Recent reviews by xaMax

Woke up as a hungover amnesiac, went to bed as as Detective Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, a delusional feminist commie cop who collects empty bottles to pay for his drugs. 10/10 game

After having playing XCOM 2 and really enjoying it a lot, I was thrilled to see they released a new, smaller project in the series. After playing it for 10 hours I found it was quite different, yet I still really enjoyed playing it. There are some new mechanics that keep the pace higher and the gameplay is as good as it was in XCOM 2. I felt like I was about halfway through the game after the 10 hours I played, but then my save broke. Enemy reinforcements were supposed to come, the game crashed IMMEDIATELY when they arrived (not the first crash for me) and when I restarted the game, I was stuck in an infinite turn loop where reinforcements would not arrive yet the mission did not end either. There is no way to force restart the mission, and I've got no other saves since I was playing on iron man mode.

The classic XCOM bugs and glitches are still there, and while most of them are bearable having my save file basically be lost forever is the limit for me. I would currently not recommend you buy this game until these issues have been addressed and resolved.

So, here's the deal with XCOM 2:

It's core gameplay is great. The missions are tense, there are a lot of different alien types which all require different strategies to deal with them and I've never bonded as much with any virtual character as I have with my soldiers in this game.

However, if you don't like RNG and taking risks, then this game is not for you. Winning a campaign of XCOM means taking risks, and your entire campaign can be ruïned by simply bad luck. To win, you will sometimes have to take those 35% shots and hit at least some of them. Your entire campaign can be ruïned because an alien hit that 15% shot on one of your best soldiers, killing them instantly. Because of this, the game had me pressing ALT+F4 quite a lot.

This uncertainty is a positive for the game as well however. Because anyone can die at any moment, the game is ALWAYS tense, even on those lousy side missions that have you rescuing a VIP from the aliens. The game is hard as nails, and you will have to accept that you are going to lose some soldiers along the way, unless you add a lot of mods to your game (the modding community is very active, which is a HUGE plus).

But then, there are the infamous bugs. XCOM 2 has A LOT of bugs. Some have been fixed by now but you will still find soldiers shooting through walls to kill an alien on the other side. The action camera is dreadful as well, and when the game intends to show you an awesome shot of your soldier, you will often find the camera just staring at a wall while the soldier blows up 3 aliens with a grenade. There are even more bugs, like not being able to pick up unconcious soldiers which leads to you losing your best soldier. Bugs like these can be VERY frustrating, even more so than the RNG often.

However, if a few graphical glitches and minor bugs put you off this game that is your problem, and you are missing out on one of the best turn-based strategy games EVER made. The game can be very frustrating at times, but the gameplay the game delivers is the best I've seen in a long time. This game is still capable of putting me through emotional rollercoasters after playing 60 hours of it, and I do not intend to stop playing this game for quite a while.