Resistance isn't futile
I’m in trouble. I need to put a soldier on the back of
a flatbed truck, so I can hack the device it’s
carrying and abscond with the alien secrets inside.
As it happens, the truck is on fire. It shouldn’t be,
but I used a grenade to take out the Advent trooper
standing next to it and things sort of got out of
hand. I’ve got three soldiers left – the fourth having
died earlier – and I don’t want to lose another to a
fire I’ve made them stand in. Sadly, I can’t see an
alternative, so I pick the XCOM agent with the
most health and tell them to burn themselves alive.
That’s when the Sectoid shows up.
“The aliens are brutal in XCOM 2,” says
lead producer Garth DeAngelis. “I’m
really proud of that. If you look at the
Sectoid, for instance, of Enemy
Unknown versus XCOM 2, the Sectoid
in Enemy Unknown could mind-merge
and they could shoot their gun. They
can shoot their gun in XCOM 2 as well,
but they can also do an attack called
‘mind spin’, which will panic or
disorient you. Or mind control you.
That can happen as well. The first alien
in the game can mind control you.”
That isn’t what happens in my
playthrough. It’s the second mission,
and, after battling through Advent
troops, I’m now experiencing my first
alien encounter. One of my soldiers is
now on fire. The Sectoid waves a hand,
and a psionic purple tendril reaches out
to a dead Advent soldier. He gets up. It
turns out Sectoids can reanimate
people, too. This is bad. The zombie
has the drop on my burning soldier. I
have been outflanked by a corpse. My
soldier is able to take down the
reanimated agent, but not before he
removes a significant chunk of her
health. A turn later, uniform aflame, she
succumbs to the fire.
DeAngelis smiles as I recount my
experience. “That’s great to hear,” he
says. “You have the Advent
administration on the front lines.
They’re tactically interesting to fight,
but we want the surprise – the really
cool stuff – to come from these aliens
that are emerging from the shadows as
the XCOM resistance grows stronger.
In this world they’ve always been
behind the scenes. Humanity doesn’t
really know if the aliens are there or
not. They just know there’s this Advent
administration that are their saviours.
And now XCOM is pulling these more
sinister aliens to the front, and you have
to fight and face them.”
cut loose
Two of my soldiers are dead. The
remaining two are critically injured.
The Sectoid could finish me off here,
but I have a secret weapon: a Ranger.
His sword attack is a guaranteed hit,
and does huge damage. In any other
situation it would be a risk – leaving me
out of position, and vulnerable to
assault. Here, there are no other
enemies. I’m clear to take down my
troublesome foe and leave with the
remnants of my team. I remember
XCOM: Enemy Unknown as a game
about caution, about sticking to good
cover and using overwatch to punish
aggressors. In XCOM 2, DeAngelis
explains, encounters more resemble
combat puzzles.
“The battlefield is your playground,”
he says, “so where do you move? How
do you take advantage of cover and
flanking? That’s the puzzle aspect. Also,
predicting what the aliens want to take
advantage of. You learn that as you go.
You might need to get tongue-pulled a
few times before you get the hang of it,
but eventually you’ll know how to
counter that and get in front of it.” In
short, the aliens are Firaxis’s attempt to
counter the go-to strategies of Enemy
Unknown players. Or, to put it another
way, to fuck with their fans.
Overwatch still has its place, and has
been significantly improved. In the four
missions I played, it once again
functioned as the cautiously sensible
default action – now with the added
bonus that the second soldier in an
overwatch chain will no longer attempt
to fire on an enemy killed by the first.
But the new classes offer a more
interesting selection of abilities and
upgrades. Better opportunities exist
aside from just moving and shooting.
Right now, my favourite new class is
the Specialist, whose Gremlin drone
can hack objects at range and be
further upgraded with new assault or
defensive options.
panic a hack
These upgrades are invaluable in early
battles, when you’re in charge of
weak-willed rookies prone to freaking
out mid-mission. The Specialist’s
Revival Protocol upgrade – available
once they’ve been promoted to
Sergeant – can remove negative status
effects, including panic. With it, you
can spin a disastrous affliction into a
net positive. Later in my hands-on
session, a rookie loses it during an
encounter with a Viper. He takes an
automatic panic shot, hitting the snake
lady, but not finishing her off. Using the
Gremlin, I remove the effect. The
soldier now has a regular full turn with
which to finish off his foe. Not that this
is a tactic you want to rely on, as
panicked soldiers can just as easily
grenade the wall you’re using as cover
– blowing it out and leaving you
harmed and exposed.
The Specialist also saves my skin
during a timed mission to hack into an
Advent network. I had eight turns,
most of which were spent dealing with
Advent troops outside a petrol station.
When I finally reach the building that
houses the terminal, I have one turn
remaining, but the only soldier in range
of the terminal has been grabbed and
bound by a Viper. Fortunately, I realise
I can send in the Gremlin. Hacking a
terminal has a guaranteed effect – in
this case breaching the network – and
also provides a chance of picking up
two bonus rewards.
The likelihood of unlocking these
bonuses is based on the difference in
tech score between the hacker and the
terminal they’re trying to unlock. I’m
offered a permanent bonus to my
Specialist’s hacking score, and a four
week upgrade to my home base’s
scanning ability. Other potential
rewards are more immediate, such as
blinding nearby enemies for a couple of
turns. I receive nothing – my
Specialist’s score is too low. Luckily, this
time there isn’t an associated penalty.
Later in the campaign, failed attempts
can trigger negative effects.
spoils of war
Timed missions aren’t XCOM 2’s only
trick for putting the player under
pressure. Enemy Within’s Meld
resource is gone, but a new loot system
takes the same trick and applies it on a
smaller scale. Downed enemies have a
chance to drop loot that will selfdestruct
after three turns. That loot
takes the form of weapon attachments
– everything from scopes that increase
aim to repeaters that have a chance to
instantly kill a target. It’s a bonus less
essential and abstract than Meld, but
useful enough to be desirable.
The effect is lots of small-scale,
focused bursts of risk/reward decision
making. If loot appears at the start of a
battle, there’s no guarantee it will still
be around when it’s over. Retrieving it
could be disastrous, but better weapons
means being better equipped to deal
with future missions. Between the new
abilities and the external pressures,
XCOM 2’s challenge isn’t just about the
brutality of the aliens – although they
are brutal. There is also plenty of scope
for for shooting yourself in the foot
through poor decision choices.
“We wear that as a badge of honour,
that it’s a challenging game,” says
DeAngelis. “In fact, we want it to be
brutally challenging. We want you to
have to overcome those odds, because
the sense of triumph is truly powerful.
We want players to be able to learn that
and earn that on their own.”
It’s not all failure and
disempowerment. In XCOM 2, each
mission starts with a moment of
empowerment – a chance to ambush
the enemy and take them out unseen.
This concealment phase is in keeping
with the idea of XCOM as a guerrilla
force. When your soldiers arrive on the
map, they’re undetected, and will
remain so as long as they don’t open
fire, move too close to the enemy, or
create excessive noise by smashing
through a door or window. In this way,
I’m able to surround a group of Advent,
setting the majority of my force to
concealment overwatch – a special
ambush variant that tells your soldiers
to only open fire if detected.
Once the trap is set, I tell my final
soldier to attack. This reveals the squad,
triggering their overwatch. The entire
attack plays as one continuous scene
– the camera tracking from soldier to
soldier as they take their shot and wipe
out the enemy. Concealment only
works for the first encounter of each
mission, and even then it’s easy to mess
up. My first ambush failed when I
positioned a soldier near some civilians.
“They’re scared that there are these
humans running around with guns,
because they think they’re in a utopia,”
DeAngelis explains to me. “They think
they’re safe.”
alien experiments
The sense I get of XCOM 2 is that it’s
more open to experimentation. Its
difficulty feels designed to punish
ill-judged plans, rather than penalising
the player for not following a specific,
linear solution. The meta-strategy of
the Geoscape is the perfect example of
this, in that you can no longer lose the
campaign purely based on specific
factors. Building a resistance is a very
different prospect to stopping an alien
vanguard, and that’s had a pronounced
effect on how you interact with the
world. For one thing, there are no
longer any satellites to screw you over.
“I think that’s why I lost my first
playthrough of Enemy Unknown,”
DeAngelis says. “I still remember it
vividly. There were other ways you
could lose, of course, like if you tried
the alien base a bit too early, but
satellites were something you had to
prioritise early. The beautiful thing
with XCOM 2 is I’ve played through
multiple times and it’s always like, what
do I want to do first? There seem to be
a lot of options that could potentially
work, or ways I have to adjust based on
how the game’s panning out.”
Failure in XCOM 2 is tied to
something called the Avatar Project. It’s
represented by a bar at the top of the
Geoscape that tracks progress towards
something incredibly bad that the
aliens are planning. Your strategy lies in
balancing the need to grow the
resistance against the requirement to
stop the aliens from completing their
evil masterplan.
final countdown
“If I prioritise trying to get to tier two
armour first,” DeAngelis says, “I’m
forgoing building the resistance and
finding a new region. That could end
up biting me in the ass because I don’t
have time to get to a facility, and the
Avatar progress rose. It’s constantly a
balance of how do you pull that off, and
it feels different every game because
the rate of Avatar progress being filled
changes every game.”
Dark Events similarly mix things up,
and feel like an attempt to level the
power curve as your squad becomes
more effective through research,
abilities and new gear. Dark Events
function as alien research, and will
enhance your foe in a variety of ways.
Examples include improved Advent
armour and additional reinforcements
during missions. Counter-ops will be
available to prevent the enemy gaining
these upgrades, but again, it ties into
the overall Geoscape balance.
Preventing an enemy advantage may
come at the cost of completing some
equally important project.
It’s clear that Firaxis has thought
carefully about the particulars of
Enemy Unknown. Every aspect of
XCOM 2 feels like a response, from the
procedural maps that provide longevity
over multiple campaigns, to the
shifting, broad and open-ended strategy
layer, and the opportunity of
experimentation that it provides. This
isn’t a sequel that only offers more of
everything that made its predecessor so
enjoyable. It’s a total rehaul, and an
opportunity to take the basic formula
and recontextualise it in a way that’s
well suited to XCOM’s punishing
difficulty. It’s a sequel designed for its
fans, and, based on what I’ve seen, next
year’s most promising strategy game.
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