For the vast majority of battles the terrain is busy, interesting, and benefits from a huge leap in visual fidelity from Enemy Unknown. Only once have I seen a truck spawned partly into a wall. You’re scraping food and fuel out of the dirt to keep The Avenger in the air.Ĭombat is turn-based, and takes place on procedural battlefields that are uncannily well generated. I have to steel myself for every fight, knowing that a bad performance could ruin my plans. Dubbed Retaliation, these once again ask you to rescue civilians from the battlefield while the aliens’ best troops try to annihilate them. If you’re unlucky you’ll be faced with XCOM 2’s equivalent of Enemy Unknown’s Terror missions. If you’re lucky, it’s the council getting in touch to give you a thumbs-up and tell you they’ve dropped some sandwiches for you in South America.

There’s a notification screen you have to click through to find out what is about to try to kill you-I swear this is intentional, to let the sense of dread register for a second or two. The moment the timer freezes during a scan, I stop breathing. You’re scraping food and fuel out of the dirt to keep The Avenger in the air. This narrow series of opportunities fits the fantasy perfectly.

I needed a cup of tea because it was all getting a bit too much. I needed Advent corpses to get a vital armour upgrade. I needed to hit an alien base to reduce the Avatar Project count-a doom clock that is very bad news if it maxes out. I have left supplies on the ground for a week because I needed to recruit an engineer. Brilliantly, you even have to scan to collect your monthly cache of supplies, hidden in the landscape to escape alien detection.

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