XCOM 2 review: 'a truly remarkable strategy game'

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’s core - its unparalleled turn-based combat scenarios - has undergone lots of little tweaks, which combine to make every turn feel precious and important. Even the base management feeds into the game’s new setting: no longer burrowed underground like in Enemy Unknown, your command centre is a repurposed alien ship called the Avenger, constantly moving around the globe to avoid Advent detection. In order to build new facilities you must excavate alien debris from compartments of the once-derelict craft - much like the cross-sectioned, ant colony-style underground base of Enemy Within - but in XCOM 2 you have less room to expand due to the limitations of the craft.

Your choices matter - from what research you tell your scientists to develop, to what facility you ask you engineers to build. It is this sense of agency that makes even micromanaging your base, or deciding where to send the Avenger next, truly exciting. The Avenger’s bridge houses a huge, holographic globe - selecting this zooms you right into a flat map of the world, another layer of the three-pronged strategy game. To progress, you do all your resource management, squad customisation, facility building - and more - at the Avenger, before heading to the command centre to decide where to send your aerial army.

Do you zip across to a cache of supplies in the Arctic - time even passing during the journey - and spend five days gathering it up, or do you head to Mexico and try to recruit that new engineer? Like with most things in XCOM 2, you can rarely do both, especially since there is an ever-present doomsday clock counting down to the failure of your entire campaign, forcing a restart. Whatever you decide to spend your limited time and resources doing, an alarm will eventually warn you of an assault opportunity, and then it’s time to get your squad’s boots on the ground.

True to the game’s guerilla setup, most encounters begin with the enemy unaware of your presence as you infiltrate enemy ground. Concealment, as it’s called, gives you the option to keep your troops hidden, sneaking unseen across the map until you decide you want to strike (or you accidentally stray into the enemy’s line of sight and it all goes a bit Normandy landings).

A well thought-out ambush is often devastating to the enemy, providing you have managed to get each squad member into a good tactical position, hugging full or half cover and with full sight of the aliens. Putting soldiers on ‘overwatch’ allows them to react with fire when an enemy moves. It plays out with cinematic satisfaction; the camera swoops around the battlefield, focusing on each soldier as they fire: swinging up to a long view as the rooftop sniper lands a critical shot; panning down to the support soldier tucked behind a pillar as she peppers a fleeing enemy with bullets, wounding them, forcing them to flee right into the path of your shotgun-primed ranger. Boom!

Once concealment is done and dusted, you can really start worrying about the safety of your squad. XCOM 2 is devilishly satisfying when a plan goes your way, but the game’s great quality is how it is equally compelling when your plans begin to crumble. Enemies will take advantage of any mistake: an unguarded flank, units grouped too closely together, or a wounded straggler all draw the AI’s attention. Even on normal difficulty, enemies rarely make mistakes, and they use each turn to strike with brutal efficiency.

Most missions have a limited amount of turns in which to accomplish them, meaning a slow and careful advance is generally out of the question. It is a clever, cruel way of coaxing you into misjudgment, eking out risks when you should be patient. Sometimes you’ll be forced to send a soldier sprinting into the Fog of War just to get a grasp of the procedurally generated battlefields, but be that at your peril - they may end up toe-to-toe with an entire enemy squad and all out of moves. Often, if you are too slow at completing the objective - hacking a terminal, kidnapping a VIP, destroying a facility or a host of other objectives that pop up through the more varied campaign - you will run out of turns. Your soldiers will not make it to the evac points in time, instead becoming stranded on the battlefield and captured by alien forces.

As with everything else in XCOM 2, its extraterrestrial foes are a much more varied bunch. Some genetically altered favourites return, but the game also introduces some disgusting new surprises like the Faceless: a rubbery, seven foot mass of sentient gloop that can change into a human form at will, only to charge at your flank when you engage another enemy. Even 30 hours in, I was still being surprised by the cool new enemies showing up in the field, each one as interesting, and as capable of changing the dynamics of the battlefield, as the last.

XCOM 2’s battles, and the decisions you make therein, have true weight to them, and these choices are made even heavier by XCOM’s incredible level of customisation. Before a mission begins you watch your entire squad, all sat aboard the Skyranger before they rappel into battle - perhaps for the last time. With so much room to customise your own experience into a truly personal war story - from the colour and style of a squadmate’s armour, to the hair on their head, to a veteran soldier’s scars of war, and even the little backstory you can create for each operative in their bios, creates scenarios that matter to you as a player.

Each post mission debrief is exactly the same as when going in - sat aboard the Skyranger - and if you’ve taken casualties, the surviving troops head back to base in silence, dismayed looks on their faces, the empty seats instilling the feeling of a profound loss in both them and you as their commander. There is even an entire wall on the Avenger dedicated to these fallen heroes, letting you reminisce over their impressive combat record - letting you regret their cause of death. “That grenade was only meant to blow an escape hole in the wall, Sgt. Hoggins... honest!”

Every choice, every death and every shot feels like it counts in XCOM 2 and it is this feeling of real consequence that makes for a truly remarkable strategy game - one that goes beyond its clever design decisions and the odd technical hiccup to create a tangible sense purpose and real emotion to your squad’s story. As an experience that puts you in control, lets you relish victories, forces you to truly mourn mistakes, and allows you to grow as a tactician against insurmountable odds, XCOM 2 is near faultless.