I just finished my first-ever playthrough of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. This was a very generous gift from my youngest brother, not tied to any birthday or holiday, just "Oh this is a fun game and you should play it." And he was right, I should!
It has been on my radar for quite some time. I played the original X-COM back in the 90s; I don't think I ever owned it, but have vague memories of playing it at a friend's house, where I thought it was (1) very fun, and (2) extremely hard. The series has evolved a lot since then, adding a vertical dimension and a lot of new features, but those two points continue to be true.
More recently, it's been adjacent to my interests in strategic and tactical games. In particular, there's a sort of second-cousins relationship to the Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun Returns series. They are fairly different - Shadowrun is primarily an RPG that also has a turn-based tactical combat system, while XCOM 2 is a tactical turn-based strategy game that has a strong story and character customizations but isn't really an RPG. There's a pretty strong overlap in the fandom, though. Over the years I've collected quite a few Steam Friends solely on the basis of my Shadowrun campaigns, and a good 40 of them are also XCOM 2 players.
Shadowrun and XCOM 2 share some visual similarities, like an isometric camera and a near-future grimy cyberpunky aesthetic. But XCOM 2 has much more elaborate maps, true 3D environments that you can rotate, vertical movement, and just overall higher production values with a lot more animations, clutter in the environment, vocal barks and dialogue, and so on. In terms of gameplay, they share some elements like Action Points, Overwatch, grenades, hit points, armor, cover, flanking and critical hits. Shadowrun ultimately goes broader, with its arcane spells, shamanistic spirit totems, cyberware and Matrix, while X-COM 2 goes deeper, with destructible environments, fall damage, weapon modifications, teamwork bonuses and more.
All that to say, they are very different games, but I felt like my many hours in Shadowrun gave me at least a bit of a head start in XCOM 2. I debated what difficulty mode to play in; my initial playthrough of an RPG will usually be in the "Normal" difficulty, but I haven't played any XCOM for nearly two decades so I opted for the easiest "Rookie" mode instead. I also played without Ironman mode; if I do another playthrough at some point I'll probably both bump the difficulty and turn on Ironman, but while learning the game I was really thankful to be able to reload. I didn't do it very often, but there were cases when, like, I was right-clicking to close a submenu and accidentally issued a Move order, and I don't feel bad about reloading for essentially a mis-click. Overall I felt like the game was still pretty challenging for the first couple of missions on Rookie mode, with at least one or two casualties for every mission. After I got multiple promotions, though, it got a lot easier - of course, my growing familiarity with the game mechanics must have helped a lot, too. I don't think I had any deaths after the first in-game month (though, again, I did reload a couple of times).
Having knowledge goes a very long way. Whenever I encountered a new enemy for the first time, there was a really high chance of things going sideways. Usually, when you get an enemy down to 0HP, they die and are removed from the field... but a Codex may split in two when near death, creating an additional body that may last into the Alien Turn and cause you mischief; and an ADVENT Priest will always survive one "death" before being revived on the following turn. One of the roughest encounters for me was a Gatekeeper, and I swore out loud the first time it unleashed a MASSIVE AOE attack that did high damage to my entire squad, dispersed over a large enough area to avoid grenade clusters but not enough for the Gateway. But once the swearing ends, I figure out how things work, and eventually all the enemies end up feeling fair. If you know what's upcoming (thanks to a Shadow Chamber), you can equip and plan for the enemy appropriately, and have a counter up your sleeve that can neutralize the threat or at least manage it. In the case of the Gatekeeper, I started to have my Grenadier pack in one or two EMP Bombs. These have an enormous radius, so you can launch them towards the Gatekeeper from far off; they will often disable the Gatekeeper for multiple turns, letting you ignore them entirely while you plink off the rest of the enemy pod; or worst case take off half their health, letting you finish them with a second EMP Bomb or focused fire from the rest of your team. Once again, it comes down to the strategy layer (research, investment, and equipping) and the tactical layer (holding items in reserve, keeping your grenadier close enough to the front to react to a new threat).
Your soldier classes all feel pretty balanced. I think that at the max promotion Grenadiers shine the best, with multiple AOE attacks and multiple attacks per turn. Sharpshooters are also great once they get Death From Above for a kill-shot action refund; this also makes for a a good pairing with the grenadiers, as the grenadiers can soften up a pod with their bombs, and then the sharpshooters can take down all the survivors. Specialists are really important early on to keep people alive, later on they're more situational. Skullmine and Haywire are very useful, and you can extract more rewards from some missions via hacking. Their weapons tend to be the first to be upgraded, so they are often better fighters than you would expect. Rangers are very versatile, good for scouting and combat. In retrospect I shouldn't have mixed my upgrades between sneak attack and melee since you lose stealth while approaching into melee range. Bladestorm can be amazing though, I've parked a ranger near a door and killed 4 enemies during the alien turn as they run past.
Of the War of the Chosen faction classes, I think I like the Reaper the best. There's huge utility from being able to scout ahead - for most units, enemies' vision range for concealment is just slightly shorter than your units' vision range, so it's very easy to accidentally get spotted even if you're making cautious advances. But the Reaper needs to be standing right next to an enemy to be spotted, letting you much more freely range ahead. I gave as many Mobility upgrades as possible to my Reaper, so she can reveal much of the map in just two turns or so, letting me properly set up ambushes or whatever with the rest of my units. The flip side is that she doesn't engage in much combat, and often is never revealed during the entire mission. Because of that, she lagged behind my regular XCom soldiers for promotions. I never used her Claymore much.
The Skirmisher (Pratal Mox in my game) is also fantastic. Right off the bat he can attack twice in one turn. Unlike other units, attacking doesn't immediately end his turn, so he could do two regular full attacks, or fire and then run behind a wall. He also has great utility, including a Grapple ability to quickly reposition over a wide area, and can use the hook to drag an enemy to him and then deliver a strong melee attack. He's basically Boba Fett.
The Templar was probably the weakest of the three, but also the most fun to play as. Mostly melee, he feels kind of like a Monk class. He builds Focus, which is kind of like Chi, and can use it passively to buff his attacks or spend it on powerful abilities. Melee can be dicey in this game since quite a few enemies can explode on death, but it's a lot of fun.
Narratively, XCOM has an interesting mix where all of your soldiers, the characters you actually control in combat, are all randomly generated: different names, personalities, gender, nationality, appearance, etc. But you do get really attached to them over the course of multiple runs. Key moments where, like, "Rooster" managed to use Haywire Protocol to take over a scary mech that was about to wipe out the team, or Elena Drugova consistently staying in Reaper stealth through to the end, shepherding the team to their objective and then landing a killing blow. The voice lines for combat barks are short, but great for establishing just enough personality for you to hang a mental image of the soldier off of.
MINI SPOILERS
Other than your soldiers, the characters on the ship are all fully written, animated and voice-acted NPCs. They're great too: Shen, the whiz-kid engineer who manufactures equipment, is probably my favorite, but I also like Dr. Tyson, who claims to be squeamish but seems to tackle alien autopsies with great gusto, and who researches all of the weapons that Shen will then build. The various faction leaders and the Chosen also get a good amount of screen time, have vivid personalities that clash with their supposed allies and lead to the sense of complexity in the two opposing sides.
I really like the after-mission reports where you hearing the propaganda broadcast from ADVENT. It makes me think of a Paul Verhoeven film.
MEGA SPOILERS
As noted above, this isn't an RPG, and as far as I can tell there really aren't any branching plotlines or story-based decisions to make. You can make a lot of gameplay decisions, like which soldiers to risk in a given mission and how long to put off the main storyline and whether to focus on taking down the Chosen or race to grow your contacted Resistance regions; but the story itself is always the same and will play out the same no matter what route you take to reach it.
My X-COM memory is fuzzy, but I think this is essentially the inversion of the original game. You were originally a global defense organization, fighting against the stealthy aliens attempting to infiltrate and corrupt Earth. In X-COM 2, the world government is now essentially a Vichy collaboration with the aliens. The main global defense organization is ADVENT, a Human/Alien genetic hybrid, serving the will of the alien masters. X-COM is now a global insurgency, with local resistance cells using infiltration and targeted violence to fight back against the alien invasion. You're also more mobile, zipping around the globe in a souped-up captured UFO, while ADVENT operates from fixed bases, again an inversion from the original.
I enjoyed the story, but honestly it wasn't the highlight of the game for me: the combat was. Much like, say, the Divinity Original Sin games, this is essentially a really fun and challenging tactical puzzle to overcome, and the story is an entertaining side-course along the way.
END SPOILERS
Super fun! X-COM 2 nicely scratched that tactical/strategic itch, and with a refreshing near-science-fiction setting that's a fun break from my fantasy standards. If I revisit this in the future, I'll be interested to try a higher difficulty and Ironman setting. I'm sure that the hard-earned lessons I've learned in my rookie playthrough will come in very handy in future outings.
