A Review of XCOM 2

By Tiffany Funk

I know I'm late to the game, but consider this my pandemic catch-up report: XCOM 2 and all its DLCs is on now on the Nintendo Switch, and I've found an outlet for all my current news and social media rage. It's the classic love/hate relationship—you know, like Walter and Hildy in His Girl Friday. Harry and Sally in When Harry Met Sally. Hannibal and Will Graham in Hannibal.

A little background for the uninitiated: XCOM is a science fiction game franchise featuring an elite international organization tasked with countering alien invasions of Earth. Upgrading Julian Gollop's cult hit strategy game UFO: Enemy Unknown, Firaxis Studio's XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012) checks all the boxes for an excellent turn-based strategy gamer, especially 80s and 90s nostalgiacs raised on a healthy diet of Starcraft, Starship Troopers, and X-Files. Its premise is simple: the world has been invaded by aliens that have the technology to genetically enhance certain of their characteristics to better decimate our planet.

The turn-based strategy element is tightly controlled and addicting. Ground combat uses a top-down 3D perspective. The player, in the role of "The Commander," controls a squad of human or robotic soldiers with special abilities, tasked with hunting aliens and completing a variety of objectives on maps. Though map layouts are not randomly generated, soldier and enemy placement is, and the addition of fog of war allows for enough variety and surprise that even well-trodden maps remain entertaining. The few cutscenes during map gameplay emphasize particularly exciting moments, usually critical kill sequences special ability moves. Between missions, XCOM's underground headquarters is displayed in "ant farm" fashion: here players must deploy construction teams, research projects, and manage resources while monitoring the "Geoscape," a holographic view of the Earth that tracks alien events around the world. The player orders aircraft to intercept UFOs and sends soldiers on missions to engage aliens on the ground.

The enemy design is in keeping with all the sci-fi touchstones one would expect: the "Sectoids" look like the stereotypical big-eyed, ashy "grays" made famous by the Roswell accounts. The thin men are a "Men in Black" design in keeping more with classic conspiracy theory than the Will Smith vehicle, their slightly uncanny human appearance more Gumby-cum-Agent Smith. Even the more baroque designs are still recognizable to a sci-fi nerd; the "Mutons" are your stereotypical Doom berserker enemy, "Chrysalids" cleave more to the insectoid creature that would be comfortable with the bugs of Starship Troopers, if they had the xenomorph habit of laying chest-bursting hatchlings in humans' stomachs; "Elders" have a more languid, yet bony, exotic alien design that borders on H.R.Giger-esque, and their appropriately menacing look matches their difficulty level.

While all of these elements—gameplay, strategy, character design—are excellently crafted to make a highly addicting game, the only real and inescapable problem is its bugs. The game often freezes, enemies will wink out and into existence, or audio will cut out. Playing on Ironman is a masochistic nightmare of reboots. Even those who hate the idea of save-scrubbing are forced to call up autosaves at least once every few missions because of glitches. And despite all these technical failures, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the DLC Enemy Within (2013) are great games—they're addictive, they're unique, and they're tongue-in-cheek funny with some over-the-top gore and Starship Troopers-esque satire of nationalistic militarism.

XCOM 2, released in 2016 and just this June with all DLCs for the Nintendo Switch, has retained all of XCOM: Enemy Unknown's strengths: its gameplay, strategy, and enemies are all back. Unfortunately, so is the bugginess. Again, the game freezes, lags, and sputters. That might be forgivable if it were not for the developers succumbing to what I've come to call "kitchen sink syndrome": if it's good, add more. And more. AND MORE. With all the additions—new enemies! new objectives/missions! new strategic elements! new tattoo designs for your soldiers!—XCOM 2 often becomes a rambling, unruly mess, from the storyline to the enemy design.

XCOM 2 continuously introduces new enemies that seem to have no cohesive reason to live in the XCOM world. By the time they introduce "Spectre," a nanobot cloud enemy that inexplicably looks the rubber man from season one of American Horror Story, I was done. And then along came... I mean, WTF is this?

It’s called The Gatekeeper. Is it Krang in a Poké Ball? THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.

Even new, interesting enemies like the Faceless—genetically warped human spies, I guess—should be more disturbing, borderline eldritch in theory, but the execution is all wrong: the transformation sequences are less Parasite Eve and more Kindergarten stop-motion animation.

Some added elements work better than others. There is a threat bar that essentially creates a race against the clock to prevent the aliens' Advent Project from completing. However, it feels a little arbitrary and not terribly threatening, aside from the red glowing screen and announcement that you're "running out of time."

Now, if you thought that the DLC for XCOM 2, The War of the Chosen, would compensate for some of this narrative and character design drift... oh, you sweet, summer child. Get ready to meet some long-winded, expository cutscenes with over-the-top boss speeches from Peter Jackson LOTR reject characters:

However, aside from the convoluted storyline, annoying cutscenes and dialogue, and overall uneven tone, there are some interesting additions that change gameplay entirely, mostly for the better. "The Lost" are zombies that attack in hoards when alerted by explosions; new factions add interesting covert missions and exciting character abilities; the "Bond" feature allows new duel actions between linked soldiers. Also, Jonathan Frakes voices the Volk, the Reaper faction leader.

COMMANDER RIKER, YA'LL.