Trump was in the hospital, but replacement Marco Rubio panicked and ran into cover. When Cruz was wounded, Bernie Sanders was mind-controlled by an alien Sectoid and shot him in the back. The team was short-lived, however, because in the very next mission I over-extended our conservative hero. In XCOM 2 Earth is ruled by an alien-human dictatorship known as Advent. Faced with near-certain defeat Cruz proceeded to absolutely shred through the alien forces with multiple crits and returned to base as the soldier who dealt most damage, made more attacks (the end-of-mission stats are lovely) and brought home the loot. Surely Trump and Sanders would set aside petty squabbles for the good of humanity? The highlight of this short-lived team was the death of Hillary Clinton and severe wounding of Donald Trump during a mission, simply because for some reason Ted Cruz stopped panicking and turned into Rambo. On my first campaign run, in this time for heroes, I decided to try and take back the Earth with current US presidential candidates. The missions have an authentic edge of risk here, because of course you get attached to these toy soldiers, but if someone dies they’re dead – and all that investment of time and resource goes with them. Their name and appearance can be edited, an important touch, because over multiple missions your troops will level up into various classes (sniper, scout, etc) and become much more efficient operators – mentally stronger, more health, better shots and various abilities. XCOM’s troops are each a randomly generated personality with their own name and looks, and they are a valuable commodity indeed. Nowhere is this more obvious than in your soldiers. Mismanage your base in XCOM 2 and it will go under by degrees and collapse. Many games that incorporate a meta-structure of base building silently have a safety net, meaning that the base gets better over time regardless of your involvement and it’s hard to screw it up. Supplies and personnel really are precious, and making bad calls – like setting your scientist to work for 14 days on magnetic weapons, when you have other projects that will come to fruition much quicker – can you leave your operation feeling lopsided for weeks. This side of XCOM 2 is straightforward, a case of making strategic choices rather than actually running a base, but the scarcity of resources and the impact of your decisions give it huge influence over the campaign. If you just race up the weapon and armour tech trees as fast as possible, you’ll be ignoring soft buffs to the base’s efficiency and capabilities which may have a bigger payoff in the long term. It makes every decision an important one, and comes to define your tactics in a wider sense.
Managing the base is a matter of choosing priorities – there are a number of specific rooms covering science research, weapon production, and so on, but each can only work on a single project and you’ll always have a big list. XCOM 2 features many new enemy types, including the ‘faceless’ creature seen here, which can impersonate humans. There’s a shimmering effect when you enter the map room, where a 3D globe moves towards the screen and breaks apart into constituent particles as it does so, a sight so beautiful you just want to stick it on repeat with a Pink Floyd album. The latter is an incredibly lavish production of what is basically a side-on 2D view of an ant mound, which zooms in and out of the rooms as you click through them. XCOM 2 splits between missions on the ground, where you control a group of soldiers (initially four, soon six) and fight aliens/save civilians/steal technology, and the XCOM base itself. Here the restrictions are as tight as they were but, when you’re scrabbling every day just to find supplies and keep out of sight, the whole setup makes much more sense. At once the scenario fits beautifully with how XCOM 2’s mix of turn-based strategy and base-building works – in the original game you apparently had every nation on Earth’s backing, but could still run out of doctors or scientists or troopers. The tutorial establishes this new XCOM as a ragtag rebel group, abandoned by most of its old allies (who have signed up with the alien rulers) and lacking leadership.
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