What's the verdict on this game?

What's the verdict on this game?

It's good.
Weird optimization on PC though, unless that's been patched/modded since I played last.

Best al shibab simulator on the market

Still too console inspired.

ayy/lmao

What the hell does that even mean? The game didn't even have controller support on release.

It's ver2 of the first one that made to many compromises for their casual der... I'm dumb as fuck audience. Its still that way

Great game. Tons of potential play time, and the open source code means anyone can mod it and potentially add more play time to it. 5/7

>runs like shit on everything
>fucky hidden campaign mechanics that you need to read the wiki for
>success in missions depends entirely on whether you can agro one pod at once or not

>still manages to be fantastic

Great strategy/tactics game that runs like shit on every computer. Performance isn't a big issue in a turn-based game, but it will dip to single digits later in the game when you're fighting enemies that destroy buildings just walking through them. Long War 2 makes the game have some replayability.

its annoying isnt it?

to know the game is vastly inferior to terror from the deep yet its still good.

>fucky hidden campaign mechanics that you need to read the wiki for
wot?

...

>Argentina
subtle

>open source code

Uhh, do you know what open source means?

Vanilla campaign is much better than the last one's vanilla DESU.

Is Long War 2 any good? I'll be honest I never played Long War in the first game because I already had too much trouble with the base game + EW by itself but XCOM 2 seems much easier overall.

It's actually pretty good and a nice take on subverting regular X-COM approach in a 180 turn of having you being the aggressors and ones who attack instead of always defending.

RNG trash.

Not really worth my time, even though the rest of it is fun.

>RNG
You don't even know what true RNG is, m8. Complaining about a turn based squad tactics game being RNG heavy is like complaining about water being wet.

The only thing I hate about it is the fact that they removed Ethereals as enemies. In the first game you got that sense of "oh shit it's the leaders I'm so fucked" and now that's completely gone since they're gone. You never get that satisfying feeling of killing the alien leaders like you did in the first game.

Other than that the game is good I guess.

The building part of the game disappointed me again. In EU it was "build satellites or you're fucked". In 2 it's "build comms centers or you're fucked"

Yeah, give it a go. I think you'll appreciate the changes.

I like it better than vanilla XCOM:EU but less than Long War. I'm very hopeful for Long War 2.
The devs fucked up with the DLCs but their modding support is GOAT so it's coo'.

It seems that you never paid attention to the story at all, the "avatar" enemies are basically the ethereals that had their consciousness transferred to new, stronger, bodies, they're not gone at all.

It's hard to take them seriously when they look like this.

I'm having fun with it. It's not perfect, and I preferred the first one, but it makes a lot of strides in the right direction. I'll just list out a quick pros/cons to the changes they made to the first game to see if you would enjoy it.

Pros:
Removed the UFO fighting roulette game
Made the tech level upgrades squad upgrades, removing the tedious gearing up and down
Psi is no longer a one and done chance of it happening, but now a progressive training sequence for soldiers
Movement is faster and you can now path your soldiers
Stealth exists, albeit limited
You can chose which class your rookies become with a base upgrade
New aliens are interesting in how you approach them, specifically the faceless
Pods are now composed of different troops, not only one type

Cons:
Load times and frame stutters even on the most powerful computers due to bad particle optimization
Missions are often timed, forcing you to take a very aggressive approach
Explosives are no longer a blast radius, but a damage template
The classes are not balanced in the slightest, as psi operative greatly outpaces every other class
Sharpshooter and specialist are near useless late game, and gunners only mildly useful for the armored opponents
Psi operative can learn every psi ability, making the game unbelievably easy
The order in which psi operatives learn abilities seems to be random: my first psi operative could mind control at level 1
Many of the enemies faced are humanoids in armor
The intel/supply system is a bit luck based. If you start out with 2 supply raid missions you will never want for elerium or alloys.
Dark event missions are similar bullshit to the abductions in xcom 1, but with worse consequences in you get bad RNG
Alien hunter DLC is pure bullshit, never buy it, and if you have uninstall

That's most of my thoughts, there is a bit more to it, but the game is good if you enjoyed the style of the first one, and wanted a game with a bit more aggressive feel, rather than a defensive one.

They look fucking stupid, I think is the real problem.

RNG is a lazy as fuck design choice, even more so when you realize that the harder difficulties's challenge comes from not getting fucked by it instead of well planned strategies.

Fire Emblem is also really awful because of this.

Come on now, aliens in XCOM always had silly designs.

I don't know, xcom 2 had some pretty great designs.

Great but still silly and I think that's the charm.

Was it better than the first one?

REMOVE
SNAKES

Bad. The timer and stealth ruin the best part of the game: long slug fests between ayys, positioning your troops in the best possible way for engagements, and getting caught with your pants down.

In xcom 2 you can just conceal scout to have 0 surprises from day 1, grenade any time you're in even a tiny bit of shit, and your troops become unstoppable by mid-late game.

Long War 2 made some nice changes but the timers are even worse.

Better than the first (which was already a great game) but not as mechanically sound as Invisible Inc.

The SDK is awful to develop in.

I would be happier if the game removed "miss/hit" and actually had projectile physics. It's not bad as a game, but it's still awful as an XCOM game.

Should have embraced the terrorism aspect desu.

>Sharpshooter and Specialist near useless late game

Maybe Specialist, but I quite liked whipping out a pistol and wiping the entire room of alien scum in one turn with my sniper hunnies

While incredibly fun and fluffy with its guerrilla theme, the turn limit and seemingly time-constrained campaign can bring it down a bit.
It's no EW:Long War, but in its own right is fun when you get used to the more fast-paced/risky gameplay.

>get LW2
>mod out turn timers
>never infiltrate
>bring 12 soldiers
>mow down like 30-45 aliens per mission
>have lots of fun but have to stop playing late because 40-50 LW2 lategame aliens is impossible

Always wanted to mod it down to LW1 levels of swarming, LW2 gets a bit ridiculous. I should get around to it when I reinstall

As someone who loves the original X-COM and also enjoyed neo-XCOM, I really liked it. It fixes a lot of the issues I had with the first reboot.

In the first reboot I always felt like everything, both in the metagame and in missions, was always under control, and when bad stuff happened it felt like bullshit. In XCOM 2 it's the opposite. I constantly feel like I'm scraping by by the skin of my teeth, and victories feel hard-fought. It makes for a much more rewarding experience.

Performance can suck a dick, though. It's like they didn't even try to optimize it.

So I take it performance never got any better with patches? I stole it and played through the campaign when it first came out.

It got a lot better. I could barely play it on release but now with the same setup I can play it on max settings with no FPS drops.

The sharpshooter isn't bad, it just doesn't have a use that other classes (specifically the psi op) doesn't do better. The ranger and psi operative are the only classes you really need late game, maybe a grenadier for high armor targets like gatekeepers or sectopods, but the psi ops are just so unbelievably good that not having a whole squad of them with 1-2 shadow conceal ranger scouts is just worse. Why use lightning hands+fan fire+face with 2-3 rangers to clear a room, when you can accomplish the same thing with 3 void rifts, or just dominate everything organic and stasis the sectopod for a turn to prepare?

Stasis, domination, void rift, inspire, fortress, solace, void rift, null lance; the fact that every psi operative can have ALL the abilities makes them a better fit for every situation. 4 psi operatives can utterly lock down an alien RULER without any chance of failure just by using stasis every turn. The only reason rangers aren't useless as well is that phantom and conceal are incredibly useful and locked to that class.

>argie

my sides

Better than 1, but still didn't fix some things that were stupid fundamentally from 1 while adding more dumb shit.

Mooks are still way too important and only being able to use 4-6 of them. It's also even more punishing if you fail or leave a mission that its more or less game over if you fail a mission. Not quite but it will feel like it.

The game is unoptimized as fuck. It runs like absolute dogshit, though I don't know if they fixed things since I haven't really played since released. The fucking last level turned my graphics card into a rave party.

Grenadiers and Psi ops are straight up better than every other class namely due to armor. The latter you need to go out of your way to get at least. Grenadiers see next thing, and because that dumb cunt Vahlen is dead so you can explode shit to your hearts content, as is X-com protocol.

Armor is a thing that mitigates damage. It literally forces explosives in fights and immensely fucks over sharpshooters and rangers.

Dodge and Graze are things. They're stupid and fucks over Sharpshooters and Rangers even more, since the other 3 have ways of doing guaranteed damage.

Hacking is just RNG.

Faceless are a nice idea, boring and dumb execution.

Chrysalids are even more of a joke, and have been reduced to annoying inconvenience than actual threat due to burrow.
Some complaints but overall the game is solid.

Are Avatars supposed to be male of female? At a quick glance I can pick up a distinct feminine/masculine feature but the more I look the more the line starts to blur and it's confusing my benis

long war 2 sucks so bad

I think they're supposed to be genderless.

>In XCOM 2 it's the opposite. I constantly feel like I'm scraping by by the skin of my teeth, and victories feel hard-fought.

I agree. You have to move to your positions fast and then setup the kill zones asap. People can criticize the turn timers but they add a sense of urgency to the game where before you had plenty of time to inch your way through. Now on some missions you're like "fuck I need to rocket that wall so I can free the prisoner or I won't have time and i'll lose my squad on the mission." Plus no matter how beefy and OP your dudes get, you better move fast and accomplish the objectives.

that depends on whatever you are, since they're you

Turn timers are fine, but having them on nearly every mission is ridiculous. The only missions that you aren't rushing through are base assaults and cargo raids, and those are rare enough that they feel like special events. Personally, I would prefer a timer system that rewards the players moving quickly instead of outright killing the ones that go slow. Maybe a turn counter for a large amount of reinforcements that would be a danger to a defensive player, but still possible to defeat with good positioning and tactics.

timer was a mistake

Absolutely this.

I didn't like it. I spend $60 on it too. Should have played Enemy Unknown for longer to know that I dislike its mechanics. And every fucking turn based strategy game after it is taking inspiration from it in one way or another. It basically single handedly ruined the genre.

The original reboot was consolized and 2 is basically the same game even if it was made for PC initially. The turn based gameplay is still gutted, mostly because of the action point system it uses rather than time units.

100% this. people who hate them just don't like being pressured i guess, but that pressure is part of what makes it good

Mediocre
No innovation at all
Terribly introduced features such as stealth
Removal of a lot of content from the past game
Modding community can't deliver a single big project except for Dong War which is practically a paid dev team
Forgettable
Let's hope that exp does something interesting

they need to polish the stealth system so bad, the cone vision is shit, the timers dont make any sense, you get timers even if they dont know you are there

the only thing long war 2 fixed was the infiltration, you cant drop a squad in the middle of the city and say it's concealed

I always found that due to the lethality of X-COM itself i'd always have my troops in best spots and overlapping covering fire and leap frog style movement.

In X-COM 2 i'm now having to contemplate various other risk factors due to the time management aspect of it all. And sometimes I just have to take a more crazier risk by not being 100% in hard cover with some characters and have to risk guys being in the open so I can get the kill. It does make sense though given that most of the skillsets for the new classes do let them mitigate the danger element of being in said open situations like Rangers with Untouchable.

a complete failure that didn't capture anything about what made EU/EW good

Reminder that after playtesters showed Jake Solomon that the game was difficult. He insisted on increasing the difficulty.

>skulljacking an advent commander
Fuck this game

Yeah I agree. I love XCOM but the best way to play the game also makes it more tedious.

I've had XCOM2 in my library for ages, just beat XCOM EU/EW and was planning to start 2 this week, what's wrong with Alien Hunters? I bought the game edition which included all DLCs

One of the ethereals that talk to you in the final mission sounds like a woman
It's probably just fucking with your head though

Yeah I really didn't mind the pressure element of it all and quite enjoyed it. You get used to the difficult nature of it and you adjust your play.

I like XCOM better when it's more of a MIB/Government agency than this whole reble group bullshit.

Not him but nothing is really wrong with it but if this is your first time playing X-COM 2 I would play without Alien Hunters. New aliens jack up the difficulty experience if you're not used to how X-COM 2 plays out and are unfamiliar with enemy types and skills etc. Alien Hunter aliens are not a joke.

The Boss aliens are game breaking in a bad way, in that they quite literally break the rules of the game. Each boss gets an action after EVERY action of your own troops. In a 6 man squad, the boss alien gets between 6 and 12 turns every turn. Instead of making the boss aliens have new abilities within the confines of the game, firaxis just made them break the rules.

Avatars are made out of human sludge and do not need sex organs. They are completely androgynous, and the design does a good job of reflecting this. The hair is fucking stupid, though.

lw1 > xcom 2 > xcom ew > lw2

Alright, thanks guys, I'll wait until I've done a full playthrough before enabling the DLC.

Game has a wonky as fuck difficulty curve
Some classes are shit until 5 upgrades down and then they become okay
GRENADE COVER SHOOT AYYLIEN is the only tactic worth a damn

It desperately needed an expansion, not those shit dlcs.

shen's last gift is fine, tho the mission comes up really early and is probably very out of depth if you're new
it waits for you till you're ready, though

They're basically treating LW2 like the expansion now. My hopes for an actual expansion are almost completely gone.

I liked it more than EW but less than the classics. Timers won't please everyone, but personally I liked having a real reason to move instead of having all the time in the world to take it safe. Sadly grenadiers make it all too easy to steamroll enemies in one turn, but XCOM has always been easy to break difficulty-wise.

I'm seeing a lot of criticism for LW2. I still haven't gone past the first few months. What's wrong with it?

Hated it, the first Xcom was much better balanced.
They designed combat to be frustrating, not fun.

The rest are ok like Shen's gift but Alien Hunters is the serious challenge one. I think the rest are just cosmetics.

>Modders will fix it
is the problem with that game, from my understanding the LW2 is fucking tiny and slow moving compared and the game needs some heavy fixing up to make it interesting.

Anyone who complains about turn timers is trash. In the rare, RARE event that a turn timer fucks you over, you should still be able to recover if you don't suck.

The game does have problems though, I did a playthrough at release and haven't looked at it since.

Who needs a turn timer when a snek can pull your best soldier out from behind cover across a street into a building with 3 other enemies?

Also, was anyone else really angry at how the proving ground weapons buying worked? Why is there a random chance to get the blaster launcher you want, and not just get it outright after you've made it once?

>grenadiers are a good class

How? A Psi Op with war suit and a blaster launcher does everything they can do but better and more, and on the point of armor the grenadier gets a single point from a sub-par ability that's counterpart is actually decent. The only class that a Psi Op with a war suit and blaster launcher doesn't completely outstrip at all times is the Ranger in a wraith suit, who acts as the perfect scout/cleaner with implacable and untouchable. Literally everything else, save for long distance hacking, the psi op has better action economy for.

>blacksite mission
>proximity mine's explosion extends BEYOND the radius shown during targeting
>blows up cover on my medic
>leads to squad wipe
>game over man

I'm fine with XCOM BABY but only when it's something that I fuck up through stupidity rather than ignorance. I don't want to read a wiki article every turn.

See, this is the shit that makes the game not fun. There were so many ways to grow a soldier in XCOM 1, with everyone being equally useful. Here in 2 some classes outshine all other classes without fail and can the entire game

>have soldiers on roof
>order a soldier who is standing behind another soldiers who is closer to the edge to take a shot an an ayy on the ground level
>she shoots the floor out from under the soldier at the edge, she falls down and gets critically wounded
>mfw
I guess this is the trade off for wiping entire patrols who are unfortunate to encounter my grenadiers while walking on roofs

>I don't want to read a wiki article every turn.

I wonder why XCOM doesn't have an in-game wiki like the Civ games?

I like it more than EU and EW

>argentina

REEEEEEEE ARGENTINA IS WHITE

>Putting soldiers on the roof ever
This game will teach you the hard way if you insist on doing so.

I lost half a sqaud once becuase Sgt. Dick McChucklefuck missed a shot with a plasma weapon, which burnt the floor beneath him, causing everyone nearby to fall three fucking stories.

>specialists are near useless lategame

Retarded? Their medic capabilities are required for the final fight of the game.

Best Xcom/X-com game ever made with the most amount of choice and the widest variety while maintaining balance.

Not even memeing, and this is coming from someone whose first X-com was UFO Defense back in the day. Modern Xcom completely loses the horror and most of the tension (Though 2 has some tense moments with the limited time on missions) but mechanically it shits on all the others. I really hope Firaxis puts out an expansion for it.
Since they made one for fucking Beyond Earth I remain hopeful.

>no innovation at all
>terribly introduced features such as stealth

Congrats on being a fucking retard.

They can appear as either male or female. All ADVENT models including Avatars have both male and female models... for whatever reason.

I wish troops dying was expected instead of being a devasting result.

But the only way to make losses acceptable would be to increase the number of characters on stage, which would make turns last forever.

maybe they could make it more focused with multiple squads moving in vehicles that move as one unit until you disembark them. you could cut time and also allow more flexible amounts of soliders + more alien death

this is why i dont play on ironman. i never savescum just cuz things go wrong, but if i get fucked over by a misclick or something i'm just not having a good time

>How? A Psi Op with war suit and a blaster launcher does everything they can do but better and more

Yes, but you can only create one or two fully-trained Psi Op soldier.

With the time and resources you have to put into these characters who are only useful in late-game they better be the best fucking soldiers ever, otherwise there's no point to using them.

>mechanically it shits on all the others
>minimal inventory mechanics
>grenade usage is automatic rather than being able to prime and throw separately
>can't throw items besides grenades
>combat is purely dice rolling rather than having actual projectiles
>items like dropped ammo (which doesn't even exist in XCOM 2) aren't affected by fire and explosions
>can't choose ammo type
>class system is awful and means you don't have as much control over your own squad
>cover system is completely unnecessary and it's basically become that if you're not in cover all the time you're dead, no different than cover based third person shooters
>pod system still exists
There's a lot more too. The new games are travesties and incredibly watered down.

Blatant cashgrab. What was it like fucking $80 at launch for what was essentially a clone of the first game with some bells and whistles attached? Subtle SJW horseshit in both this and the first one, as well. Basically Firaxis can eat my nuts.

Would rather play xenonauts or openxcom any day of the week.

>Subtle SJW horseshit in both this and the first one

What? Are you referring to how you can choose female soldiers? That's just for fun. You can fucking run into combat wearing hotpants and a tophat. Realism isn't the point here.