XCOM 2

For those of you who have not been briefed; a recap: XCOM 2 is the highly anticipated direct sequel to the 2012 game of the year ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’ a sci-fi turn based strategy epic, that spawned an expansion ‘Enemy Within’ as well as a better left unmentioned prequel: The Bureau.  Although these previous titles were available across the range of previous consoles, XCOM 2 is an exclusively PC affair, in a move slightly at odds with most other major release titles.

In the XCOM universe you are the commander. The year 2035. 20 years have passed since the events of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and the aliens have settled quite nicely into their new Earth home. But all is not lost. Out of the ashes, the phoenix of a squad rises, and the XCOM project is born again.

New players may find themselves overwhelmed when first thrown into battle. While XCOM 2 uses the opening skirmish as a tutorial to show you the ropes, not to mention to the concept of ‘acceptable casualties’, it’s the finer, often unexplained details that give this game it’s real grit, and in this the learning curve for new comers is steep.

Now I will happily sit here and gush about the wonders of what has to be one of my favourite game series of all time, so it’s important that I approached this with a critical eye. And as less than flawless presentation appears to be a hallmark of all my favour games, XCOM 2 is no exception.

Graphically XCOM 2 is a major step up from its predecessor, and on first play through these wonderfully rendered cut scenes and quick time events are immersive and glorious. But they get old, and come at quite the performance cost. While my gaming rig meets the recommended system requirements and is capable of rendering the game in high quality, I quickly found my system groaning under the pressure, and had to lower the game settings in order to maintain smooth game play. And this isn’t the kind of game you play for an hour of time, rather the kind of game that makes people ask “what ever happened to that guy?” as you disappear from society and most none critical activities. 2K, the publishers of XCOM 2 have acknowledged this, and say patches are in the works to address these issues.

Despite this, the drive to keep fighting on remains strong, aided by the wonderfully diverse and customizable squad of soldiers. Don’t expect to find your standard line up of white male American grunts here. The highly internationalized line up of recruits, in which many will be pleased to see that female soldiers are equally represented in terms of attractiveness and armour styling to their male counterparts, have the option of a range of accents and languages, including multiple versions of the Australian accent, and the option to speak in game in their native language, helping to drive the tone of this game.