XCOM 2

Release: 2016
Platform: PC
Developer: Firaxis
Genre: Tactical RPG, Resource Management
Gameplay Stats: 40 hours, 1 play through on normal difficulty, 70% achievements

Hooray 2016! A year for highly anticipated sequels. The first big one for me this year is XCOM 2, so I gave some plasma and bought it! A lot of this review is going to be comparing the game to the first one because that seems appropriate for sequels I think.

Visuals: This game looks pretty great! I have a middle of the road PC and played the game on Medium graphics settings and it still looked really great. The character detail was good, the effects on the environment (fire, explosions, acid) all looked really good as well. The new character classes look visually unique and each look pretty good. There is a lot of character customization if that's what you're into. You can make a character for each of your friends and watch them die agonizingly or save scum to keep them around. I don't do the character customization stuff, but all of the random characters I was given looked visually distinct.

Audio: The music for this game is pretty good, but I think they needed more variation in the sound track. Maybe different songs depending on how many/what enemy units are present? The music did get a little stale and I opted for Pandora after a dozen hours or so. The sound effects were really good! The little snippets of conversation that your units say after moving them or killing an enemy also got a little stale, but you can't expect that much variety when they have dozens of accents and personality types, I guess. There were many choices, but they were all kind of shallow I felt.

Gameplay: The tactical layer of the game is very well done. Destroying enemies and laying ambushes feels really great. The addition of the turn countdown timer rushes certain aspects of the game which I think was a very welcome addition. A lot of people feel pressured by the timer, but I think that fits with the story of the game. You are a resistance group, when you find out about stuff you need to act quickly. I almost wish it were a real life timer though as opposed to a turn countdown, to add a little pressure. Generally after the objective is completed you have as many turns as you like to mop up the remaining enemies or flee. I wish there was more of an indication about where remaining enemies were located though. If you're far away from them, there is no indication and there were several missions where I spent a significant amount of time ferreting out the last baddies. The strategy layer of building your base and researching technology/equipment was good as well. I think it was maybe too transparent though. When examining research components it would tell you generally what fruit your research would bear. I liked being more surprised as in the first XCOM game about what new stuff I'd get. Much of the game seems randomized: which missions you'll get, which enemies will show up, which events will appear on the world map, the continent bonuses, and even the maps themselves. This is a great feature for extending the life of the game since two campaigns will never be the same. This seems like a marked improvement over the first game.

Story: Honestly, I think this may have been the weakest and boldest aspect of the game. The story of XCOM 2 assumes that you've lost the fight in XCOM, so the aliens are running Earth and your resistance is trying to overthrow them. For whatever reason, the story seemed to lack a bit of the gravitas that was present in the first game. I know that story isn't the big allure of this game, but I would have liked to see more of it. The characters seemed less compelling than in the first game as well. It's really odd to type this, but I really miss the UFO v Plane fights of the first game. They were the only thing out of your control and they added a nice bit of something extra to the game. I guess since you're already operating in the shadows as a resistance force, you aren't under threat of being found or destroyed, but I would have liked to see something like that.

Overall, I obviously liked this game a great deal. It had high ambitions to improve on XCOM Enemy Within/Unknown and I think that by in large they did a great job living up to those expectations. However, the game is pretty buggy and the patches seem to be only slowly rolling out. I have the game installed on my SSD and every mission came with a 30-60 second loading screen on either side of the tactical section. I thought it was just my machine, until I googled some others' reactions and found the problem is nearly ubiquitous. Many people are reporting straight up game-breaking bugs too. Like lots of random crashing or save game corruption. There is also a lot in this game that is tied to animations playing out that you can't skip. I know it sounds like I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but literally every turn on a mission rescuing civilians a guy jumps on the radio and yells at you for letting a civilian die (the aliens kill 1 per turn until you engage all the pods). It's unskippable. Every time you open up the map, an unskippable 2 second dive into the map. You have to click through multiple transitions almost every time that you want to do anything and they are locked to the animation, so you can't input until the animation finishes. I played an un-modded version of the game, because I think that's necessary to review a game, but looking through the Steam Workshop (game has full mod support) there are mods to make some things skippable. It's called the Stop Wasting My Time mod, so I think I'm not the only one that found the lack of skips to be a problem. The pauses aren't big, but they're big enough for an eye roll and those eye rolls start to stack up. I liked this game a lot, but I can't say that I'd recommend it right now unless you have a lot of patience. The game is fun, but it's poorly optimized at this point and the waiting adds up. There are numerous bugs that still need to be addressed 3 weeks after release. I don't know the process for stomping these bugs, but I wish it were quicker. [8.5/10]

Great game, but I'd say wait a bit before playing so Firaxis can address performance issues and bugs.