Reviews from

in the past


War of the chosen made XCOM 2 into an incredible game. It provides so much more diversity, danger, and fun to the base game. If you haven't played this DLC, it will change your opinion of XCOM 2 entirely.

love the squad, it's so cool getting attached to rando soldiers and watching them get ripped apart, miss my fallen brothers

This DLC really did create a massive change to the game! Not only adding these three new dangerous warrior bosses, who behave slightly different from those in the Alien Hunters DLC, often having you hunt them down to their own little bases to actually kill them and much like the main game, the boss battle is FAR more interesting than the previous game where it could be ended in a single-shot from your sniper making a headshot!

The other element that makes this DLC bigger and better than Alien Hunters is not only do you get the unique items after defeating these bosses, but it brings in three separate resistance factions who, much like those in history and the real world, they do not all get along.

All the groups have their own advantages and fun classes that exploit new in-game mechanics being related to that class as I'll get into detail here:

Reapers: Mostly spec-ops people who hide in the shadows of the infested and dead cities that Advent have left alone to rot away, but they excel in remaining hidden and firing upon enemies from the shadows, being a kind of tactical sniper and having fun gadgets that go along with them to cause distractions and exploit weaknesses of powerful enemies.

Skirmishers: Something I loved being cannon here, the idea that some of those serving Advent are rebelling against their masters. You ever get extra dialog added in when you raid their blacksite for more information. These ones are the typical soldiers though and not the more fun ones like the Viper or Mutons (though I do love adding a mod that adds one such group that is comprised of Vipers) but their abilities are really cool, starting with a wrist-mounted hook-shot to get onto rooftops to outflank the enemy and being armed with a Bullpup that acts as a mid-way for rifles and pistols with it's damage.

Templars: A group seen as quite strange. They are a group of psionically obsessed warriors who base everything on their abilities and worship of these powers as they create warriors who can harness these powers to use them for melee weapons produced by the power of psionic energy and can tear into enemies, however, there is an additional scene with them at the end of the game too which leads to more questions about these groups.

These new options make units a lot more fun and valuable. Especially as you get the chance to recover those who get captured that you really liked yourself.

I have some game play that showcases the fun that can be had thanks to this DLC and the mods it's allowed to happy from it's existence: https://youtu.be/vutrDto71w4

Very solid tactics game in its own right, lots of fun classes, along with enemy/mission diversity. I really like how you have to focus on the long game and be efficient with your time. The real cherry on top however is being able to make your own soldiers and throwing all of your friends in only to have somebody die to a misclick friendly fire grenade crit in the first mission

Eu te amo XCOM 2, eu te amo


Goated strategy game. Probably won't stop coming back to this one til we get XCOM 3.

I modded all my characters to look like clone troopers. I think that really helped to invest me more into the game.

90% of the criticism doesn't land.

The type of luck I've had with this game would have some of you people commit a crime of passion against me.

Love this game but always end up getting bored around the mid-late parts of the campaign, think it's already my 4 or 5 playthrough and still didn't finish it
Also there's some extremely annoying mechanics that i absolutely hate

Este juego simplemente es muy bueno, la expansion da horas de juego ademas que debo admitir que la formula de un juego de estrategia por turnos tactico es un genero no muy explorado pero que xcom 2 lo logra hacer a la perfeccion, lo unico malo del juego es que esta muy mal optimizado ademas de que es necesario poner mods para asi no tener que esperar por horas a que los enemigos se mueva

Oh, man. This just adds onto the base game so well. SO many options. So much customisation. I seriously LOVE these Xcom games and recommend them to anyone who has an interest in turn based strategy. Prep to be heartbroken when your units eat lead.

una de las mayores expansiones jamás realizadas, ampliando y agregando mucho al ya excelente juego base. agrega nuevos enemigos, nuevas clases y nuevas misiones que son aún mejores. es muy adictivo y uno de los DLC que hay que comprar.

Everything about the game is better than 1 but I hate that they made the player character into a super special boy who saves the world rather than a faceless bureaucrat like in the first one.

Not every game has to have the other characters talk about you with Reverence, and esp not strategy games.

Esp bc the story is you lost the war in the first game lol. "oh we have to get our old commander back to win" that didn't work the first time! leave him to rot and try something else imo

they didnt have a reason to go so hard on a expansion

Amazing game. The character customization options were great and how you can just lose that character forever makes you really attached to your squad. If you are a fan of turn based strategy gaming I definitely recommend this game. I only gave it 4.5 stars because I felt the story was so incredibly weak, but I know a lot of strategy players enjoy a lack of story affecting their gameplay.

Adds so much stuff it might as well be a new game. New units, enemies are great and new bosses are cool.

just c+p'ing my steam review AHEM...

I decided to write a pretty moderately thought out review at 2am due to seeing some really lenient reviews as well as some scrub-take reviews so, here's my 2 cents. I'd give this a middle thumb, but that doesn't exist so pretend the thumbs up is a middle thumb.

PROS:
-Great gameplay: Probably the most important part of any review is to talk about how fun it is. When this game works.... it works well. The general gameplay loop is you manage a small army while upgrading your mobile base, establishing world contacts, and managing resources all while random events and missions pop up with the urgency to complete them. In the actual missions, it's exactly what you'd expect from a XCOM game. There's some slight balance issue where certain classes are clearly better than others, and some classes are just flat out unusable in most cases/situations. Overall though, it's not exactly a broken mess with the said balance. You can pretty much play any way you want to and it will for the most part work, which is all I could really ask for from a tactical game like this.
-High replay value: Sometimes you will flat out miss out on some items, weapons, upgrades, characters, or facilities due to the time limit the game puts on you with the Avatar Project, especially on a blind run. In a way, knowing that there was something you missed out on or could have improved on gives you a reason to run through the game again sometime just to experience it. It accomplishes this by giving you a pretty good time the first time around, so naturally you start wondering just how fun or interesting alternatives could also be.
-Mod support: This is always a big plus. Sometimes games almost need mods to be fixed, fleshed out, or polished due to either development hell or incompetency from a developer/publisher. I don't think this game is one of those cases, where both on console and on PC I felt as if I didn't NEED mods to make the game enjoyable.
-Actual challenges: The game comes with multiple difficulty adjusters to make the game easier..... or if you're not a game journo you can make the game much harder. This is separate from the difficulty selection as well, so you can really customize how hard you want this game to actually be. The enemy variety is already decent and the WotC expansion adds even more to that as well.
-Pacing: As mentioned earlier in the review, the game constantly keeps you moving and will eventually force you to make decisions that can make or break your playthrough. It's not breakneck and it doesn't push you to fast to move on, but it won't let you sit there and grind everything to max before you start your first raid. It has plenty of things it wants you to do, and it will make sure you do it all but still allow you to enjoy doing it.

CONS:
-Stability: This one is not nearly as big as an issue as it is on console. To make a long story short, on consoles this game crashing is 100% guaranteed to happen a few times due to the way it loads things, and console can't handle it as well. It's notoriously difficult to play through the game on consoles due to the terrible stability and occasional softlocking to go along with the threat of a game restart. PC thankfully has MUCH less issues but that is not the same as none of the issues. Snapped cameras not going back to neutral, loads taking too long, turns being ruined because a unit didn't actually move where you wanted it to, reloading a save moving units across the map instead of where they were last, etc. This game when it runs, runs very well. But that's only when it DOES run.
-2K's idea of mod support: For some unknown reason, 2K decided to turn the XCOM 2 launcher into an advertisement for Chimera Squad and Civ 6. How does this affect mods? This launcher broke mods entirely. XCOM 2 has this thing where you get annoying alerts and sometimes broken save games when mods that were active on a save file get loaded when said mods are not active. The devs complained and had 2K try and reverse this and presto, mods are working again... not really. Mods that worked with both base game and the WotC expansion do not work still, unless of course they are updated to do so. The main issue here is a lot of the best mods in the game's existence are dual-compatible mods. Well this is an older game with an issue that was created in June 2020. Most of these amazing mods? 90% of them right now are no longer being supported or haven't had an update in years. So, unless you use fanmade launchers like AML you just can't use a majority of the best mods this game has. That being said, AML is a great launcher that even shows compatibility issues with mods and is worth downloading in order to get the best current XCOM 2 experience. But this doesn't excuse the fact that what you are paying for was tampered by the publisher just to run an ad, and might one day update the game again to break AML for no reason.
-Price: This game is years old, has a $40 expansion so good that it pretty much makes the base game look like a joke, and has multiple DLCs for both the base and WotC expansion. Yet... despite the DLCs being priced more than a full game in total....... the base game needed for all these expansions is still normally $60. This game is well over 100 buckaroos for the full experience. The fact that you HAVE to wait for a sale to be able to experience this amazing game at a FAIR price (not even discounted, imo the sale price should be the NORMAL price) is not just a negative, but a hefty one at that.
-The Lost: This complaint is only really for the WotC expansion, but in all honesty you should be playing WotC over the base game anyways so I'm including that here. Fucking awful. Literal zombies that ruin the flow of the game and are just there to be annoying. I once had a standard 8 enemy early game mission take 2 hours due to the sheer amount of Lost added to the level, and it turned an 8 enemy mission into a 93 enemy mission. They can't even really hurt you and you get free turns when you kill 1 of them. They are a waste of time, they are unfun to fight against, and they have no tactical aspects to them. They feel so out of place. This game already had zombie-like enemies, so I fail to see how LITERAL zombies add anything to this game. In fact I'd say they subtract from the experience. Thankfully there exists a mod that quite literally removes them from the game, and that unironically made my WotC experience instantly better.
-Various QoL improvements that haven't been added: And, they wont ever be. Faster menus, faster overwatches, less nagging from npcs on the radio, better civilian AI, etc. There are a ton of QoL improvements just begging to be made that won't make the game any easier or harder, yet they won't ever come. Thank the lord for mods, absolutely look into QoL mods when playing XCOM 2.

All in all, an objectively good game. There's plenty to criticize and I probably did not get it all in this quick review. Most of the criticism seems to stem from either the launcher being absolutely terrible now (which is 100% justified) and the Lost in its entirety, or its more @scrubquotesx material where somehow having lots of content to revisit makes the game bad somehow or not being able to breeze through the game quickly due to the Tired feature making the game longer than 10 hours as I saw someone complain years ago. Again if lots of content and longer than a day's worth of gameplay bother you then dear lord stay away from most games, XCOM 2 included. Go play some unmodded Skyrim and maybe a pinch of SWSH if you got a Switch. That being said, the ACTUAL cons are real. Stability, poor mod support from 2K, QoL features lacking, and the price can seriously ruin the game to a lot of people, and those are the real issues that should be talked about imo. But dang man, game is longer than 10 hours get the pitchforks people.

I realize the timer is a big part of the game. but this would be so much more fun without it.

i hate it but i'll probably come back anyway

What an insane improvement over base XCOM 2 man. While I have grown a begrudging respect for that version after playing it on Rookie difficulty, I still heavily dislike how it plays on Veteran and above. However, War of the Chosen rectifies most of my major flaws. The new classes help combat the insane difficulty curve (particularly the early game) and are generally fun to mess around with. Using combat AP instead of chance for new soldier upgrades was ingenious, and some of the new story missions are dope as hell. Actually being able to play on Veteran mode without wanting to kill myself was a huge bonus as well.

Some minor criticism regarding this specific version of XCOM 2 is that the Lost (while incredibly cool in the first few encounters) can become a bit tedious in later missions, and I'm not sure if adding resistance members to Terror missions was the right call; they end up taking up a lot of time just to deal chip damage.

Juegazo con Expansion que solo lo hizo mejor. Tiene problemas de rendimiento y tiene bugs que te pueden romper la experiencia. Pese a lo malo de las mejores experiencias tacticas en el mercado

Narrative: 3
Gameplay: 4.5
Graphics: 4
X-Factor: 4
Overall: 4


Its good , offers tons of content and replayability with difficulty and challenge runs . Story is meh like always with xcom . It is a good game , wouldnt rate it higher than EW but its still worth a play . It is an unstable mess at times and is very unoptimised , even if your specs are beyond the reqs , expect HEAT but usually its stable and not buggy .

I played on switch but that was not an option this game was amazing it mastered the risk and reward progression system I
Loved how every choice mattered so you had to choose carefully. A true masterpiece

It would be perfect if everyone talked just a little bit less.

A expansão comsegue de algum jeito deixar a historia mais tosqueira, mas é mt divertido as mudanças q fizeram