XCOM 2 Anarchy's Children

I track every XCOM 2 DLC the same way I track Paradox patch notes: what does it add to the decision space? For Anarchy's Children, the answer is zero. This is a pure cosmetics pack, 100-plus new customization options spread across every armor tier in the game, from Kevlar to the late-game WAR Suit, covering helmets, face paints, spiked pauldrons, muzzlers, hockey masks, leather straps, and bare-shoulder options for soldiers who apparently fight aliens in short shorts. There is no new mission, no new ability, no mechanical hook of any kind. Stat columns are unaffected. If you were hoping Firaxis had tucked in a new soldier class or even a single new weapon skin that changed a damage roll, you are reading the wrong DLC page. The style question is where this pack lives or dies for any given player, and it is genuinely divisive. The punk-rebel aesthetic fits a certain reading of XCOM 2's lore: these are resistance fighters and exiles operating outside any chain of command, not parade-ground soldiers. Spiked shoulder armor on a guerrilla raiding an alien broadcast tower is at least thematically defensible. But a lot of long-time XCOM players wanted the opposite direction: more paramilitary, more special-forces grit. What they got instead reads closer to a mid-2000s Hot Topic catalog than a covert ops unit, and the Steam review score of roughly 33 percent positive reflects that gap between expectation and delivery hard. The deeper problem, from where I sit, is competitive context. XCOM 2 shipped with Steam Workshop support active from day one, and the modding community responded by building an enormous library of free cosmetic mods, including Star Wars helmets, Halo Reach armor, and dozens of military-realism packs that do exactly what the frustrated majority of buyers wanted here. Anarchy's Children does not meaningfully outpace what a fifteen-minute Workshop browse can hand you at no cost. One genuine piece of value the pack did add to the broader ecosystem: it extended Firaxis's modular armor rigging so that community modders gained the ability to customize individual arm and shoulder slots separately, which unlocked a wave of more granular Workshop content afterward. That downstream benefit belongs to Workshop creators, not to the DLC itself. If you already own the XCOM 2 complete collection or the Resistance Warrior bundle, this pack came along for the ride and the math does not matter. Install it, try the face paint slider set to partial so the wilder items do not auto-apply to new recruits, and see if anything sticks. If you are considering purchasing it separately as a standalone add-on, the Mostly Negative consensus is the correct signal to act on. The other two packs in the original Resistance trilogy, Alien Hunters and Shen's Last Gift, both add actual missions, unique boss encounters, and new weapons with gameplay effects. Those are the purchases worth evaluating. This one is not.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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