XCOM 2 is out tomorrow!

[SlightlyJames]

Man, I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. I had an excellent time with Enemy Unknown, it had a really great feel to the gameplay and it was the sort of game you could lose hours in. I've seen a decent amount of footage of XCOM 2 and everything points to it being a massive upgrade over the previous game. Everyone who's played the game already says it's wonderful. Can't wait for it to unlock on Steam tomorrow!

Who's going to be playing XCOM 2?

[Everlong]

I'm going to get it eventually for sure. Enjoyed the first Xcom quite a bit. I just have so many other games to play right now that I couldn't justify getting it right awway.

[SlightlyJames]

So I've done one full... attempt at a playthrough so far. Earlier in the week I decided that my current campaign was doomed and put it down. I've since started an Ironman (one rolling autosave ie no reloading) playthrough that has been going significantly more smoothly. I've got a more sensible build order on my facilities, I'm researching some really useful stuff early on to make me more survivable, and I'm getting on top of the map expansion sooner as well so I'm in a far better position to push on and finish the game this time around.

It's been a week now and there's really no way of getting around that XCOM 2 performs pretty poorly. Load times are long, frame rates are low and the game isn't above the odd crash here and there (I've only had a handful, personally, but I have heard horror stories from a mate of mine who was even more excited for the game than I was). I really hope they get their arses in gear and get the game into a more workable state, because technical issues aside the game is really good.

As far as gameplay criticism, the main one from my perspective is that I feel that the turn counter on almost every mission is a bit obnoxious, I get that they're trying to encourage a more aggressive play style but the way it's wound up I don't think it's quite right. That and it feels like the fail state is too lenient if anything. I've had the Avatar counter fill up all the way and wasn't even worried because I had to many different ways to knock it back. (The reason I started over is because I was falling behind in tech, that's not going to happen this time around)

That aside, I'm really enjoying the flow of the game. The classes are a bit different/more varied in comparison to EU/EW and I'm really digging the specializations you can get by following the different upgrade paths. My Gunslinger was an absolute beast first time around, the pistol deserves some serious respect with its super high hit chance.

Having the techie guy be able to fly over and remotely heal his teammates is a nice idea, along with various other buffs he can apply and the hacking ability, I like the battlefield control of the grenadier being able to remove enemy cover from distance and leave them vulnerable. Rangers are so cool, the sword is awesome a good risk/reward trade-off for when you really need something dead, I haven't even tried Psionics yet but I hear they are terrifyingly strong so I'm bee-lining them in my new playthrough.

Ambushes are a really nice idea, I like dropping into a mission and having a chance to get the lay of the land and take up a strong position while concealed, it adds an extra element of planning being able to get the jump on the enemies and potentially remove and entire group straight away if you take advantage of the options available to you.

Concealment is really handy in those Retaliation missions as well. I have a Stealth Ranger who doesn't get discovered along with the rest of the team, so at the start of those missions he remains undiscovered. This meant that I was able to line up my squad on a ridge in full cover and Overwatch while my one ranger saved six civilians and then made his presence known, leading a group of enemies into an absolute slaughter by my firing squad. That was really cool.

It's those kind of war stories that I think XCOM 2 really shines in. There are so many different ways that things can pan out and it can be really memorable at times. I’d like to share another one, it mentions some elements that only appear in the mid game onwards so if you’re wanting to keep completely unaware of things that show up divert your eyes.

It was the retaliation mission that finally put my original campaign to bed. The squad consisted of my Stealth Ranger leading out four complete rookies as everyone else had either been killed or was severely wounded. I had made some silly choices in terms of my tech tree and chosen to build individual EXO suits for my high value soldiers rather than making the all-in tech upgrade to Predator armour. I did have Plasma Rifles though so there was that.

Things started well, I was on top of the threats that appeared and I was making good ground on saving the requisite amount of civvies to fulfil the mission parameters. I thought I was going to be able to salvage my campaign, as I was close to some important research/build work being completed. I had finally managed to save enough people when an old terror showed up out of nowhere.

Fucking Chryssalids. Out of the bloody ground, sliced up two of my rookies right away, one each. And each of those dead rookies would go on to spawn two more Chryssalids! It was a nightmare. My Ranger had the Bladestorm ability, which meant each time the bastards would come at him they would get a mouth full of sword. They got the entire squad except for the Ranger, and I thought that was a really interesting story.

Dude had been through a war already, rather than being with the guys that had been with him the whole time he had to lead out a team of fresh faced recruits, he couldn’t stop them from being cut down by the Chryssalids, and then had to watch as an army of the things hatched from the corpses of his team. He held on for so long, a surprisingly long time, but their poison ability and sheer overwhelming numbers finally took him down.

I didn’t want to continue after that. It’s possible that I could have salvaged my campaign from that point if I pushed through but honestly I didn’t want to. That felt like an appropriate moment to end on, and I wanted to start anew with a clearer idea of how to get ahead of the curve. Don’t worry, I actually got an armour upgrade this time around so no more Chryssalid one-shots.

Yeah, XCOM 2 is really good, the technical side of the game is really frustrating and can not be overlooked but it also doesn’t invalidate the excellent gameplay to be found within.

[Everlong]

Yeah, I've heard there are some performance issues as well, which makes me even more fine with waiting a while until I get it. I still really need to sink my teeth more into the first Xcom anyway, so there's no hurry.