The vegan X-COM
In 1994, MicroProse released UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM: UFO Defense), a game that took the nascent gaming world by storm and essentially defined the genre now known as “squad tactics.” While many modern games—such as Battle Brothers, Wartales, and Silent Storm—draw inspiration from X-COM, the franchise also spawned a direct line of remakes, reboots, and spiritual successors. The most famous of these is XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis, 2012), while other contenders include Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019), the UFO: After series (2003-2007), and Goldhawk’s Xenonauts (2014). I played the original Xenonauts back in the day and found the base game to be a bit underwhelming. The vanilla experience felt short of greatness and mods played a crucial role in elevating Xenonauts beyond mediocrity. Naturally my expectations for Xenonauts 2 were moderate. Before examining how it stacks up against other successors, it’s worth outlining the philosophy and design decisions behind each of these games’ lineages.
The Firaxis Games (henceforth referred to as “XCOM 1” and "XCOM 2") revamped the original formula in several important ways. Gone is the time units system. In its place, Firaxis introduced the controversial “two actions” system, forever “blessing” the world with soldiers running past their enemies and the almighty “overwatch” button. The flat stat progression is replaced by a class system and individual roaming enemies are replaced by the pod system, whose legacy remains divisive to this day. Many X-COM purists accuse Firaxis of being unfaithful to what made the original game great. On the other hand, Firaxis doesn’t fun police the players. Blaster launchers, psionics and flying snipers make a glorious comeback, giving the games their own brand of exploding, space magic fun.
The “after” series (UFO: Aftermath, UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight) nowadays is more of a niche curiosity. Being real time with simultaneous actions, it didn't really influence other successors. Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) did find a niche audience and attempted basically the same thing as Xenonauts, but its experimental philosophy with free aim, diplomacy and evolving aliens stands in stark contrast with the latter’s staunch, balance-driven conservatism. Indeed, Xenonauts 2's take on X-COM boils down to deepening the mechanics, treading similar ground while making sure that whenever power fantasy and FUN clashes with challenge and “balance”, the Balance Gods get their due.
Geoscape
The strategic layer of Xenonauts 2 happens in the Geoscape, which will immediately be familiar to veterans of previous games. The game rejects the modern trend of single base campaigns, opting instead to force the player into at least building a second base to cover whatever continents were left out of the detection range. The air game not only makes a comeback, it is THE most sophisticated interception system in any X-COM successor to date. Air battles can be auto resolved or played manually. The combination of weapons, interceptors and enemies allow for plenty of variance in Earth’s struggle for air superiority against its would-be conquerors. It is quite satisfying to defeat a stronger enemy squad through clever flanking and superior dogfighting. It’s also worth mentioning that new aircraft don’t just bring more speed and armor; they also bring new tricks that can be used in battle to outmaneuver enemy ships.
The best interceptor has a dedicated "surprise ************" button!
New to the sequel is the “operations” system, which introduces a new resource for the player to manage. Operation Points (OP) represent the clandestine war between Xenonauts and Aliens for influence over various human groups, like scientists, manufacturers and intelligence agencies. Once these assets are secured, the player receives bonuses like faster research, reduced panic or just more OP. Conversely, the visitors will try to infiltrate these groups, raising panic and making life harder for the player. Once all relevant groups in a continent are secured, a larger continent bonus is applied, similar to securing all regions in a continent in XCOM 1. Aside from applying a stacking passive bonus, OP can be used for requisitioning immediate benefits in the form of materials or cold hard cash. The decision making regarding OPs boils down to balancing short term benefits with expanding your network for long-term returns.
Infiltrated groups can be reset with a good old fashioned whacking.
The economic aspect of Xenonauts 2 is also one of its stronger suits. Players are tasked with managing money, materials and operations points in order to stay ahead of the curve. The goal of a campaign can be summarized as “don’t fall behind” and to that end the game presents you with an overwhelming number of considerations. Do you build another lab or go for another plane? Do you burn your OP for cash or do you save for a new supporter? How many soldiers on reserve are enough? Can you afford a permanent upgrade or do you need the resources for something more pressing? Is it time to increase radar coverage and can you defend your new assets? In every other X-COM successor you reach a point where the economy becomes a non-issue, usually around the midgame, but in Xenonauts 2 scarcity will haunt you for the entire campaign.
Speaking of scarcity, Xenonauts 2 brought its own middle-of-the-road approach to the classic strategy of becoming the world's premier arms dealer. It's shocking for me to think there are people so invested in fun policing single player games that they proclaim manufacturing plasma weapons and selling them for a hefty profit was an "exploit" in the original game, instead of a logical conclusion to the premises of the game itself. Firaxis "solved" this by making upgrades squad wide by default, so individual rifles are simply not represented in their games. In this game the profit margin of equipment lowers with each piece sold. Hence, arms dealing is profitable, but not an endless well of infinite money. Idle engineers will also generate money for you, but the opportunity cost of doing so makes hiring engineers for idling them a poor usage of your limited resources.
Another innovation on the strategy layer is the delegation system, or “why is nobody else doing something about these aliens?” Squad tactics is a repetitive genre by design and every campaign inevitably reaches the point of fatigue. You actually can have too much of a good thing and even if the tactical layer is good (and we’ll get to that in a bit), players can only remain invested in so many missions. The in-game justification for the system is that world governments are very interested in recovering downed UFOs, so they pay you for the privilege. You can say no and recover yourself, but that costs you OP. This can be disabled when starting a new game, but I found that the 2 missions per UFO system is helpful in avoiding turning the campaign into a slog. I find it superior to, say, an auto resolve system.
Tactical layer
The missions themselves play out very similarly to the classic games, with a system of time units (TUs) governing the action economy. All attacks cost a percentage of total TUs, so the stat won’t provide you with more attacks per turn, but it will allow your soldier to move considerably more before attacking. This prevents TUs from becoming the ultimate stat, as with AP based systems like Jagged Alliance 3 and Fallout Tactics, where the AP stat trumps all others. Action refunds and attack reset mechanics, which are commonplace in XCOM 2, are also absent, meaning character progression is more linear and less likely to offend the Gods of Balance.Weapons in the game are tiered by tech and split into a few static types: shotgun, rifle, machinegun, sniper and pistol. Each weapon type has its strengths and weaknesses, with rifles being the jack-of-all-trades weapon. Apart from giving distinct roles to different weapons, the game also makes usage of a suppression mechanic, very similar to Jagged Alliance, with flashbangs being a key tool in the player’s arsenal to avoid reaction fire. Cover destruction is also an important mechanic, with demolition charges and grenades competing for your precious TUs and inventory space. At first glance the multitude of weapon types gives the impression that there are more tools available to the player, but experience firing the different weapons says X-COM's rifle/heavy plasma are like a swiss army knife, while Xenonauts 2 weapons are the individual blades, meaning you need a shotgun for close quarters and a sniper for long instead of having one weapon that could do both with different fire modes.
There's sufficient mission variety to keep the player engaged. The classic UFO recovery, terror and abduction missions make a comeback, alongside the new data recovery mission, VIP rescue/capture and several key plot related missions. Interestingly enough, despite the community's hostility towards the Firaxis games, Xenonauts 2 takes a cue from XCOM 2 and introduces timed missions. I'm aware mission timers are controversial, with mods that extend them being extremely popular in the Steam Workshop for XCOM 2. However, I do believe throwing a wrench on overwatch camping and introducing urgency to certain missions is a good call and I don't blame Goldhawk for making it. Regarding the plot, the campaign is structured around five acts, each ending after a certain time (visible on the Geoscape) or the completion of an important plot related mission. There are no voice overs, everything is told via mediocre quality text centered around a Redditor science guy and a cute base-mom. The writing is mostly there to remind you this is a mechanics-first type of game and storyfags should look elsewhere.
Great atmosphere, good graphics, mediocre sound effects
Another strong aspect of Xenonauts 2 is its atmosphere. The creepy music and semi-realistic art style are very reminiscent of the classic X-COM games and provide veteran players with a sizeable dose of nostalgia. The feeling of dread every time you end a turn is back, and the presence of armed civilians helps establish that “something bad is lurking over there” quite nicely. A lot of indie games will put you off solely based on their questionable art direction, but Xenonauts 2 looks quite enticing—like an interactive season of G.I. Joe, not too far removed from what’s presented in the iconic 1994 introduction cinematic of X-COM.The sound effects, on the other hand, are… there. It may be a conscious choice to avoid exaggerated death cries and over-the-top “pew pew” audio, but the result is ultimately forgettable. Don’t expect punchy, instantly recognizable sounds like the AK-47 from Counter-Strike 1.6, which is burned into the memory of a generation of LAN house kids. Aliens getting shot sound like a mildly annoyed pet snake, and firefights sound more like kids playing with BB guns than desperate battles for mankind’s survival. While X-COM uses sound to transmit the “otherworldliness” of the alien threat, and XCOM leans into a larger-than-life cinematic tone, Xenonauts 2 just sounds like not much is happening. Instead of a sensory voyage to a sci-fi battlefield, the sound design feels like an inoffensive elevator ride in an office building. It’s clearly the weakest aspect of the game, and the first place modders will want to start.
Another big missed mark is the final mission. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say the visuals are just a repeat of the same environments we’ve seen before. Given the stakes and the location where it supposedly takes place, I expected unique visuals to help tell the conclusion of the story, but if I were to show screenshots of the final mission and tell you it’s an alien base or ship, you would be none the wiser. The overall tragedy of the game repeats itself here: the developers seemed more concerned with ensuring nobody would say it was too easy—or worse, figure out a cheese strategy to trivialize the combat encounter. Instead of treating the closing chapter as a canvas for beautiful art, they saw it as yet another spreadsheet to be filled and balanced.
Technology, balance and standardization
So far I covered mostly the positive aspects of Xenonauts 2, so it’s time to dive into the game’s biggest flaw: its unhealthy obsession with fixing the “unbalanced” elements of both X-COM and XCOM. What do veteran players remember most fondly from X-COM? Mind controlling aliens and making them shoot each other? Blowing up entire rooms with blaster launchers? Flying snipers raining death from above? Well, REJOICE, brothers and sisters, for these heinous offenses against the Gods of Balance are completely gone from Xenonauts 2. I’m under the impression that every time the developers added something fun and cool to the tech tree, their chief concern was, “will this BREAK MY PRECIOUS GAME!?”Sure, you can have jetpacks, but no hovering in mid-air and no shooting while flying! Sure, you can destroy objects in-game, but UFO walls are made out of Contrivium™ and you can’t make your own doors. You have to go through the dev-approved killzone, that’s the rules buster. Invisibility? Hell no! But you can have this armor that makes it harder for enemies to hit you. The game even tells you that you should equip said armor on your snipers because GOD FORBID you don’t play EXACTLY the way the developers intended. There’s a power armor that allows your guys to walk through walls, but don’t even think about going full Kool-Aid man on the aliens! That's unbalanced fun and we don't do that here.
“Commander, I just ran through three walls to get here, but now you ask me to ruin another man’s garden? NEGATIVE!”
In every single strategy game you start out with a very small set of tools and unlock more as you play the game, be it from technology, perks, plot or another source the game sees fit. Xenonauts 2, however, displays a stubborn refusal to provide players with actually new toys to mess around with. With perks being absent and transformative technologies being extremely limited, the player is left for the most part just improving stats and equipping better stat sticks. The ballistic rifle you have on day 1 and the fusion rifle from endgame perform exactly the same. As a rule, new technologies don’t change the way you approach the challenges presented by the game, they just make you better at doing the same thing.
Except for jetpacks. Jetpacks are cool.
The way the tech tree works also contributes to the feeling that the game is overly concerned with you not breaking it. Earlier I mentioned the goal of the campaign is to not fall behind, but it should also be pointed out you can’t possibly get ahead in this game. Since you need to find new UFOs, alien species and whatnot, it’s actually impossible to acquire new weapons ahead of schedule. So if we look at the act division of the campaign, it’s possible to tell in abstract what weapon technology the player will have at each stage, because he can’t possibly research better stuff. Yes, it is true that X-COM did roughly the same thing, but I can’t shake the feeling that the leash is much tighter in Xenonauts 2.
To the game's credit, enemies are visually distinct and look interesting enough. Unfortunately, they don't introduce new challenges that must be worked around with new tools. New enemies are just bigger stat sticks that are dealt with the same as the old, which interacts poorly with the inherently repetitive nature of the genre. Lizard, robot and frog face enemies are all fought in the same manner, albeit featuring different health bars and weaponry. The Reaper (aka Chryssalid) is the only enemy that stands out as being a big wall of stats in melee range as opposed to being ranged. Sadly, enemy design is an aspect in which XCOM 2 does a far better job than what we see here.
RNGesus doesn’t love you
Another glaring issue of the game is the unchecked randomization of pretty much everything. In more recent years we had games like King Arthur: Knight’s Tale (NeocoreGames, 2022) experimenting with systems that heavily rein in RNG and ensure player decision making is front and center of combat resolution instead of dice rolling and coin flipping. Xenonauts 2, however, is not one such game. In fact this is probably the most “lolrandom” X-COM successor/clone out there. The accuracy formula is heavily biased in favor of a miss, so much so that a single plastic chair between you and the alien might as well be a WW1 trench. As you play Xenonauts 2 you will get in the habit of walking soldiers towards the nearest obstacle before shooting, as this action removes that obstacle as a potential point of failure for your shot. And once we're past the hit or miss check, damage rolls go from 50 to 150% of the weapon's base damage, so when you consider that machineguns can attack up to 10 times in a single action, rifles can burst for 3 and every shotgun shot consists of 3 "mini shots", the end result is that there is zero consistency in what comes out of an attack action. Your soldier might obliterate an alien, miss everything, hit for pitiful damage, suppress him (or not) and anything and everything in between. And because of the excessively wide damage spread it is very difficult to notice the actual effect of the small percentage increases provided by autopsies and "advanced" weaponry.The RNG issue is compounded once you learn the skill ceiling for your soldiers is really, really low. While it is true that experienced soldiers in Xenonauts 2 can carry considerably more gear, sprint for longer distances and defend themselves better against psionics, the actual attacking part is severely hamstrung. It's quite frustrating to see Colonels with dozens of missions under their belt still struggling to hit a mildly obstructed shot. Worse still, grenade throwing can still fail spectacularly, making you question, "if these guys are the best Earth has to offer, how bad can life under the Eternals be?" While a 100+ accuracy soldier in X-COM gives Vassili Zaitsev a run for his money, a 100 accuracy Xenonaut can hit aimed shots against exposed targets and that's about it. Anything more complicated than that and you should start praying to RNGesus. Rifle burst fire, for instance, is a complete joke and the penalties for using it are so severe, Colonels will consistently miss a full burst in point blank range of a 7-foot tall lizard man. I've had similar experiences with a few conversion mods for Jagged Alliance 2 that nerf accuracy across the board for some unfathomable reason. Because professional soldiers not hitting the broad side of a barn is "realistic", somehow. And stat based specializations? They are quickly gone as all soldiers become equally adept at everything, minor deviations notwithstanding.
