And all of this you are expected to do at once right from the get-go, with a paltry number of soldiers and staff against an incredibly sophisticated and well-entrenched alien threat. You fly across the continents to avoid alien detection, answer distress signals, scour the globe for useful leads and resources and try to make contact with resistance cells in the hopes of pooling your meagre forces together. You research materials, perform autopsies and reverse engineer alien tech in order to bridge the substantial gap in military hardware between yourself and your adversary. You enlist randomly generated rookie soldiers from an impressive array of nationalities and backgrounds and train them up to fight ET.
#XCOM 2 BUILD ORDER SERIES#
Mechanically, this translates to managing your base of operations from a flying fortress repurposed from alien tech, leading guerrilla strikes across the globe in a series of missions of uncompromising turn based, squad shooter combat. One such pocket, led by a familiar face from the first game, breaks into an ADVENT holding facility and rescues you from stasis in the hopes of rallying the rag-tag resistance into a capable enough fighting force to emancipate the Earth from extraterrestrial authority. Through Orwellian use of propaganda and misinformation, the majority of the human race has wilfully accepted alien dominion with the exception of one or two pockets of resistance fighters. In the twenty years that follow, the invaders, as opposed to wiping out humanity entirely, have instead installed a totalitarian coalition of aliens and sympathetic humans, know as ADVENT, to rule the earth whilst extolling the virtues and generosities of ‘our alien benefactors’. Turns out failure to do so is the canonical ending of X-Com: Enemy Within your base is annihilated, the Commander is captured and the leaders of the world capitulate to alien rule.
At one point in the previous game, your base of operations is assaulted by the alien threat directly and you have to defend your home turf to continue the fight else face a ‘Game Over’. To provide a quick overview of the setting, you take the role of the faceless ‘Commander’ a mute yet unaccountably competent military genius in charge of the clandestine extra-terrestrial defence organisation, XCOM. If, however, you occupy that elusive two percentile that would otherwise be interested in playing the sequel to Firaxis’ wildly successful 2012 X-Com reboot if only you had known yet somehow missed their aggressive marketing campaign then stop staring at your feet, my man this review is for you. It may be functionally redundant to pen this article since the likelihood is that if you were interested in XCOM 2 you would have bought and played it by now.