XCOM® 2

I have colour-coded spreadsheets for a reason, and XCOM 2 is one of the games that made me start keeping them. The two-layer design, turn-based squad tactics on the ground, globe-spanning base and resource management in the Avenger above, demands that both layers stay in sync at all times. Blow your supply budget on mag weapons too early and your squad hits the mid-game under-armoured and under-staffed. Turtle in the Avenger building rooms in the wrong order and the Avatar Project timer will catch you before your Psionics lab is even online. The pressure never fully lifts, which is exactly the point. On the tactical layer, the five core classes give you a clear decision tree from the first mission. Rangers bring concealment-breaking melee with the sword and close-range rifle work; Sharpshooters sit back and bank Serial kills once they reach Colonel rank; Grenadiers crack cover and strip armour so the rest of the squad can finish cleanly; Specialists run the Gremlin drone for remote hacking, healing, and one of the most satisfying ability interactions in the game when you jack an enemy Sectopod and turn it on its own pod; and Psi Operatives, unlocked late, rewrite the probability math entirely once trained. The concealment system, which lets your squad start missions hidden and set up an opening ambush before going loud, was a genuine addition to the formula, it rewards aggressive forward positioning rather than slow overwatch-crawling, and it ties the guerrilla fiction directly to the mechanics. The criticisms are real and you should know them before spending money. The campaign timer is the most divisive design choice in modern strategy games and for good reason: new players will feel steamrolled by it before they understand the underlying pacing logic. The Geoscape between missions has thinner strategic texture than the base-building in Enemy Unknown, the adjacency bonus system from the predecessor is gone, and several reviewers noted that resource scarcity early on makes each spending decision feel opaque rather than satisfying. The RNG, as always with this series, will occasionally produce outcomes that feel inorganic even at high hit percentages, and no amount of experience entirely insulates you from that. Performance at launch was a known issue; years of patches have largely resolved it, but it is worth noting that the game has always run better on mid-to-high-spec hardware. For a beginner who bounced off the difficulty: start on Rookie, turn Ironman off, and treat the first campaign as a tutorial you are allowed to lose. The game front-loads its cruelty because it needs you to bond with your soldiers before it kills them. Once you survive the first few missions with a squad you have named and customised, the stakes become personal in a way few strategy games manage. That emotional investment is the engine behind every comeback attempt. If you reach the War of the Chosen expansion, which overhauls the mid-game substantially with the Chosen antagonists, the Reapers, Skirmishers, and Templars as new hero classes, and Resistance Orders that meaningfully differentiate each campaign run, you are looking at a different and considerably deeper game. The mod ecosystem is the long-term argument for the purchase. With over 5,000 mods on the Steam Workshop, the community support has extended the game's life well past what any vanilla replay count would justify. Long War 2, officially sanctioned by Firaxis and built by Pavonis Interactive, restructures the entire campaign with new infiltration systems, SMG weapons, a more aggressive strategic AI, and additional classes built around the same tactical skeleton. Musashi's RPG Overhaul suite goes further, opening up 14 base specialisations and 98 total abilities for soldiers who start classless. Quality-of-life mods like Evac All and Instant Avenger Menus address the genuine friction points in the base game. The modding infrastructure here is not decorative, it is a structural part of the game's value proposition.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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