Strategy and tactical games are generally not my cup of tea, as I mostly stick to the usual action-RPG titles prevalent on consoles. Sometimes, however, it feels good to step out of your comfort zone and try something non-typical for your tastes. After my recent venture into Marvel’s Midnight Suns (which was a ton of fun), I felt an urge to check out some other titles by Firaxis Games. This is how my guerrilla war against alien invaders began in XCOM 2.
Facing Unrelenting Odds
I have to admit, getting into XCOM 2: War of the Chosen was no walk in the park. Even though I beat XCOM: Enemy Within back in the day, I wasn’t quite ready for how overwhelming this experience can be, especially during its first few hours. War of the Chosen does not mess around. Things escalate almost instantly, throwing tough battles with ruthless bosses at your inexperienced rookies right off the bat, making you grapple with tough decisions and inevitable mistakes, leading to failed missions and lost soldiers. Yet, pretty soon, you realize that’s the whole point, as the game isn’t really punishing you for your failures, but rather shaping its progression around them.
Unless you’re playing on the easiest difficulty (or resorting to heavy save scumming, which I totally don’t recommend here), it is almost impossible to win or even to tackle every mission that War of the Chosen throws at you. You will inevitably fail some objectives, allowing the Chosen—three alien war masters unleashed to stop you—to seize the initiative multiple times throughout the story. Their menacing presence can be felt every minute that you spend analyzing the global map of operations, pondering your next move. And you’d better be ready to face them in person on a crucial mission when you’re expecting them the least.
Sharing the battlefield with all three Chosen at once feels like competing against real opponents who are always online, called in to make your life harder. Whenever you progress, they grow stronger as well, and they always take advantage of your mistakes. While it is really tough to keep up with them at the beginning, you eventually cherish those moments, as things get much less nail-biting as soon as you grow strong enough to take down at least one of them. After you beat all the Chosen, XCOM 2 can’t offer any substantial challenges until perhaps the very last battle. If you manage to adapt and overcome its brutal opening hours, and stall for time until your soldiers obtain some non-starting gear and abilities, you will most likely be fine later on, and the Chosen won’t be as deadly a threat as they used to be.
Defining How The War Unfolds
But it’s not just the Chosen that keep you on your toes in XCOM 2. The game rests on three core pillars, each offering plenty of strategic and tactical depth of decision-making. As an XCOM commander, you must handle base management, allocating valuable resources to the most essential research projects and even constructing new facilities. You also control the global strategic map, determining humanity’s next major move in its fight against oppressors. Finally, you lead a squad of operatives during tactical missions, leveling and gearing up your soldiers in between. The beauty lies in how these three aspects seamlessly intertwine, ensuring the game never really gets old or predictable, and you never feel safe.
It’s rare to find a game where each decision carries such weight and has long-reaching consequences, shaping the course of the resistance war, all while granting you complete freedom in how you approach your tasks.
These myriad decisions, both big and small, form the heart and soul of the XCOM 2 experience. Deciding which research project to prioritize, choosing which facility should benefit from your limited engineers and scientists, selecting the right operatives for dangerous missions, making decisions about which countries to contact first on the global map, deciding which missions to undertake or skip, and planning for the resources you’ll need in the coming months—every one of these choices feels uneasy yet significant.
And the best thing is that there is no ‘correct’ way to play XCOM 2: War of the Chosen due to the major random factors, your personal preferences, and the objectives the game generates for you aside from a few key story points. It’s rare to find a game where each decision carries such weight and has long-reaching consequences, shaping the course of the resistance war, all while granting you complete freedom in how you approach your tasks.
One thing to complain about here, though, is the current technical state of the Xbox console version. I was unpleasantly surprised by how poorly XCOM 2 performed on my Series S, experiencing frequent crashes, save loading failures, and persistent sign-in issue—a common problem widely discussed online. Given all these issues, I absolutely cannot recommend playing it on the console, and it’s a shame that the devs abandoned their otherwise brilliant creation in such a problematic shape.
Aside from that, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen was a fantastic experience that showed just how much excitement there is to find when surrounded by unrelenting odds and being pushed to the limits while fighting for each small victory. Its unmatched freedom and unpredictability can take you on a wild ride if you’re bold enough to take back your planet.
XCOM 2
- Platform(s)
- PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, Android, iOS
- Developer(s)
- Firaxis Games
- Publisher(s)
- 2K Games