So among the many other things on sale on steam at the moment, XCOM 2 is 50% off. Meaning it's $30 now. If anyone's considering buying it, I really recommend it.
How does it compare to the first one, and also the original, if you played it?
Incrementally better, I suppose? Pretty much everything's been streamlined or updated or tweaked, usually to be better but not always. For instance, Armor (flat DR) is an official, visible stat now, with a handful of things that can break off points. Which is nothing crazy compared to the first one, but adds a nice bit of strategy and variety.
Most common complaints I've seen are time limits being overused and bullshit, and aliens getting a doubleturn on being found because they get a free movement action to run to cover, followed by their full turn when yours ends, frequently resulting in free flanking. Oh, and that the stealth mechanic is criminally underused: it's awesome, but disabled forever on first entering combat, so you only get creep around setting up these amazing sneaky ambush plays once per mission.
Compared to OldCOM, it's a lot less fiddly and more animated. Your soldiers are a squad of action heroes with various dashing grenade launcher abilities and skills, rather than a platoon of shuffling mooks with 83.4 inventory slots to hold 3.8 grenades with. Your losses also tend to come more from bullshit miniboss aliens and less from swarms of mooks that sometimes get lucky, though the latter is most definitely still an occurrence. Oh, and bullshit pod placement, since if you trigger a new group of aliens while fighting the first group it doesn't go very well, and unlike in OldCOM the spaces are small and movement speeds large enough for this to happen kind of a lot.
There's a doomsday counter that pushes you to do stuff before time runs out, which makes playing the slow overland game harder (but I don't think impossible, since you can stall and even nudge it back, I believe). Manufacturing is limited to building the occasional new toy, rather than the full equipment production line/capitalism simulator from OldCOM.
All that said, you're still trying to direct a group of jackasses to victory over mostly mookish but occasionally reaper-of-skulls-tier aliens, so the very, very underlying vibe is still there, I thought.
It doesn't have MEC suits and badass super punches though, so for that reason I cannot recommend it to anyone.
Shit, that's still not in? This is what happens when you're not allowed to take live specimens to dissect. And don't have a future serpent queen scientist to guide your glorious ascension.
Author
Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1454174 times)