Xenonauts 2 Reviews

alot of fun, kinda balls to the wall at times, but i wont lie it makes alot of auto saves, which i think is a beautiful use of the multiverse xD i mean if they gonna invade us from the multiverse, i may from time to time, swap to a reality i didnt just flash bang my whole team, and try a differnt thing xD 10/10 its a cleaver use of quantum mechincs

This game will cheat. You will miss hit chance to hit shots, regardless if taken multiple times. Your soldiers will die from a stiff breeze. Enemies will spawn right next to you when you start the mission and WILL kill you the from the word Go. You will always be at a disadvantage unless the games director decides suddenly that the aliens are eating glue in the corner levels of dumb and easy. You think I'm being dramatic? Half cover walls are -40% accuracy when shooting over it from as far a one tile away from it, while the aliens you weren't targeting, and that you can't see hidden in the fog of war, can head shot your soldiers perfectly every time. Your soldiers will miss several shots on the SAME enemy whose standing in the middle of an open field, but that same enemy on the AIs turn will kill one of your soldiers with ease. Oh and then an enemy you can't see because of the fog of war will follow up on their turn by ONCE AGAIN blowing the head off another solider. Med kits can only be used ONCE per soldier, meaning they can only be healed once per mission. Enemies WILL destroy your cover with a few shots, but your nerf gun bullets will bounce harmlessly off the walls. Enemies have a MUCH wider field of vision than you, and they WILL shot you from areas that your sniper in a raised advantage point, with upgraded weapon and sights, can't see and cant target. Enemies will charge you, and your soldier will full movement point, who should be on overwatch, will do NOTHING to stop them. While if your soldiers stick so much as a pinkie toe from behind cover then aliens will overwatch your position EVERYTIME and get free shots off. Miss a shot or took a shot? aliens get a free reaction shot on you. Aliens shoot you or miss you? Your soldiers will stand around with a thumb up their ass as they die. You hit an alien with gun fire and a grenade? They will laugh it off and charge you. Your soldier with multiple missions and dozens of confirmed kills gets a splinter? They go crazy and shoot and destroy the life saving cover of their nearby teammate WHO THEN GETS KILLED BY AN ENEMY YOU CAN'T SEE! The game punishes you for playing it. Save scumming is a MUST. And NPC civilians on the map will get more kills then your hand picked, best of the best, special forces soldiers. Its like playing the first Xcom remake all over again. And I loved that game, and its broken mechanics, while this game just pisses me off. I keep coming back to this game to try it again and again, but I can't stick with it for long because it just pisses me off so much with its poorly explained mechanics, and obviously cheating AI that makes it that you HAVE to save scum to even have a hope of winning. I had to start the same mission over again several times because the game INSISTED on having an alien right next to my deployment zone that would immediately one shot whoever I sent out first.

tl;dr play the Firaxis XCOM games instead. A year and a half into early access and this game still has so far to go. Less than 10 hours in I've encountered 'placeholder' art and story for required plot missions. New enemies show up almost every mission but they lack meaningful variety/mechanics. Given the deep sales while still in EA I suspect it's not selling well and I'm speculating the remaining development will be haphazardly rushed to move the devs to more profitable ventures. Very glad I did not buy this at EA launch or for full price. Gameplay Combat mechanics seem ok; no major complaints outside enemy variety. Enemy overwatch mechanics seem poorly implemented but perhaps I'm not understanding the mechanic well. Facing direction is new to me mechanically--it adds a little thinking to positioning but the feature is mostly irrelevant. Soldier progression seems very poorly thought out (medals and rankings with minor stat bonuses? c'mon...numbers aren't fun). IMO the Firaxis XCOM games were much more fun; the RNG soldier class system and ability tree made each soldier unique. Additionally, I dearly miss the cinematic kill-cam. Performance Not good. Enemy turns are long and the game stutters something fierce when smoke is on the field. Despite the classic sprite appearance, the game is rendered in 3D. Game runs on Linux via Proton, but almost everything does nowadays so no bonus points.

Great game with a lot of challenges, its still early access but the developers are really trying to work hard to fix issues and complete the game. Still in its uncompleted state its a good challenge and has a lot of content.

Not too complex (Phoenix Point), not too simple (Xcom 2), based on Terror from the Deep. Couldn't stop playing until I reached the "Finished all the available content!" message.

Kinda boring. The story is a little too 'basic' to draw me in. Still lots of basic bugs, like not being able to click on the data from computers in the cleaner missions makes it unplayable for me. I just stopped playing. :(

Excellent. Played through on unfinished main branch and buggy beta branch. Enjoyed both a lot. Been a long time since I played the original x-com games, but I would say the difficulty curve is smoother and there isn't a sense of dread. Compared to x-com reboot, it is less cinematic and less immersive in some ways, but more interesting tactically. You think about battles in terms of the whole map, instead of a bunch of mini encounters. I prefer it. Probably my favourite game of its genre.

An absolutely amazing sequel to an equally amazing game. This has improved on the XCOM formula in almost every way and is arguably better than even XCOM 2.

A solid throwback to the days of the original X-Com games where defending the earth meant building up the global infrastructure to do so, instead of just upgrading a single base and dealing with a single mission at a time. The visual flair and punchy skill tree driven combat of the reboots will be missed, but fans of the genre will appreciate the more robust strategic layer.

This game has some good moments and at times a decent gameplay loop, but I can't recommend it in its current state, especially as a full-priced title. While this is still a review, I have put a few 'wishlist' style changes I'd like to see throughout it; despite my (at times) harsh tones, I love this kind of game and wish this game and its developers a successful 1.0 release. Regardless, My main criticisms are as follows: 1. Compared with other games of this genre, the difficulties are far harder than they let on. I'm struggling through my second playthrough on veteran (second hardest difficulty) while I've managed to beat pheonix point and Xcom 2 on legendary EASILY by comparison. This isn't a detractor for diehard fans of the genre, but WILL alienate more casual players. 2. Overwatch in tactical missions. This is an issue in other games of the genre as well, but it's ESPECIALLY bad here. Aliens, even from undisovered pods, will almost always be on overwatch beyond the early game, even on turn one, facing directly toward your landing area. There's also NO indicator showing if any given alien (or human, for that matter) is on overwatch, and if that alien has only a single overwatch attack, or several. Additionally, your own men's overwatch (which you can't really turn off beyond wasting time units) cause friendly fire an uncomfortably large amount of the time. The rules explaining how and when units will use overwatch are unclear and inconsistent, and NOTHING you can field is beefy enough to just face-tank through the worst of it unless you're VERY ahead in tech at that given point. One (partial) solution is smoke grenades (flashbangs can't usually be thrown far enough accurately to turn it off consistently), but they're REALLY risky and unintuitive to use: Use them on your own units -> you're forced to move unless you've outfitted your entire squad with gas masks (or have T3 armor already) because stun will keep building from smoke inhalation. Use them on enemy units -> congrats, you're never going to hit them until they either leave or you get really up close, which defeats the point. use them on the space in between -> They're sorta inconsistent, and aliens still move around them on their next turn anyway, and you also can't shoot through it either, and moving through it later will still give stun effect. 2B) Damage rolling. While not a big issue in the earlygame, with how armour works, combats feel increasingly luck-based and inconsistent as the game progresses- attacks do 50 to 200% of their base damage on every hit, before armour An attack having a base of 50 damage against a unit with 60 hp and 20 armour could do anywhere between 5 damage (basically nothing), or 80 (oneshotting almost most biological soldiers even through T3 armour). Weapons having different damage ranges/spreads or even reducing the overall spread would do a tonne to make combats more fair and straightforward. The wild damage ranges makes the overwatch issue mentioned above even worse as you can't calculate your way through traversing a volley to allow your squad to move again. 3. The atmosphere of the game and the strategy layer in particular is underwhelming. Almost no voice acting, no cutscenes even for big events, and a lack of varied sound effects or music as the game progressed. Our chief of operations, head scientist and head of engineering don't even have their own names or backstories (that I've managed to find, anyway), which is a huge shame for the scientist especially, as he clearly has a personality he establishes over the game. Additionally, the storytelling around 'an asymmetrical war against the aliens' is DEEPLY confusing. You simultaneously have hidden bases, yet the governments of the world are somehow still funding you anyway while all their intelligence agencies have been compromised by alien sympathisers (light spoilers, my bad) from the dead start of the game? Whose side are the governments of the world on? If the threats are so pervasive, how are you able to just build bases anywhere and they'll almost never be attacked until the second half of the game, and only by aliens. Where is the Xenonaut support base coming from? 4. The air combat is also very unpolished and they admit as such when you do it for the first time. with a second-generation fighter (which I won't name for spoilers) armed with third tier weapons and second tier armour can't kill anything bigger than certain 'small' sized aircraft. Additionally, the interface implies you can send multiple fighters (which would definitely be helpful in using lots of weaker craft) after a single threat, but there's no proper explanation anywhere ingame on how to do this? This one is probably the most forgivable of all my criticisms thus far- maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Additionally, I built a LOT of missile/laser/redacted Defense batteries in my campaigns, and later found out these ONLY shoot at alien aircraft attacking your bases? If these could attack other alien craft passing by, I think that'd be both thematically awesome and make the air combat a lot more bearable. 5. A lot of the tactical level item choices and combinations are honestly just sort of boring, and the number of viable comps in the second half of the game is very low. Grenadiers are really weak as the game progresses and their tech up for explosives comes WAY too late. Further exacerbating their mediocrity, normal soldiers of other classes can carry a LOT of grenades by then. Could grenade launchers be made into a secondary so I can still use a rifle, shotgun or machine gun? Shields are honestly too strong in the earlygame and midgame if you get their T2 project done soon enough, but fall off rapidly after that. The MARS units are definitely very cool, but why can't I turn my men into Telepaths, cyborgs or super-mutants using alien tech? The restrictions on what can be used as primary and secondary weapons are also too strict for my liking- it also takes (in my opinion) far too many time units to move stuff around in inventory, so trying to cram out on held items and switching as needed in combat isn't usually viable either. 6. More minor issues. they're not a serious issue in the scheme of things, and will likely be fixed soon, but definitely make play on some maps maps deeply uncomfortable. Issues such as Cyberdrone explosion on death feels almost unavoidable in the REDACTED, as the short corridoors and small rooms mean one in the center of a room is almost unavoidable damage, especially if you use shorter- ranged compositions (you'd be an idiot to do a long-ranged one in there anyway) Why do really thin boreal trees provide 100% (perfect) cover as good as brick or metal walls? Cover in general feels like it's too generously applied when shooting through various non-straight general angles. Why can't I move units through each other, to the point it adds massive amounts of time units in moving a formation UNLESS you move them all in a very specific order? since you lose additional time units for making turns, a unit may need to turn THREE times to get around one guy, which often loses you 10+ time units for what should have been a 2-3 block, 5-7 time unit move. This isn't a huge issue by itself, but if someone gets suppressed, panics or otherwises loses their remaining turn unexpectedly, it can cause a doorway to be shut for an entire turn as the person you can't move through now can't move at all. While I may have more to learn about this game, I can't recommend it right now. I WILL update this review as more content, bug fixes and rebalancing comes available. I have high hopes for the team working on it and this game by 1.0 Release, however far away that is. Thanks for reading my review!