Republished on Wednesday 30th May 2018: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of June's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows.
When aliens landed on Earth in 2012 strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it was up to you to unite the people of our planet against the invading extraterrestrial force. Perhaps it's a commentary on the unforgiving difficulty of that game that XCOM 2 canonically assumes that you were unsuccessful in your bid to repel the alien invaders last time around. The game quickly establishes that two decades ago when XCOM fell, the aliens struck an accord with the human race and an alien/human coalition government was formed.
On the surface, humanity and alien-kind live side by side in a mutually prosperous coexistence, but the peace is just a veneer in order to hide the more sinister ulterior motives of our alien overlords. Some of humanity's brightest and best have seen through the facade and are working to bring about an end to the subjugation of the human race as part of an under-staffed and under-gunned resistance movement. After twenty years in an alien prison, you're broken out for one last job - to lead humanity into battle and kick the alien scourge off Earth for good.
The story might sound like it's laden with sci-fi clichés, but the formulaic opening belies the intriguing tale that XCOM 2 morphs into. It occasionally teeters perilously closely to the heroic bombast of something like Independence Day - backed by a salute-worthy soundtrack that wouldn't sound out of place in that movie - but the more personal moments of human triumph and failure keep the story grounded and compelling. The individual tales of the soldiers that you lead in each mission become even more important than the overarching one, which is quite an achievement given that your unit is made up of randomly generated characters.
As you control your soldiers mission after mission you'll grow fond of the ones that serve you well, and worry for their well being since they're always one wrong move away from ending up on the memorial wall. For us, Yukiko Yoshida was a rookie that instantly stood out because she shared her first name with popular Persona 4 character Yukiko Amagi, and her surname with that of PlayStation hero, Shuhei Yoshida. During her first mission as part of the XCOM squad she hid behind a car for cover which promptly exploded and cremated her on the spot. Meanwhile, Jane Kelly completed dozens of missions, frequently skirting death, and became the number one soldier we wanted on our squad whenever things got dicey. Whether soldiers live to be a legend or they're killed before they ever pull a trigger is largely up to you.
As your soldiers perform kills or complete objectives in battle they'll gain experience and eventually level up. Levelling up means assigning a class, and each class can then make use of two different skill trees in order to customise their abilities. The longer soldiers remain alive the stronger they'll become, and it's up to you whether or not to risk putting together a crack team of all your best troops, or use them sparingly alongside rookies to reduce the risk of a disastrous mission costing you all of your best fighters. You'll learn to rely on certain soldiers, while others you'll scarcely remember once their names are on the memorial wall, but the game does an excellent job of reminding you of the frailty of human life, and the need to carefully plan every move in battle.
Since XCOM is a guerrilla force in XCOM 2, the missions tend to take on the form of surprise attacks against alien bases or convoys in which subterfuge is an important part of gaining the upper hand in battle. Combat is turn based and often you can shrewdly use that to your advantage. Many missions start with your XCOM force being concealed in the shadows, and that allows you to position your soldiers cleverly in order to ambush your unsuspecting foes. Using concealment effectively can mean the difference between walking out of a mission without so much as a graze, or any number of your troops coming home in body bags.
Not all missions afford you the chance to surprise your enemies. Sometimes you'll be sucked into an all-out fire fight from the second the mission begins, and it's important to know when to change your tactics accordingly. Peppering the enemy with grenades to break their armour and cover might be a sound strategy when they're bunched together and unaware of your presence, but if they're expecting you it might be better to try to pick them off one at a time with concentrated fire.
Between battles it's your job to research new technologies and upgrades, build up a network of contacts by meeting different resistance groups, and recruit new soldiers and scientists. Like in combat, the decisions that you make during these moments can have huge ramifications for your chances of success going forward, with poor planning potentially leading to an under-powered military that will likely struggle against the alien threat.
Sadly, the game suffers from a few technical hiccups that may be fixed in time via patches, but at launch are too frequent to ignore. Cut-scenes will occasionally suffer from audio blips, frame rates can drop, and there are some utterly absurd load times once you've been playing the game for a significant amount of time. The load times seem to get longer the further you are into the game, with some of them clocking in a staggering two minutes late in the campaign, which is simply unacceptable.
Conclusion
While the occasional technical issues might hamper the experience somewhat, XCOM 2 remains a superb strategy game that expertly weaves stellar mechanics and emotional story-telling into an engrossing campaign in which every choice that you make feels genuinely important. It can be both brutally difficult and depressingly ruthless, but the scant moments of joy that you'll experience in your attempts to overthrow the alien regime should provide more than enough incentive to keep fighting the good fight.
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Comments 32
I LOVED XCOM 2 (I finished it last night), but I definitely think the plethora of technical issues - at times severe - should put the PS4 version at a much lower score than 9. Personally, I'd give it a 7.
Only problem I have so far is the frame drop when loading missions and the crashes.
Also, the game starts with so many things is overwhelming!
This is my goto franchise which is always a day one purchase. Glad you gave it a 9 definatly deserves this rating.
@ElkinFencer10 I think that, for me, the technical issues in the game were never intrusive enough to override the fantastic experience of playing it. I only ran into issues, really, during loading screens, along with a few audio drops during cutscenes. The frame rate drops only occurred for me during the loading screens, and while the loading screens were shocking in length at times, the amount of time between loads was so long that they never crippled the experience - it wasn't like the long load times in Bloodborne, for example, that you'd encounter every few minutes if you died as often as I did.
So while I wholeheartedly agree that there are numerous technical issues that should never have made it into the game, actually playing the game was nearly always a completely smooth and issue-free experience. Perhaps for other people the technical problems were more invasive and thus more of an issue, but I can only really speak of my time with the game which was fine aside from the aforementioned issues while missions loaded.
Wonder if PS4 Pro will help the issues in this game at all. Probably, I guess unless they are HDD-bound issues?
I'm gonna buy this as soon as I finish TW3 (yawn!) and the Old Hunters DLC (yeah!), that means I'm gonna play it next year, fully patched.
I'm glad to hear someone else annotate TW3 with 'yawn'.... I basically stopped playing 2/3 the way through because I couldn't take it anymore!
I want it! Tech problems suck though. I'll wait a while, see if any improvements come out.
@Mega-Gazz I enjoyed TW2, but all the chatting in TW3 is killing the fun in every single mission. Sometime you just get exp for hitting X between a cutscene and the other... Games like XCOM remember me why I started playing videogames a long time ago!
I actually knew a Jane Kelly who got kicked out of school for fighting.
I remember when this game dropped as a PC exclusive. Oh I wanted it to come to consoles so badly.
Well, it's here! And it's in my playlist for sure
Was hoping for more of a comparison to XCOM: Enemy Unkown, this reads like a basic overview that could easily have been copy/pasted from the first XCOM game. Didn't learn much
@andreoni79 exactly! Tw3 made me solidify what I like in games... more gameplay than story by a fair margin, and enough challenge that failure is a possibility.
That makes xcom a good prospect . Think I may wait for ps pro though
Fantastic game. Sometimes, the difficulty is crushing, but still a very rewarding game. Like for @ElkinFencer10 the technical issues never hampered the experience for me, although I do hope for a patch.
@Lonejester In many aspects, it's much like the first game. The soldier classes are a bit more streamlined. Also, weapon research now works in the way that you research plasma rifles, for example, and they're then available for the whole squad. You don't have to buy them individually after researching them, anymore.
Biggest difference is that you don't have a stationery base anymore. You are basically fighting a guerrilla war against overwhelming odds. Your base now is a giant captured alien aircraft carrier which enables you to fly all over the globe, trying to first contact and then build up a resistance movement, which gives you more resources and eventually different boni, like the continental boni from the first game.
Also, many missions have a set number of turns before they're automatically lost, forcing you to adept your tactics, basically having to avoid the good ol' "overwatch creeping".
@Lonejester Honestly, the game is very similar in a lot of ways. It's a great sequel in that it doesn't reinvent the wheel, it just streamlines what came before and improves in areas that needed improving. The story is much more fleshed out, for example. Research and development is easy.
The biggest change is the switch to guerrilla warfare that I mentioned. It means that missions tend to be about laying ambushes for the enemy since you're outmanned and outgunned, and other missions are about surprise attacks on an enemy stronghold or vehicle or VIP. And as @Reverend_Skeeve said, you have to change your tactics up on a mission by mission basis depending on the conditions.
Otherwise, it's very similar. Just improved.
Awesome game. Loved Xcom since the 90s.
@scollurio exactly the same as me glad its still fighting after all these years.
Great game, I still play it on PC now so I hope it sells the deserved number of units on consoles. I did have a few problems with the game though, namely the use of timers on a lot of the missions and the fact that a single attack from stealth reveals your entire team's location to the enemy. The former problem means that you often have to forego tactical planning to rush an objective before you run out of time. The latter problem means stealth mostly feels like a way to position your troops at the beginning of a map (and with time constraints you tend to pick the first decent spot, not the best).
It's also a bit of a shame Sony seem hellbent on not allowing mods as they add quite a bit to the game and increase its replayability by a magnitude, hopefully they will hear the outcry from their users and reverse their policy.
Even with all of the above problems though it is still worth getting if you like a good turn based strategy game.
I've always looked at the first in the series, but was wondering if it's a first-person shooter type experience...which I hate the first person genres (hate those shooters like that). If anyone can let me know if this is not first-person, or a shooter, I may be picking this one up.
Only technical glitch I have come across was that the aliens stopped moving/attacking on their turn. Took me 2 missions to figure it out thought I was a badass! So far absolutely loving the game, but if the loading screens got any longer I could take a nap between battles.
@JLPick nothing close to a FPS, its a turn-based strategy with a 3rd person overhead view.
Was going to get this but the technical problems have put me off a bit. Will wait till the price drops.
@johncalmc @Reverend_Skeeve Great, thanks for the comments. More of the same isn't bad in this case, loved the first game (and expansion).
So if I loved the first X-Com game from the early 90s, would this be something I should pick up? Yes I'm old.
Sad all the screenshots are not of a gameplay shot. Doesn't represent the game very well just showing cut-scenes.
I played this game a LOT on the PC (200+ hours), a bit of an average PC too so the PS4 version looks much better and the transition from keyboard to controller is brilliant. I've probably played only about 14 hours on the PS4 and haven't encountered any of the technical issues I've seen mentioned above and elsewhere - with the exception of some flickering during the Faceless transformation. A recent patch allows for the setting of movement waypoints which is an excellent addition; you can now go around fires!
@johncalmc An old review I know but Im considering buying this in the sale. Did they ever patch the long loading times and stuff?
@themcnoisy They hadn't when I was still playing the game, but it's entirely possible they have since. I've always thought about going back to it, to be honest. It was great, even with technical hiccups.
@johncalmc Thank you, will pick it up later.
Really excited for this so thank you Sony - I haven’t played one of these since psone so happy to see how these new versions have improved
Thank you as always for the heads up and re review @get2sammyb
Great addition to PS Plus! Never played it, but fingers crossed!
I'm excited to try this. I haven't played a strategy game in a long time though, which makes me a little nervous about it. I might need to play one again to brush off my skills before I jump into this. Thoughts anyone?
Did they at least fix most of the bugs yet?
The bugs in XCOM killed that game for me .. and from the forums XCOM2 seems to be not much better. (that is why I did not buy it)
I will never understand why technical problem are not part of a review.
("excellent" and crashes etc. do not make sense together)
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