Number 5: X-COM 2

Copyright Firaxis Games and 2K Games

I don’t like to put up games where I didn’t finish, but it’s hard to not put up a game I had to put down because it accidentally got my brother killed.  In the game, in real life my brother is fine, but it’s hard not to love a game where I had to put it down because some dude with a sword named after my brother got sacrificed for the mission.  Of all of the games I played this year, none of them were quite as moving or affecting as X-COM 2.

I didn’t really get into the first X-COM (of the new series, I’m too young to have been a big fan of the real original) for a lot of reasons.  It was a good tactical game, and did a good job of making it feel like there were consequences for mistakes, all that good stuff.  However, the tutorial was too long and had too many moving parts at once and it was just hard to get into.  Great game, just didn’t like it.

Fortunately, X-COM 2 manages to do a better job of easing the player into the game.  The tutorial is stronger and does a good job of introducing the player to the new things without just tossing multiple things at once at the player.  It doesn’t however, make the game any more gentle, making no bones about showing its lethal side, right at the beginning.  This is what makes the game work, it’s a brutal, challenging tactical game that demands a lot from the player, and continues to pus their tactical acumen to the edge, and beyond.

As a lover of tactical games, it’s hard not to love every heart pumping, stress inducing moment of X-COM 2.  It’s relentless, requires planning multiple moves ahead and doesn’t shy away from forcing the player to make difficult choices, which brought me back to the moment where I had to sacrifice my brother.  All of my characters are named after real life friends and family members, and my brother wound up running in and taking a bullet for the mission, getting in the way so they could succeed.  In an action game, it would have been a climactic moment.  In X-COM, it’s business as usual.

X-COM 2 expands on everything the original has.  First, classes have a lot more options.  Sure, it does kind of suck that when a unit promotes, the player doesn’t get to chose what they promote into, but when they do get into their unit classification, there’s more than one track to fill out, so when two great rookies promote into the same thing, picking different talents will allow them not only to compliment the fire team, but also each other as well, if they wind up fighting together.  Maps, too, are huge improvements over the previous game, which is saying something, because if there was one thing X-COM did great right out of the gate, it was map design.  2, however, adds so much more, but making routes and objectives so much more complex, right from the get go.  There is still a bit of enemies getting instant reinforcements, or aliens suddenly appearing on the map when they weren’t there before, which does work sometimes, but is often more a frustration than actually making a more tactically rich game.

The new stealth system (which may have been in one of the expansions, but I don’t know) is very nice, giving the player a slight edge they’ll need, since the player is almost always outmanned and outgunned right from the start, with reinforcements just making things worse.  The inability to return to stealth, even when no enemies are around is kind of dumb, as is the “aliens suddenly know where you’re at” aspect of it, but it does mean that setting up an ambush is more than just sitting on Overwatch and waiting for your sniper to blow grunts and serpents away.

X-COM was rewarding in a way that a lot of games have not been.  It’s brutal and viscous, and honestly, it’s actually kind of unfair, but that’s the point. It pushed me.  It made demands of my skills, and I made a point of reaching them.  Sure, the game cheats, but if it didn’t, it wouldn’t quite be the same.  It’s pretty awesome like that.