XCOM 2 Hands

An hour into my first experience playing XCOM 2, I was still stuck on the same map, finding myself in a frustrating spiral of pain and death. My squad, meticulously trained and equipped specifically for my mission -- to deactivate an alien power source -- weren’t quite as expendable as I had initially thought they would be. With a member of the Firaxis team cheekily watching my every move from over my shoulder, I learned a valuable lesson in patience. It took me an hour -- far too long for a seasoned Enemy Unknown player -- to recognise where I was going wrong: I was severely overestimating my human team’s capabilities.

Maybe that was the point: XCOM 2 can be a harsh mistress, which is certainly in line with the game’s gripping premise. Set after the events of Enemy Unknown, the world of XCOM 2 is one of “peace”, although the human race has essentially submitted to a life under alien rule. Expectedly, you’re a member of the resistance, an angry group determined to rise up and reclaim Earth for the human race. With that, you need to take bigger risks, because now you’re the one trying to infiltrate and take over. The odds are heavily stacked against you, so it’s an entirely different game of strategy.

”The game’s brutal,” admitted art director Greg Foertsch, ”but when you have success, it’s about as satisfying as it gets.” That really hits at the heart of what drove my time playing XCOM 2, a game that looks to reestablish the series’ iconic ruthlessness first established back in 1993. Even in the tutorial mission, I found my irresponsible style of play to be slammed down hard by the world’s uncompromising race of superior beings. It might be the same game of cards but the players have changed, and more often than not, XCOM 2 calls my bluff. But when I play within my means and submit to its obsessive nature of strategic patience, the feeling of success and reward is unparalleled.

Finally making my way through the mission -- with only one survivor, mind you -- I regrouped with XCOM at the scavenged alien mothership, The Avenger. Here I was introduced to XCOM 2’s intimidating degree of unit customisation, mission structures and research facilities. Player choice has expanded far beyond what we’re used to in Enemy Unknown, and if the goal here was to mess with my head, then Firaxis has certainly nailed it. XCOM’s funding council, made up of 16 nations, must at all times have at least eight active members. Countries drop out if panic levels are too high, but you might be strung on other missions that gift you important rewards in an effort to improve your squad’s capabilities. Balancing the importance of squad goals with the at-times overbearing nature of XCOM’s own necessities is really only one of the many challenges posed to players in XCOM 2. Like I said above, this is entirely different game of strategy, one that moves beyond that predictable nature of Enemy Unknown’s conflicts.

Exploring the world map, I got a sense of how varied the mission structure is in XCOM 2. Dark Events dragged me in with their promise of story progression and improved intel on the aliens. Long term alien goals chip away at the game’s primary story, while short term goals -- if not infiltrated and stopped -- can promote alien bases and make it even tougher for your squad to progress. These events change every time you play, and it’s hard to ignore important events that drag you closer to the ultimate end-goal. In my brief time I found myself really struggling to determine which path to take and which mission to tackle, although it’s an element of choice that really tugs at XCOM 2’s dark world of war and death.

When I was able to drag myself away from base -- after about an hour of tinkering with the deep weapon customisation, the incredibly useful and intuitive squad recruitment system, and other homely managerial tasks -- I hit the battleground with my four-person strong squad of heavies, melee masters and long-range eagle-eyes. XCOM 2 procedural worlds actually do away with Enemy Unknown’s randomness, instead managing assets in the game via a method Firaxis calls the “plot and parcel system”. Maps have been designed with “holes” that plot down specific items, like buildings, at random. The difference, however, is that rather than simply throwing in any structure in a chaotic mess of randomness, XCOM 2’s procedural maps have specific slots for different objects.

”The four leads got together and we looked at the user experience and what we wanted to do from the beginning with EU, which was to make it procedural...but adding it to the mix was hard on the first version,” Foertsch told me. ”It was something that we wanted to improve in the second game.” Map design is certainly one of the biggest changes in XCOM 2, and the encouraging thing is that worlds retain that element of unpredictability from the first game, but there’s a more coherent element of structure. Certainly what stood out for me in my play-through was how maps offer an empowering sense of destructibility, which redefines the style of strategic play on offer. That’s important, but it’s just another cog in XCOM 2’s relentless pursuit to punish impatience. In Enemy Unknown, losing a squad member was never quite the end of the battle, but XCOM 2’s world offers a sense of hostility that hones in on gaping holes in your squad when members go down. Four different classes each play very specific roles, and so maintaining a good balance in your squad across each for the duration of a mission is key.

Things can quickly turn against you XCOM 2, as I so often learned during my three-or-so-hour time with it. Yet there are a number of key elements that make it distinctively “XCOM”, like turning alien technology against the aliens, or knowing that “Normal” difficulty is probably what those not familiar with the series’ would consider to be “Expert” equivalent in other modern strategy games. If I took anything away from my time with XCOM 2, it was that it wants to be recognised as a brutal force in the strategy genre, as the classic X-COM games once were. Of course, opening the game up to the modding community is going to expand what is already drowning in classic stylings of strategic gameplay. There’s the content and functionality here to fuel the imaginations of a talented community, spread out across things like weapon modifications, unit customisation and mission events.

I went into XCOM 2 with Enemy Unknown still relatively fresh in my mind. One of the best games of last generation has now shifted into a decisively uncompromisable PC strategy game, one that invites you with its enthralling setting. Yet the honeymoon period ends almost as quickly as it begins, shifting into a slow, unforgiving battle between species. At its core, it’s the XCOM we love: highly strategic, and not one to shy away from tribulations of trial and error. It then challenges itself with a host of intimidating new features and designs, hoping to find the perfect balance between familiarity and uniqueness.

XCOM 2 hits PC on February 5, 2016.