The Top Twelve Best Things About XCOM2

Last time I wrote about the things that have frustrated and annoyed me about XCOM2. This time, a bit more positivity! I couldn't leave people thinking I dislike XCOM2, especially since I've already put over 50 hours into it, and will surely keep playing for a while yet.

1. The Mods

So many games these days are improved by modding, and indeed some games would be quickly forgotten if those amazing modders didn't put so many hours into creating, tweaking and improving the main game. Everything from cosmetic changes, bug fixes and new guns and classes are available, and more are being added all the time. I've yet to dip my toe into this expanding sea of content, but I look forward to trying them out.

The Twelve Most Annoying Things About XCOM2

XCOM2 is a fascinating sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and I've been enjoying it quite a lot over the past week or so. In fact, it's been my most played game of the past week by some margin. It provides a lot of interesting changes to the formula from the previous game, and deserves a lot of credit for it. I'm not too far away from my first victory, and then I plan on diving into the ocean of mods that are currently filling up the Steam Workshop.

It's not all engaging gameplay, tense atmosphere and tactical action though, because there are a few things which just annoy and frustrate me. Nothing enough to stop me playing or to particularly spoil my enjoyment, but enough for me to write this list.

1. "Free" Enemy Movement

In the first game, the enemy got a "free" movement when your soldiers were within sight range. This allowed them to get into cover, and this game really prioritises cover. XCOM2 is similar, but enemies also sometimes get to perform an action during your turn, which can be even more frustrating. This is balanced somewhat by your soldiers also having skills that occur during the enemy turn, but those are rather few and somewhat limited.

XCOM: The New One (meaning the reboot, not the sequel which is coming out soon, why is this so difficult, maybe they should have named it something else? At least it's not as bad as Prince of Persia)

A long while ago, I played the XCOM reboot. If you were to look back through the various posts on this blog, you'll perhaps notice one of the first games I played through was in fact X-COM, or UFO: Enemy Unknown, the first and best game in this long-running and now rebooted franchise (at least until the reboot sequel comes out, in which case I'd have to consider that one, but let's be honest I'm probably going to always prefer that classic version from my youth).

The "ant farm"

What I meant to say in that previous paragraph was that I'd covered the first X-COM, and I've played through Xenonauts more recently too. The reboot XCOM was less appealing to me, and although I also did play it, I gave up on it a long while ago. Well, this past few weeks I decided to reinstall it and try to finish it before the reboot sequel comes along. I really feel like I should give it a fair chance, since it's very popular apparently. Word is that XCOM2 is much better and so on, but XCOM1 was widely praised at the time.