XCOM 2 - War of the Chosen (DLC)

War of the Chosen is the kind of expansion that makes the base game feel like a tutorial. Firaxis took XCOM 2, already a tight turn-based tactics experience built around guerrilla resistance against an alien-occupied Earth, and layered on so many interlocking systems that calling it DLC feels like an understatement. Three new hero classes join your roster: the Reaper, a lone-wolf infiltrator who can stay concealed almost indefinitely; the Skirmisher, a hybrid brawler with a grappling hook and multi-action turns; and the Templar, a psionic melee specialist who builds focus charges through combat. Each belongs to a resistance faction with its own economy, reputation track, and strategic-layer missions. Managing those relationships while also juggling your main campaign timeline is a genuine resource-allocation puzzle, and that is exactly where the game earns its depth. The Chosen themselves are the headlining addition, and they deliver. Three persistent boss enemies, each with randomized strengths and weaknesses generated at campaign start, hunt your squad across missions. They can ambush you mid-operation, kidnap soldiers, and grow stronger if you ignore them. Killing one requires completing a dedicated fortress mission that feels like a proper climax. On the soldier side, the Bond system lets paired troops develop relationships through shared missions, eventually unlocking combo abilities and a morale-saving last-stand mechanic. It adds genuine narrative texture without breaking the numbers underneath. For a strategy specialist, the late-game calculus here is the main attraction. The Resistance Ring lets you run covert actions in parallel, bleeding out the Avatar Project timer through sabotage rather than just alien facility raids. The Lost, shambling zombie hordes that appear on certain maps, function almost like a third faction: kill them with headshots for free actions, or let them pile up and overwhelm both sides. Factoring them into an engagement plan while also tracking overwatch angles and Chosen spawn timers is genuinely demanding on Commander difficulty, and the Legendary setting will humble even veterans. The honest downsides: the expansion inherits the base game's persistent bugs around pathing and camera, and the added systems mean load times and late-campaign turn processing take longer than they should on mid-range hardware. Newcomers dropping directly into War of the Chosen without base XCOM 2 experience will face a steep learning curve because the tutorial does not scale up to cover the new factions and mechanics in enough detail. The right approach is to finish or significantly progress a vanilla campaign first, then restart with the expansion enabled. Once you know why you are managing the Skirmisher's justice-to-wrath action economy, the extra complexity pays off cleanly. The mod ecosystem on PC extends the experience substantially. The Long War of the Chosen mod, the community's massive overhaul, is built specifically on this expansion's architecture and represents hundreds of additional hours for players who exhaust the base content. Workshop support is active, and Firaxis left enough hooks in the code that quality-of-life mods addressing the interface and camera issues are easy to find and install. If you are a tactics player who likes systems that reward mastery over repetition, this is where XCOM 2 becomes the version of itself it was always trying to be.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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