You can game the alien invasion somewhat in Enemy Unknown - sit back and grind waves of low-level skirmishes to build your team up after a wipe. I never felt that worried because, poor as I was as a military commander, I was still nominally in control of the planet, and that made me, at times, even a little blasé about things. Even so, I now realise that the game benefited from a certain home advantage.
You were defending the planet from horrible alien invaders, and as events progressed you'd probably lose nations from the coalition that funded you, and you'd definitely lose cherished soldiers that you sent into battle. Enemy Unknown was not a game with a particularly cheery narrative. XCOM 2, that peerless blend of cold tactics and converging mechanics, is changing years-old behaviour in me not through its new design tweaks so much as through its new fiction. And this is where things get a bit weird. Just now I got blown up by an exploding bit of scenery at the very second in which I thought I was clinching a flawless victory.īut still, why the restarts? If it's a harder game, shouldn't a shifty, low-talent player like myself be happier to scrape victories, even this early on? Clearly not. And, compact as it is, there were things that surprised me on my fifth, eighth, twelfth playthrough of it. There are things in that first mission - and, honestly, it's not a very long or complicated mission - that properly freaked me out on my initial attempt. Then there are the terrifying baddies, with all of the first game's low-tier foes evolving into forms in which they really don't look so low-tier anymore.
A new focus on missions with timers, along with a fresh willingness to bring in reinforcements, keeps you moving forward - and moving forward is always a recipe for disaster in XCOM. Part of the answer is that XCOM 2 really is just harder - or rather, more exacting.
IS THERE AN EARRLY ACCESS XCOM 2 DEMO SERIES
Why do I suddenly want to excel at a series that I was previously happy to blunder through? Why do I hit reset even when most of us are safely back in the skyranger? What's interesting to me, though, is why. Yes, I know, I should be able to do all of this quite easily in the first mission of the game, and why don't I just get good? Well, with all this restarting, I am slowly getting good - or at least I'm getting less awful. That last part is the current sticking point. I can complete it, but I can't yet complete it in the manner I wish to, which is: everyone alive, a few bits of loot picked up, and nobody even remotely wounded. I have played this mission many, many times. After a good few hours of play, I am still on the first mission, the one right after the tutorial, where you head out and capture an unstable alien energy source to power your base with. As I play, I'm starting to realise that it's hard for a variety of interesting reasons, and not all of them are down to ingenious mechanical changes following on from Enemy Unknown. So XCOM 2 is hard - although, now I'm playing on Xbox One, there's at least the slight balm of being reunited with the first game's really beautiful console control system. Okay, maybe not Oops, but when I'm the soldier in question nothing is ever entirely off the table. These sound like cocktails served at the world's worst theme party, but they also, to their credit, sound like the sort of thing an inexperienced soldier might radio back to base when things go horribly wrong. Meanwhile, how bad am I at XCOM 2? By way of an answer, here are a few of my recent save file names: Everyone Dead.
IS THERE AN EARRLY ACCESS XCOM 2 DEMO PC
XCOM 2 has just landed on consoles with a decent port of the PC version - a bit stuttery when loading missions, but otherwise fine, as far as I can tell.
0 kommentar(er)
