I'm especially interested to know what the alien win condition is, and what the aliens will do to pursue it. With luck, the sequel will take this dynamic in some interesting directions. Hacking is a key component of several of XCOM 2's missions. It's reminiscent of a similar scenario in Enemy Unknown, where you could shoot down UFOs and raid them for alien corpses and technology, but also of the base invasions from UFO Defense. If they succeed, you have to fight off a ground attack, with the price of failure being that the aliens win. In one such event, the aliens will send a UFO to hunt down your ship, the Avenger. As the game progresses, your intelligence services will warn you of "Dark Events" that will occur if you don't locate and sabotage an alien research base. And you'll want to, because the aliens have their own win condition now. The Interceptors are gone but with your own mobile command outpost, you can contact rebel cells and sabotage alien bases to keep them from researching new technology. This effectively flips the script - you are now in the role of invader.įlying around in a captured alien supply ship, your goal is to rescue captured sympathizers, sabotage alien efforts, and find out what exactly the invaders are doing behind closed doors. Their occupation brings with it massive advances in technology, but at the expense of humanity being subject to horrifying human-alien hybrid experiments. In the scenario put forward by the sequel, the aliens were victorious in the original game, creating a new world order while forcing the resistance underground. In that regard, XCOM 2 feels like a step forward despite sacrificing a few familiar elements, which I'll get to in a moment. It was still a great game in its own right, especially on the tactical level, but the strategy layer always felt a tad too simple and linear. Without a true win condition of their own, the aliens lacked a sense of agency, being unable to establish secret bases or invade the player's headquarters when they got too close to victory. Though it did a good job of mixing randomized elements with more straightforward progression, it lost the sense of dynamic danger inherent to the original. As good as Enemy Unknown was though, there was something missing. After years of protesting that a triple-A tactics game simply wouldn't work, 2K finally relented and handed off the series to Firaxis, who in turn inaugurated a new tactics boom. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a pleasant surprise when it launched back in 2012.
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