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Got this at Christmas, am still presumably very early in the game (about to do the Craftworld mission). My initial impression is that the gameplay is a really solid XCOM-take that effectively encourages risk mitigation through aggression. Everything feels powerful in its own way and the only thing that feels necessary is something that can purge disease. I had a few restarts as I learnt the basic mechanics but as long as you play sensibly it feels like you can make anything viable (on normal at least, interesting to see how things change with higher difficulties). On the downside, it might just be that the game has let me do this but I feel that the pacing is very off. A game of XCOM1/2 lasts about 30 missions. It feels a lot longer and you can victory lap if you want, but something new gets thrown at you every other mission. Here the game clearly has a fair bit more to show, but I'm spending a lot of time on the same 3-4 basic pods. It is good that the pods mix and match from the possible enemy types for variation. I'm not massively liking that every mission is either get the pods or kill the spores, but I could accept that other mission types would boil down to 'kill the thing' with window dressing. I don't feel like I'm fighting to save anything, the maps are decent and do the job well, but they are all themed like they're on a chunk of a planet that's already exploded.
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Jan 3, 2023 12:32
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 01:33 |
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Playing this game is like being a boiled frog. There's a deep and interesting tactical system that you never quite appreciate because the game starts off boring and you are a dozen hours in before you even start to unlock enough abilities to start playing off some of the more complex plays that are possible.
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Jan 27, 2023 00:53
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 This final mission.
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Jan 31, 2023 11:23
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The continuing support for this game really is great.
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Jul 18, 2023 16:37
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Yeah the game is a really interesting take on the genre, in particular the route they've taken to force pressure and momentum on the player (as opposed to XCOM2's 'take too many turns and you lose'), but the pacing of the strategic layer is a bit off and could have done with some refinement. Also you spend all game unlocking and using stratagems as part of your toolkit and then they and then for the endgame they disappear as well as all the rest of your research benefits. Absolutely mad decision.
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Jul 19, 2023 08:02
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The boss battles are inventive but also range from 'quite hard and need a specific squad comp' to 'easily cheesable'. I love the game, but it does highlight how Firaxis benefit from being to take that extra year of development to polish and fine tune things.
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Jul 19, 2023 13:53
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Yeah the USP of this game is that attacking and killing things in certain ways generates more AP so it's very momentum based.
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Jul 27, 2023 09:26
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search engine posted:I like old and new xcom a lot , but so far I haven't found anything else in the genre that works for me. Feels like those games set the bar really high and spoiled everything else. Troubleshooter almost did it, but it bogged down getting both too easy and overcomplicated toward the middle. So, if my baseline is stuff like long war and legendary ironman xcom2 is this game going to pan out? I would say at higher difficulties this gets a bit like legendary XCOM on the tactical level with the need to clear pods just right, but the strategic game is a fair bit uneven and never lets you stabilise things and proceed at your own pace - you are very much gradually losing control of things even playing perfectly and that's the story of the game.
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Jul 30, 2023 22:11
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And the optimal path is to beeline research on the main objectives while focusing on the requisition rewards because none of that research matters in the endgame.
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Jul 31, 2023 11:35
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Captain Oblivious posted:If your first campaign is a failure, that’s okay. The game is not blisteringly difficult or anything, but even in XCOM 2 an abortive first run isn’t unusual for first timers. The final 2-3 missions in particular are brutal if you don't calculate in advance which characters are going to go into each of them.
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Aug 18, 2023 07:30
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I R SMART LIKE ROCK posted:I didn't think it was that bad. it tells you the vanguard team will be fighting off waves of enemies and the main squad will be dueling the big bad Yes but *spoilers I guess* before that you have to fight one of the greater daemons with no time to heal, so possibly you need a *third* team if that fight is painful. And then you are told the vanguard team is fighting off waves of enemies but that isn't strictly true - the enemies are running though them and you just want to do as much damage as fast as possible. Ironically I think the optimal strategy is to really hurt all the enemies in the outer area but let them through so they can be one-shot by the guys fighting the big bad for quick WP. It's also annoying that and I think a massive misstep that your characters do not get to be the heroes of the story. You play the whole game assembling this team and then in the end one of your characters and their set of mechanics straight up disappears and you watch as this named hero shows up to fight the big bad for you. It's an incredibly strange decision to make when XCOM is right there demonstrating why the perfect ending to this sort of game involves the narrative acknowledging that over the course of the game your guys have proven how special and heroic they are. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 07:21
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The craftworld mission is a hint of things to come and one of the pacing issues I have with the game, because it's the length of any regular mission you have done up to that point... and then you have to do an endurance boss fight with infinite waves of enemies coming at you from all directions. Oh and the boss has a mechanic that makes it basically impossible to burn him down.
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Aug 21, 2023 08:53
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 01:33 |
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Oh now I feel a bit silly.
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Aug 21, 2023 12:17
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