The key to success lies in experimentation. XCOM 2 enables you to do a whole host of cool and wonderful things with soldier loadouts, battlefield tactics, base building, character customisation and many more of its complex and versatile systems.

To help you along the way, we've put together a guide that should prove pretty handy, whether you're a newcomer to the series or a veteran of the earlier wars. And there are plenty of things you can do to tilt the odds in your favour. This is a hard game, in other words, but you wouldn't want it any other way. The turn-based battles that your squad finds itself in are now enlivened with timers, and played out across procedurally-scrambled maps, while the story sees your enemies entrenched and evolved, with new units to surprise you on the battlefield, and new means of bringing your carefully-crafted plans to ruin.Īll of which means that the pleasures to be had in turning the tides have never been sweeter, whether you're limping towards your first victory in a skirmish or cobbling together the ideal base to streamline your production of enhanced tech. If anything, Firaxis has sweetened the deal by making the whole thing even less forgiving. XCOM 2 offers more of the same - and that's fabulous news, especially as it's available on consoles as well as PC. It was about fighting infinite aggression with finite resources, and about making do as best you could in a war in which every loss was both permanent and costly. XCOM Enemy Unknown seemed on the surface to be a game about leading a rag-tag band of hardnuts as they battled wave after wave of invading aliens, but it was really, underneath all that, a game about managing failure.

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