With my trap primed, I use my sharpshooter to break stealth and get a near-certain kill shot on the most dangerous enemy.
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By putting most of your units in overwatch-the staple XCOM move that gives your soldiers free reaction shots against movement in the enemy turn-you can set up deeply satisfying ambushes. You start most battles incognito, and can freely move around the map without being attacked, as long as you stay out of the red detection range of enemies, lingering civilians, and watchtowers. They can also pursue the scout skill track, which lets them strike very effectively from stealth. The ranger fills the speedy, close-range role formerly occupied by the assault class, but they have a sword for high-risk, high-damage charge attacks, and therefore win. The specialist has a drone, which can move around the battlefield to heal allies, zap enemies, or hack alien comms towers, and also has robots to disable or even temporarily steal units.
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The sharpshooter’s gunslinger skills, earned by levelling up, can turn them into an effective mid-range pistolier who can take out multiple enemies in style, while the grenadier can improve the explosive potential of their grenade launcher, effectively merging Enemy Unknown’s heavy and support roles in one class.
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Enemy Unknown players will recognise the suppressive heavy weapon capabilities of the grenadier, and the sniping ability of the sharpshooter, but both can access new abilities that alter their jobs. The four soldier classes have been revamped. Sending a soldier to stand in that fire and hack the console was not one of my finest XCOM moments. One of my grenades started a fire next to a terminal I had to hack. Explosions can start fires that propagate, blocking floor tiles.
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To my surprise, I also discovered that soldiers running around above ground level can fall through the floor if they’re in a burning building. I’ll commonly grenade a wall to remove cover and offer my soldiers highchance shots at a target. The snowy forests, slums, city centres and alien bases are varied both in decorative assets such as sleek futuristic cars and fluffy trees, and in the vertical variation provided by cliffs and multi-storey buildings. 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.
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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.
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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.