Get your bearings, do a mission on a small crashed alien ship, start gathering resources and working out your strategic plan, that sort of thing. The previous games in the series are all slow burners. XCOM 2‘s biggest departure from the original “feel” of the series is one of pacing. You, the Commander, are rescued from the aliens’ facilities, and must lead the resistance and overthrow the xenomorph leaders. You’re a part of a ragtag team of rebels that’s pretty sure the aliens aren’t benevolent overlords. The aliens have taken over, and people live in a dystopic, alien-controlled Orwellian society. In this game, the curtain opens 20 years past a successful extraterrestrial invasion. In XCOM 2, the usual “aliens are slowly but surely invading Earth” theme gets turned on its ear. The 2012 remake had the previous games to draw ideas from, but how can Firaxis improve and evolve the series without losing sight of what made it great in the first place? Its answer: turn up the radio, slam the throttle, and set nitro output to 11. Now XCOM 2 is here, and it faces the specter of second album syndrome. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was well-received, and I think it’s one of the few remakes actually worthy of that name (I’m looking at you, Syndicate). ( Xenonauts in particular is an excellent recreation of the original game.) Firaxis eventually bought the rights to the franchise and rebooted the series. A few third-party developers tried to bring the concept back, though in my opinion only UFO: Afterlight and 2014’s Xenonauts succeeded. That fan base yearned for a modern remake or reimagining of the series. The series died off in the late 1990s, but kept a cult following (of which I’m a member). The game had little in the way of actual story beyond “aliens are invading-defend the Earth.” You, the faceless Commander, had to manage an anti-xenomorph organization’s resources, research, and engineering to deal with the aliens in tense, one-wrong-move-and-you’re-dead combat missions. X-COM: UFO Defense pretty much defined its genre: a near-perfect blend of a management simulation and turn-based tactical combat missions. The XCOM series hails from a pedigree that started back in 1994, when MicroProse meant “awesome game” in every language known to man. Or perhaps they might even be considering the finer points of fast squad members versus big hitters. Or maybe it’s about taking alien corpses and weighing which autopsy project to undertake. For fans of the series, it’s about hundreds of hours sitting on the edge of their seats, measuring movement options on tiles, then having their soldiers turn that corner only to run into a Chrysalid. I’d wager that sequence of letters rings quite a few bells for a good portion of our audience.
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