XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

Review game XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, The backstory, albeit a little exaggerated,.

I’ll pretty much take any excuse to spend another four or five hours playing XCOM 2. (To be completely honest, there are times when I don’t need an excuse.) I got a decent one this week from Firaxis in the XCOM 2: War of the Chosen Tactical Legacy Pack. Owners of War of the Chosen can play it for free for a limited time, and it’s currently exclusive to PCs. With its challenging scenarios, nostalgic settings, and catchy soundtrack, it’s definitely worth returning for.
With no strategy layer at all, the stories of the four campaigns, each consisting of seven missions, are passably good. They briefly explain how the DJ successfully connected to XCOM, how Shen launched the Avenger, and a little about the unfortunate squad members who assisted in the commander’s rescue during the first tutorial mission. However, the briefing does not reveal any significant information.

However, the missions themselves, meant to occur between XCOM 2 and Enemy Within, completely disregard the fiction in favour of difficulty. The aliens launch their strongest, meanest forces—including the Avatar with spikey hair—at you almost immediately. When Bradford, Shen, and co. noticed a Codex in the main campaign, were they just pretending to be surprised? What became of the cutting-edge equipment and plasma weapons they had collected for these missions? Why do we even get to use some of the Chosen’s weapons when they barely make an appearance? I found myself wishing Firaxis had stuck to developing new scenarios that used only low-level tech and aliens to present high-level challenges for the sake of the story.

The aliens attack you with their strongest, most vicious forces almost instantly.

Nevertheless, I’m happy about the new weapon and armour models, which are based on worn-out, duct-taped versions of the Enemy Unknown XCOM uniforms in all three tech levels. The weapons function the same as a regular mag or plasma gun but have unique sounds and visuals. With my large mod list, I wasn’t lacking variety, but additional high-quality pieces are always welcome. It’s also a nice touch that you can choose to play with music from Enemy Unknown or a new score that’s loosely based on X-COM: UFO Defence from 1994.

Though choosing between two sets of upgrades at the end of each mission is the only way to personalise your troops—not even their names—it’s a little irksome, and those choices are intriguing and occasionally challenging. You may be able to choose to give your Rangers Spider Suits or upgrade the PCS implants of every member of your squad, but choosing the latter may require you to give up your valuable Mimic Beacon.

The majority of the 28 new maps are faithful recreations of iconic Enemy Within locations in XCOM 2 quality.

Iron Man mode is required for all of these campaigns, but don’t let that scare you off—you can restart any mission with a score penalty, so it just stops you from save-scumming while in a mission. Even though almost everyone dies, their rank- and class-equivalent replacements take their place in the next mission, making the stakes feel considerably lower than usual. When hero units like Bradford and Shen sustain fatal damage, they get knocked out, but even if you manage to extract them without their presence, they still manage to return to the Avenger.

The 28 new maps are mostly of XCOM 2-quality.

Seeing recreations of iconic scenes from Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within immediately made me feel warm and fuzzy. I know which downed UFO! Anywhere, I could recognise that diner. And I’m having flashbacks to Nova Scotia because of these docks. Although they are premade maps and not generated procedurally, this is a drawback; however, the added variety they bring to the main campaign is also a plus.

As a matter of fact, there is minimal to no randomization when you return to replay the campaigns in the Tactical Legacy Pack; instead, the replay value comes from striving for a high score. In the Tactical Legacy Pack, your score is determined by the number of kills and the casualties among your own troops, similar to the War of the Chosen daily challenges. However, there is a diminishing early bird score bonus in this game, which effectively encourages you to charge in recklessly in an attempt to kill as many aliens as possible in the shortest amount of time. Thus, there’s definitely room for improvement, even though, on my first Nightmare run (there is no Legendary difficulty option), I achieved gold medal scores on three of the four campaigns. In addition, players have the ability to dynamically create a brand-new multi-stage campaign without any narrative content.

The other two Tactical Legacy Pack modes are Skirmish and Campaign. In Skirmish, you can play with any squad on any map and any objective, which is nice if you want some action without playing the campaign. Lastly, you can replay all 100+ daily challenge missions as often as you’d like. Although it’s nice that the content is once again accessible, these missions no longer have the pressure of only requiring one to try to submit their best work.

Conclusion

The Tactical Legacy Pack DLC for XCOM 2: War of the Chosen offers some enjoyable challenges mixed with nostalgia, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to try to make sense of what happened. It has a good amount of content, with four campaigns spread over more than two dozen maps, and the additional cosmetics and music really make this old XCOM fan happy.