Welcome to XCOM 2 - The Ultimate Game Review!

Good Day and Welcome to my new experimental series - The Ultimate Game Review!
In this Series, I share the very best reviews from our friends in the comment section of Steam. These Reviews left by myself and thousands of other users on the Steam Platform. Every Review is Credited to the Original Poster by their steam name from the Steam Gaming App. None or these reviews are taken from professional writers on blog sites, websites or articles. These are all just people like you and me and their thoughts after trying a game.

The reason I decided to do this was because most Gaming Reviews always seem so one sided, perhaps the Author has an agenda, perhaps they are predjeduce or a bigot. Who knows. With this series, I feel like Gamers, like you and I will get the absolute best experience possible when trying to determine whether the game is for you or not. The reason being, we will get to see the thoughts of not just 1 but many "Average Joes" like you and I and their thoughts after playing a game.

So please, sit back and Enjoy this Ultimate Game Review that I've compiled together for you!

XCOM 1 with everything dialed up a notch

By redshadovv

XCOM 2 is essentially XCOM 1 with everything dialed up a notch. The short of it is that if you liked and played XCOM 1 for any significant amount of time then you are almost guaranteed to enjoy XCOM 2.

Great new additions or significant improvements:

RNG: The huge role random chance played in the core mechanics of XCOM 1 was something that really bothered me and many other players. Thankfully, in this iteration, there are so many more ways of dealing guaranteeing damage that it is relatively simple to mitigate RNG almost completely with the appropriate style of play. A few things allow this: first off more abilities that are guaranteed to deal damage including combat protocol on the specialist and weapon upgrades that deal dmg on missed shots, cover is more destructible this time around which allows you to easily expose enemies for reliable shots and most importantly the way the game works now allows and even encourages aggressive flanking. It is not uncommon to get 90-100% shot success on most missions mid way through the campaign now as a result.

Aggression and overwatch spam: Due to the way the maps were configured and the constant threat of activating additional groups of enemies, a very defense oriented and overwatch centered tactical play style was considered optimal in XCOM 1. This is entirely not the case in XCOM 2. The way the maps are setup now, it feels like you have much more room to maneuver around the map without fatally exposing your squad. With the concealment mechanic which lets you sneak up on the aliens and with the presence of turn limits on many more missions this time around, the game actually encourages an aggressive playstyle where you take out enemy groups with 1-2 turns of activating them through aggressive flanking and, as is my preference, heavy use of explosives. Another important aspect of this is that using explosives no longer equates to losing the loot you desperately need to fund your operations. It’s a little bit more complicated than that but generally speaking you don’t have to stress so much about not blowing up the aliens this time around.

Additional customization options: I really wasn’t into tweaking the appearance of my soldiers in XCOM 1 that much but with the mind blowing amount of customization options available now, I’m really getting attached to some of my soldiers that I’ve decked out to look badass. The character pool system which lets saved soldiers randomly appear in your campaign as recruits or VIPs or scientists and engineers is also quite brilliant and unexpected allowing for favorite soldiers to effortlessly reappear in a new campaign. With the out of the box support for mods through steam workshop, the already staggering number of options will only grow.

Things which are problematic:

Unresponsiveness: I had this complaint with XCOM 1 as well. What I’m talking about is how the game loves to take control away from you in the middle of the action, locking the camera and disabling input while it makes you stare at a “new” enemy that you’ve already seen before accompanied by Central or the Doctor essentially telling you what you most likely already know. There is seemingly more of that this time around and some abilities, in particular gremlin abilities on the specialist have unnecessarily long animations for you to endure. Some of this also applies to the UI in the macro game (the avenger and geoscape). Transferring from the geoscape to the armory menu for instance, take entirely too long and clicking while the animation is in progress may end up sending you to another menu accidentally which only serves to frustrate the matter more.

UI streamlining: In the course of trying to make the UI less dense, a lot of useful information has been buried further down in menus. This leads to a lot of unnecessary clicking to find important bits of information and makes comparing some stats across soldiers unjustifiably painful. The biggest culprit of course, is not being able to see vital soldier stats side by side across soldiers, including their hp and what upgrades they have installed on themselves and their gear. There are several other places where the streamlined approach makes information difficult to discern or understand due to ambiguity, but all this one can get used to eventually, even though some frustration will be encountered along the way. I suspect this is once again a symptom of PC games being constrained by a UI designed for a controller. It’s not a major gripe, but it is something which should have been improved in this iteration and not the other way around as it stands now.

20 Years have passed...

By ownosorus

Twenty years have passed since the conclusion of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and we lost. The alien menace has convinced the XCOM council to join them, now calling themselves Advent. Advent has completely taken over the world promising advanced tech, medicine and world peace. The biggest problem is they rule with an iron fist. The XCOM program lives on in the form of a resistance.

Welcome back to the world of XCOM. Enemy Unknown was released in 2012, and a lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same. XCOM, for those unfamiliar with the series, are military strategy games that have always been about decision making. Whether the decision is one about what equipment to build, what tech to research, or giving orders to soldiers in the field; your decisions make the game. This series was one of the first to use permanent death for squad mates.

If one dies, they do not come back. This made players very cautious on how to use their squad, or even which squad mates to send in. Do you send in your most experienced? Or do you take a chance and send in a couple veterans and a couple of rookies? Keeping in mind that, of course, the veterans are better and have more skills, unfortunately, if they die you lose access to all their training and skills. It was also one of the first series to introduce recovery time for injured characters. If a soldier got injured in the field, they need time to recover. Hope you have some reserves.

Where XCOM 2 really shines are with the improvements they made over the last game. In the previous game, players picked where they wanted their base to be. Different locations gave different bonuses. In this game your base is mobile, making you harder to detect and capture. In the command room is a holographic map of the world, and when looking at the it several choices are available at any given time. Should you make contact with a resistance cell in another part of the world? Go steal the supplies from Advent forces nearby? Or should you take out that black site in hopes of securing more soldiers, scientists or engineers? This is a massive switch from the previous game where players really couldn’t move around and all they could do is scan the world for trouble until trouble presented itself.

The alien invasion story has been one of the biggest areas of improvement since Enemy Within. Its characters talk more, fleshing out a story and creating a sense of companionship despite the fact they’re clearly just a cipher for each part of your mobile base’s inner workings. There’s more mystery here, and great cutscenes go a long way to layering on more and more intrigue as you discover bigger,more sinister revelations about the alien’s intentions. To say much more would be a disservice to the great surprises, but the game’s narrative setup - an oppressive occupying force vs a struggling resistance - doesn’t just allow for a greater storytelling: it makes for a much stronger marriage between story and gameplay.

XCOM 2 introduces plenty of new gameplay elements that fit this new style, like player-placed extraction zones, ambushes, and a complete restructuring of character classes to reflect the focus on guerrilla combat. Players will find themselves thinking hard about which classes to bring into a particular firefight, and finding the right combination of soldier types will be a hard-fought trial-and-error process. Likewise, when players start in concealment – a new stealth aspect that is brand new to the franchise – they’ll find themselves tediously organizing ambushes to maximize their overwatch impact.

XCOM 2 is a serious strategy game, even on normal difficulty. The AI rarely makes stupid moves, and will respond to your mistakes with absolutely brutal efficiency. My most common mistake in the first few hours was advancing too far forward with one trooper, spotting a group of enemies, and watching the pioneer get slaughtered with their companions too far away to help. This is a crucial part of how XCOM 2 works – allow your troops to get isolated from each other, or leave a flank exposed, and you’ll be punished.

You’ll need to use every trick at your disposal in XCOM 2, as the ADVENT aren't here to play around. The aliens from the Enemy Unknown have been settled on Earth for some time and are more powerful for it. Sectoids - once the lowest ranking enemy in the game - are now powerful mid-game units that can disorientate and debuff your units while ADVENT troops (humans modified by the aliens) flank and close the distance.

The ADVENT forces are varied and require a considerable amount of tactical thought. Even amongst its foot soldiers there are officers, grunts, sword-wielding assault troopers and heavily armoured damage-soakers. The aliens also bring mechs and robots to the party, as well as more grotesque creatures like the gooey ‘Faceless’ and reptilian ‘Venom’ units. XCOM 2 has gone a long way to make the ADVENT seem both human and alien. Facilities and surroundings will bear all the hallmarks of Earth’s near-future yet be defended by snake-men and dimension-hopping guardians.

As expected your trusty soldiers will gain promotions as they complete missions and kill aliens and like in the XCOM: EU you get to choose one of two skills to unlock. These skills are mostly a new type of attack, but can sometimes be a passive ability like returning fire when attacked or being unable to be hit after killing an enemy the turn before. If you do happen to change your mind, you are now able to retrain abilities using one of the new buildings, the Advanced War Centre, which can also increase the healing down time of injured soldiers,

Combat in XCOM 2 is very similar to the combat from the previous games, each soldier is permitted two actions per turn. These actions can be made up of movements, firing at the enemy, using a grenades, healing or reloading. When you do lay down some sweet guerrilla justice on the alien overlords, there is a chance for loot drops, these can be either weapon upgrades or materials for advanced research. Weapon upgrades are a great addition to XCOM 2, they can add things like increased critical chance, reloads that don’t cost an action or larger ammo clip size and many more.

XCOM 2 has given pretty much every graphical feature in the previous game a polish to update it to modern standards and it goes without saying that the game is flawless in its design and looks. Every battlefield oozes style and really set the scene for your operations against the ADVENT. Soldiers grimace, wince and shout as they fight, while hair, toolkits and weapons sway in convincing ways. Enemy and friendly animations are smooth and detailed - from leaping over barriers to climbing ladders - and I can’t recall any time where my immersion was jarred by clunky movement.

Similarly, composer Tim Wynn has done a fabulous job in creating an epic action-movie feel that accompanies the game. The game’s soundtrack is cinematic in its crescendos and swells and palpably tense when things are going awry. The sound effects are also spot-on: guns crack, rattle and boom while alien mag-weapons make suitably science-fiction pops, zaps and fizzes.

Despite being a fan of the XCOM series as a whole I never expected this new entry to be as polished, intricate, immersive, beautiful and exciting as it is. I’ve had to tear myself away from the screen multiple times because I’d got so invested I’d forgotten to eat. XCOM 2 is one of those titles that appear once in a blue moon and set the benchmark for gaming; from start to finish there wasn’t a moment I did not completely enjoy playing it. XCOM 2 is one of the greatest strategy games of all time.

A Few Too Many Glitches

By Daszune

I'll start by saying I'm really enjoying this game and don't regret getting it, however I don't reccomend buying it at full price in the state that it's in. If you can get it cheaper then go for it, provided you're a fan of EU/EW. XCOM 2 is more of the same, with a bit of different. There's a lot of good here and a lot of bad, but the bad is fixable, it's just that it shouldn't have been there to begin with.

Pros:
-The new base management and overworld stuff is pretty fun and in my opinion makes it feel like you're not just sitting and waiting for something to happen. Instead of having to try to manage a bunch of "feal levels", but only being able to affect one at a time, there's only one meter to worry about, and there are multiple ways to manage it. Having to make contact with different countries instead of having to prevent losing them gives you a bit more option as to how you approach things.
-The new/updated classes feel a lot more balanced and interesting. Each one having two distinct specializations makes your squad more diverse, however a couple of them do feel underpowered, specifically the scout and combat hacker trees.
-The weapon changes make things a lot less tedious in some aspects, but moreso in others. Pistols on the sharpshooter class are fantastic, they're decently powerful and give your sniper a way to fight in close quarters and able to attack/overwatch after moving. Being able to attack or move after reloading is just great, so taking away secondaries on all the other classes doesn't really hurt.

Meh:
-Turn timers, I know people are so divided on these which is why I put them in meh instead of cons, but I dislike them. I feel that they force you to play a certain way, even if you don't want to. I've had missions where I had to rush through enemies or else I wouldn't make it in time, causing me to risk my soldiers. There are already lots of mods to change how they work, whether it be increasing turns, reducing the amount of missions that use them, or outright getting rid of them.
-concealment adds a nice way to setup ambushes, however in most cases it doesn't work out like you think it would. This ties in to turn timers, in that the timers are counting down even while you're trying to set up your ambush. It's just not viable to try to tactically ambush the enemy when you have to get to the evac zone in 8 turns. Also having all enemies suddenly just know where you are when you break concealment can easily lead to you being surrounded if you're not careful.

Cons:
-Performance issues out the♥♥♥♥♥ Supposed to be patched.
-Glitches out the♥♥♥♥♥ Supposed to be patched.
-I don't know if it's a glitch or just poor design, but line of sight is just super wonky. I've had enemies attacking me through walls, stun lancers meleeing people through the floor above them, and worst of all, snakes pulling my guys through as many as three walls with no holes or windows in any of them, effectively dooming them.
-The difficulty curve is steep. Really steep. Within 5 missions I was fighting against armored enemies that could destroy my cover, incapacitate my troops, and almost kill them in one attack, while I was still researching t2 weapons and armor. Enemies pop up randomly one after another, giving you almost no time to adjust your strategy.
-Dodge. If that's not specific enough, most enemies have a chance to dodge, causing you to do greatly reduced damage. I know the discussion of rng has been done to death, but sometimes it feels like they just always dodge.
-Your soldiers' wounded level seems to be completely arbitrary. Soldiers that take 10% damage get gravely wounded and are out of the fight for a month to recover 2 hp. I've read of people having soldiers take over 50% damage and only being lightly wounded, but take 2 fall damage and be gravely wounded.

Hopefully they can patch the performance and glitches, with that I'd say it's worth it, but until then no. Other than that it's up to you whether these things bother you or not.

A Few Minor Bugs

By jarcionek

If you took XCOM and added a couple of minor bugs, one or two game-breaking bugs, broke some functionality and made interface worse and less user friendly, you would get exactly XCOM2. Another large well-known studio which sells their sh** "AAA" game for very high price (£35). Such things should be classified as fraud.

Bad performance and poor stability
random FPS drops
occasional crashes
cut-scenes are playing before graphics are loaded, making first few seconds of it either very ugly or just black screen with sounds
after one mission, whenever I open geosphere the game freezes - I had to start the campaign over (with disabled mods and tutorial)
in later stages of the campaign, the game occasionally gets stuck while loading a save

Broken and user-unfriendly interface
most of the interface pretends to be in-game poor quality hologram device and it is blinking, misaligning etc. Very annoying when e.g. reading research report and the text is moving every few seconds...
on some screens there are no back/close buttons, making it impossible to navigate with mouse, you have to use keyboard
sometimes you have to click the same button multiple times
sometimes when you hover over the button to expand a list and then move mouse pointer onto item on the list, the list disappears so you have to hover over the button again, etc.
sometimes in the top right corner the video of the talking chief engineer/scientist is shown... all the time... with no sound/text...
there is no indication whether quick save was actually made
game save doesn't save the camera position and facing direction, neither soldier selection
many of the cutscenes and videos are not shown if tutorial is enabled... or maybe that was due to 3 Long War Studios' mods...?
sometimes camera is not following the action - is it enemy's turn and you just hear shots and your soldiers being killed? Sorry, all you will see is a wall (or ceiling or undiscovered part of map)

Long loading times and a lot of waiting
loading a save (even quick load) takes about 20 seconds
returning from mission ("flying back" loading screen) takes a few minutes, a bit shorter when flying to mission
with over 100 saved games, it takes over 10 seconds to open the list of saves
weird long pauses between soldiers' actions on missions - you soldier has just killed an alien? you have to look at its body for 5 seconds before you can give another order
it is impossible to skip soldiers' annimations

Flawed and unpolished gameplay
soldiers shooting through walls, without line of sight
generally what you see and what actually happens are two different things - so get used to seeing entire burst hitting the enemy accompanied by a popup "missed"
items drops? The way it works just su***. Enemies occasionally (like 1 every 10) will drop an item, that you have to pick up within 3 turns because otherwise it will disappear. Soldiers don't need any inventory slots for them, picked up items will be just visible as loot on the summary screen
weapons upgrades and soldiers' implants? Cannot be produced, can be acquired only via items drops. And the upgrades once placed in, cannot be taken out, only destroyed
items manufacturing is extremely confusing and lacks any explanation about how it actually works. I can manufacture two armors - one of them is a single utility item that I can put in soldier's inventory, the other unlocks entirely new armor (new apperance, 2 utility slots, HP bonus) and is available for every soldier. There is nothing indicating whether what you are working on is a single item, unlocking item (i.e. infinite amount of this item) or a research that will let you manufacture an item
if you finish a mission while controlling enemy soldier, its body is not retrieved
the same if a controlled enemy is killed - it's body just magically disappears
"evasive manoeuvres" in case of imminent UFO interception mean “fly around entire Earth” or “fly to a nearby location and wait for the UFO until it flies around entire Earth and attacks you”

Final Verdict:

75/100

From my own experiences, this franchise is really one of a kind. If you can look past the minor bugs and enjoy the game for what it is, you'll enjoy yourself. Turn Based Strategy isn't for everyone but if you like it, get this one!

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