chance, XCOM 2 is a game where you can theoretically do everything right and still lose to bad rolls of the dice, but on the whole a good player will generally come out on top. Just like before, XCOM’s high-stakes turn-based tactical combat dares you to become attached to your customizable characters (I made most of IGN’s staff in the character editor) knowing that on any given mission they could be permanently killed off because of mistakes or just bad luck.
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