Unlike Enemy Unknown, which had you assisting regions of the world from a fixed spot, players must fly the Avenger to the locations they wish to interact with using the command center’s world map. The administration of the Avenger slowly becomes one of the game’s greatest highlights, as its gradual evolution gives way to a plethora of satisfying rewards. From a cross-section view of the ship, players will excavate rooms, assign construction or research projects, and otherwise manage every aspect of the project’s progression. The Avenger operates almost identically to your old bunker in terms of the base building mechanics. Similar to the last XCOM, you’ll slowly learn increasingly shocking truths about our new alien overlords, and each discovery informs the next primary mission. As Commander, you are charged with organizing what’s left of the resistance through base management, while simultaneously issuing orders to soldiers on the ground, trying to make sure the success of each compliments the other. What’s left of XCOM is also no longer located in a secret underground bunker, but instead on a commandeered alien spacecraft called the Avenger. One major difference from Enemy Unknown is that the XCOM project has fallen to shambles, and you are now in charge of a scattered resistance movement.

Players again assume the persona of the Commander, a faceless overseer with way too much responsibility for one person (practically speaking). The aliens succeed in conquering Earth anyway, and things now look pretty grim 20 years later. We find out at the start of XCOM 2 that all our efforts throughout the course of Enemy Unknown were for naught. A successful DLC launch and mod support later made it clear one new XCOM wasn’t going to be enough, so now, we have XCOM 2. Firaxis threw this stigma out the window, however, when they reimaged the 90’s classic XCOM: UFO Defense into a modern strategy experience in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Often times, games revived from the early decades of gaming simply aren’t compatible with our modern tastes and technology.

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