XCOM 2 is one of the all-time greats—a nail-biting tactical strategy game that ruthlessly taught us all the difference between probability and certainty. Remember, missing on a 95% chance shot isn’t impossible, it’s just unlikely. It also happens all the goddamn time.
As part of the GOG summer sale, you can snag XCOM 2 for around $2.40/£1.80—that’s less than I pay for a big bag of crisps sometimes in the UK, and unless you have far more restraint than I do, you’ll be playing XCOM 2 longer than I let snack food sit in my pantry.
What’s more, its killer DLC, War of the Chosen, is also up for grabs. You can snap it up for $4.70/£3.50 on GOG as well. That brings the total price of the game up to around $7.10/£5.30. If you’re where I am, at least, that’s considerably less than takeout.
You might also want to throw the Reinforcement Pack on top, which gets you some extra gameplay content and cute mechs to add to your squad via Shen’s Last Gift—luckily that’s also discounted and currently around $4.30/£3.20.
If you’re at all interested in turn-based tactics or tactical strategy games and haven’t played this milestone of the genre yet, I seriously recommend it. No game’s ever quite made me feel like XCOM 2, and I feel it’s the closest you can get to the TTRPG experience without an actual table.
The emergent storytelling that comes out of high-risk missions, where luck can make or break your squad, is downright excellent. Storylines of tragic sacrifices, nail-biting victories, and horrible defeats emerge simply from Firaxis’ insistence that luck is never 100% on your side. That 5% matters, people.
If you do take XCOM 2 for a whirl, I very much recommend naming all of your soldiers and spending some time customising them. Not for vanity’s sake, but because the more you personalise your squad, the more you’re gonna be deliciously heartbroken when one of them bites the bullet to an errant crit.
Or a tactical blunder, though if you’re in my post-alien-war court martial hearings? You didn’t hear that from me.
I’d also highly recommend XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the prior game in the series. It’s not quite as feature-full as the first game, but still incredibly engaging—and you can snag both the base game and the Enemy Within expansion for chump change at $6.70/£5.
If you want to hear more about what we thought about XCOM 2 we can take out, you can read our review from 2016, where Tom Senior wrote: “In 1989 Sid Meier described games as ‘a series of interesting decisions.’ XCOM 2 is the purest expression of that ethos that Firaxis has yet produced.” I agree whole-heartedly, not just with that assessment, but with the sterling 92 score Tom gave it, too.
Read the full article here
