Where once you pretty much had to plough through this stuff in one direction and have your base-building plans defined by the need for communication arrays, or face doom, now completing Covert Actions (auto-resolved, unseen missions that play out over a few in-game days - your guys can't die in these, but they can be wounded or captured, the latter prompting a full, turn-based rescue mission later) might snag you additional Resistance contacts without having to add any new rooms or engineers to your base, an ability to make new contacts instantly if you can afford them, or knock the Avatar counter back a couple of places.
Yes, there is a lot of noise, and I still miss the peace of waiting, but the additions don’t just bring interruptions - they bring rewards that provide new ways of solving the strategy map’s two key objectives, those being delaying the Avatar countdown and expanding your network of Resistance contacts so you can gain funding and invade key alien bases. What seems like a mad cacophony is in actual fact the expert spinning of innumerable plates. However, as the game wore on, it became apparent that rather than exacerbating XCOM 2’s problems, WOTC was solving them. I still have the original X-COM in my blood, which means I’m accustomed to long, lonely minutes of waiting for something, anything to happen, and this is the absolute inversion of that. So, for example, the simple act of collecting a box of supplies from Chile might take two real-time hours and involve your base inefficiently crossing back and forth across continents a couple of times, while you suffer dire warnings that one of your new enemies is on the cusp of destroying you and, the quintessential XCOM risk, see your soldiers’ ranks severely diminish by the time that box finally gets hauled onboard.Īt first, this was exhausting - the noise of all these interruptions while I was trying to get something, anything built or researched. What this means is a half dozen new voices clamouring for your attention, which in XCOM 2 parlance means being constantly nagged to go here, do that, listen to this, work through this mission and this mission and this mission and worry about three new doomclocks.Ī single in-game day can often be interrupted by events as many as three times, most of which involve hauling your flying base off to the opposite end of the Earth. Its headline additions (but there are many, many more, both obvious and subtle) involve three recurring boss aliens that haunt you and threaten a game over scenario across the early and middle stages of a new campaign, and three new friendly factions who will provide you with extra units and resources if you meet their objectives. Initially, War Of The Chosen doubled down on this stuff, and I felt the bile rising. I dug the intricacy of chaining together skills to survive missions, and I even enjoyed the divisive tension of turn timers, but the strategy map was a drag. The long grind to expand both base and territory while trying to keep the Avatar doomclock in check, all the while peppered with must-do missions, is why I haven’t returned to the XCOM 2 well anything like as frequently as I did with XCOM the first. That map, and the drawn-out base building associated with it, was always the weakest element of XCOM 2 pre-expansion - this cludgey attempt to view XCOM/X-COM’s longstanding global crisis management through a new lens that entailed far too much schlepping about and being dragged this way and that. all the time spent outside of its turn-based missions - was a cacophony of interruptions, confusingly overlapping concepts and dubious internal logic. My first few hours with War Of The Chosen, an enormous add-on for which the meagre-sounding term ‘DLC’ is desperately inappropriate, I spent convinced that certain aspects of it were severely misjudged. The sausage is XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, and it is as delectable and satisfying as it absolutely bloody insane. It looks like it will fall apart or even explode if even the slightest pressure is applied. There is surely no room for more, but nonetheless even more has been stuffed inside it. A huge, fat, glistening sausage, bulging with meat (or the nearest vegetarian equivalent) to the point that the innards have burst through the skin, forming deliciously fatty globules on the surface.
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