XCOM 2 - we disassemble the mechanics and look at "here in exactly the same, only smaller and different"
The second XCOM from the announcement immediately promised a sea of delicious - and the flying base on the ship, squeezed from the aliens, and underground resistance, and hybrids of aliens and people, and in general a full fly.
Of course, the guys solved two problems at once:
- Make “as it was” - with sectoids, base defense, tree of sciences.
- And at the same time, do not repeat the last game, where all this already happened.
If you look at the first UFO - this is, in fact, the history of the Vietnam War from the point of view of the Vietnamese. Suddenly, the aggressor comes running two heads technologically higher. You need to use all possible methods from making ammunition from cans to throwing pieces of enemy soap in a hollow with bees. And if you are lucky, you will be able to capture a whole tank, from which you get a radio interception station, a lot of different metal, a bunch of explosives for mines from ammunition and even rubber slippers.
So the essence of the second “new” game remained the same - only now we are playing for, as in the song, “yellow-faced”. And we already brought down the Phantom. After all, the main part of the interest in the XCOM series is that you do not know what's next in the war with the invaders. If the whole tree of sciences is known, all the steps of the reptiles are recorded, then it’s just a job, not a break into the unknown.
That is why the new game had to be exactly the same, but completely different.
I remind the plot
20 years have passed since the first invasion. All countries have signed agreements with aliens. The latter feel at home on Earth, wandering around the cities, started their own militia under the pathos name “Advent”, buried everything with monuments where miserable people are drawn to a sublime and beautiful ether. And they are building genetic engineering clinics. Still constantly carry out "warning arrests", preparing for something big. In general, the herd has ripened, harvest time.
You play as a resistance cell, which has nothing but a former alien transporter, which has been converted to a flying headquarters. It is possible to raise it into the air from a delightful dungeon only at the very beginning of the game. The new “Avenger” is the same underground base as always, only now it is necessary to “bite” deep into it, through various man-made garbage left from the explosion inside something beautiful from the weapons of the first part.
In the course of the play you will have to visit almost the entire planet, establish contacts with resistance cells everywhere and build several repeaters - replacing the good old auxiliary bases “without nifig”, but with radars.
As usual, they are waiting for you: the research branch (already almost linear), the engineering branch (random) and the base module construction branch (linear, which brings teeth together). By the way, it’s important: you have almost no branches left that do not give anything practical. That is, the balance in science is very simple - discovered something - replenished combat equipment. In the first part there were schemes of alien ships, all sorts of descent races, autopsies and interrogations - and all this without guarantee of result. Our scientists, however, take up the matter only in order to spoil something alien and collect their own brand “Victory” from its details.
The main game process is base management, the choice of research-manufactures, picking in the squad's equipment and sorties on missions. The types of missions are familiar from the first games: terror (now pativas come to resistance cells), guarding VIPs or taking VIPs with you, storming enemy factories (analogous to capturing bases), as well as all sorts of “run to the mailbox in 8 turns” and all that that was in the coolest Enemy Within.
At the same time - almost not a word about the resistance. You are again at the forefront of attack, although judging by the world, this is not at all true.
Let me remind you how it was before
Before starting XCOM 2, I was well prepared - I passed once again the first UFO (podosovy) at maximum difficulty. Let me remind you that there are two features - 8 bases from the second or third month, and practical defenselessness in the face of the airwaves with 6-8 sectopods to your base (before the advent of psi and blaster installations). Plasma hovertanks without saving-loading change to sectopods while protecting the base in the proportion of 3 tanks and a couple of infantry per enemy machine. This is hardcore.
When the Sky Ranger comes down to the plate, brave guys in the form of an XCOM project with integrated communications jump out and level all the sheds and buildings with rockets - this is also hardcore. When accidentally fallen unconscious after 8 shots from a laser rifle, the crissalide must be guarded in eight - too. And when only the first average alien scout is taken as a whole, and the rest are packed with grenades in the open door to avoid losses.
All in all, very realistic. There are no major logical inconsistencies - I am ready to believe that it is necessary to fight with guests from Mars in this way. Amid the technological superiority of the aliens, there are only two things that can help in a war - tactical intellectual superiority and a crowd of meat. And we use both of these levers.
Now Jagged Alliance 2 is a revolution game in a small banana republic. There’s a textbook on how to make revolutions with mercenaries, there’s even a detailed intelligence report. The most important thing is to get local support. You communicate a lot with the population, use connections, capture cities, train the police, use the enemy’s resources against him. It’s not just Area Control, it’s Che Guevara’s style of tearing and gaining a foothold. And around there are a lot of scenes with those who benefit from and who are disadvantageous with this state of affairs.
Do you think XCOM 2 is a nice hybrid of the two?
But no. This is a console game. Therefore, in it the plot and any letters are generally dangerous for sales.
As a result, the world's population does not even know what they are fighting for. In theory, the first main task would be to raise the masses of the enemy - to seize the local TV channel Advent, fly to the broadcasting satellite, constantly compost the brains of residents from their repeaters ... But no. We are hiding in the story until the end, because aliens, like, do not even notice us against the background of everything that happens. They do not notice us especially brightly when we begin to blow up their key factories.
It would be more interesting for aliens
Well, of course, again in this thing fat traces of a board game are traced. Moreover, I am sure that aliens even in the computer version are trying by all means to be almost on a par with us. Why? Yes, because they, like in the first "new" XCOM, do not know how to walk on the map themselves. If you end the turn without aliens in visibility, you have a 100% guarantee that no shots will be fired at you before the next move (well, except for the response, if someone runs out).
Classic action cards. The third is sometimes hidden, you can see.
Hacking Dice Roll
This card is a ready-made board game field.
The mechanics of the appearance of the enemy is the same: you open a piece of the map, and there the “blip” (movement mark) turns into a detachment of the enemy. True, now we have a few reptiles that are pre-arranged on the map (guarding boxes and patrolling story buildings), plus enemies do not always teleport from point to point - patrols, for example, honestly go along their route. But if you sit in ambush for a long time on any secondary mission (moves 6-7 so that it is possible when there is no timer), you can see the miracle of teleporting an enemy pack.
So, I have a strong feeling that playing the board would be more interesting for the aliens. Moreover, they are almost as difficult as the new X-team. And they are also beautiful, really beautiful and cool - you want to see statues of ethers in large cities, and agitation is directly a cool constructivism of VKhUTEMAS. That's who has great PR people.
Base people
Compared to the plot of the first part, too much has changed. It used to be that we had a bunch of attendants on the base, including cleaners. Scientists - 50 at once, plus, if you look into the old Ufopedia - these are only those that are with us, and the laboratory still fumbles with the whole world, which allows you to quickly make discoveries. Engineers - 24 snouts minimum. A soldier - dofiga, you don’t even need to get to know each other - anyway they are new every time. And that was normal.
In resistance, there are now only a few units. In the best days, there will be five or six engineers on the base, eight scientists, well. At the same time, every engineer (cool!) Has a job - he delves into the rubble in search of materials, then he builds a module, then he sits at the console and manages communications. People can be assigned almost everywhere - in the power plant you can increase production, in the center of retraining - to treat soldiers faster and so on. The problem is that scientists can only their tasks, engineers - only their own. You can’t take an unnecessary recruit and send it to poke around in the rubble. Take the engineer to "shoot" too.
Well, the main question - in missions they shoot plasma so much fun that I just want to ask: where are the people with disabilities? In Enemy Within, the solution is simple - take a fighter, draw his arms and legs, screw inward a large robot in the Warchamer style. And then a colonel in a wheelchair could crawl around the base and sit in touch - but no. There are not even such plot comrades.
Well, yes. It’s not very clear how our brave scientists are researching together, three or three, physics that they don’t know. For 6 days. If there was a connection with other cells, you could dial them in dozens. So no, picking yourself. Accordingly, again, it would be logical or it would be to make a lot of them, or to tie specific discoveries to specific scientists. We need to deal with a plasma pistol - they flew to the aliens, repulsed a specialist, put him to work for us. Direct penetration into the "Maas Biolabs" - there are some rudiments, but everything is simplified to linear research.
On the other hand, the engineering branch is very organic - from all that we take on missions, it is possible to make useful things. The new armor for the detachment is obtained, for example, as follows: it is necessary to fill up 6 fighters heavier, and then drag their corpses to the base. Engineers will take the armor, rebuild for us - and, voila - a new collection of fashionable outfits.
By the way, the outfits really became fashionable, which also does not integrate with the world, but it is very consistent with the audience. It is a real pleasure to look at the fighters during loading in the Ranger, they look like just painted soldiers. By the way, now everyone can change their hair color, cut their mustache and color their guns. If the latter is practical - you can mark the classes with the color of armor, and upgrades with the color of the gun, then about the expression on your face and other things - well, it's really a real Tamagotchi pet. Well, at least the situation in the barracks cannot be changed. And that would be SIMS.
Cool finds
There were a lot of finds in balance and micromanagement. Here you feel really thoughtful work. You know how it happens: you still have a hundred open features, but only half of them manage to be in time for testing. There is something similar here - they obviously finished the work on the first part. Plus a huge rework of reviews. Let's get a look.
The first is camouflage. This is the mode of entering the territory of the enemy when he still does not know about you. A very cool thing, because the main problem of downtime is to “sag” the first moves in all parts of the game. And here it turns out that the first moves can be done without fear: immediately run over long distances. Well, a spectacular way out of an ambush, when a whole pack of the enemy falls - cool! The gameplay optimization is obvious.
The second is a lot of different small sketches for the interface. Please note that the download process has changed a lot - now on any long wait you read something first. It used to be in its infancy, but here it is directly clearly visible. One more thing with expectation - the constant glitches of augmented reality and screens - despite the peppy “five-five-five” in the report from the Ranger pilot, our connection is actually buggy, and each such glitch falls precisely on the period of the enemy’s turn. Another minus a second or two on the wait is subjective.
Volgograd is now in Siberia, by the way.
Here’s a fundamental improvement: fly back - read the statistics of the match:
Now you can’t take prey from some missions. This is really awesome for balance.
Finally, there was damage when falling from a height - the second floors of buildings fall if the first one is demolished. This creates a lot of fun tactical situations. By the way, most of the turrets are killed by a simple grenade - for some reason they do not survive the fall of even a low floor.
Nicknames for fighters are very useful - before in all games it was necessary to remember the last name, first name, and now experienced ones have nicknames. Cool when you have six fighters, and not two hundred, as in the first part. True, these nicknames are not shown everywhere - for example, not in the center of retraining.
And sometimes they coincide - I have two "wilderness" in the squad.
Paphos is fun and heroic.
One of the most powerful scenes.
It is very cool that wounded soldiers can go to the defense of the base and on the last mission - this was once really not enough.
A fire fighter is stewed in water. A lot of things are burning in this game - both the aliens and our friends of the resistance carefully store up fuel and lubricants wherever they gather. Therefore, fountains on missions - for a reason.
They all attached excellent facial expressions and improved movement. In addition to really tasty small things from planting a staffed squad to punching windows with a cannon (how beautifully they jump!), There is also an alien animation. The funniest thing is the snake animation. She's crazy: just watch them slide down the roof of the pipe. Together with the ability to paint our fighters as models, we can say that the victory of the graphics has been achieved - now everything that the fantasy used to do does the engine.
On maps it’s always clear which way to go - this is another unobtrusive indication of what to do (after all, to hell with us, not the intelligence report, or there’s a satellite scan, or at least something by hand from the witness). Do not get lost, ahead of Advent infrastructure.
Even in the mission about Warcraft, she has a
very good trailer with a tour of the ship - this is generally a great idea. A good story with the "boss", that is, us - and advice. Great ending when - spoiler - we turn out to be ether. A very well-thought-out alien motivation for abductions and other things - something that was missing before, when until the very end of the new XCOM there was a lack of understanding of what they were doing and why. And then everything fell into place.
The last brick The
black market is now a point on the map, and not part of the interface - it is also very atmospheric.
Steep continuity - there are missions with the taking of plates (albeit extremely rare obliquely inscribed), and the best news is that the hyperbrain from Mars is with us again! Now it’s even a lot, and this is a separate unit. With tentacles. And yes, it can be captured.
Hello from the first part. The aliens came out to pee on the tundra, and here, after 4 hours - we.
Psionics - New Magic
In the first part, psionics was as simple as a stump - scanning with a brain probe, panic to stir up the psyche of a powerful enemy, then capturing consciousness. Here is a whole branch of magic - and physical blows through the walls, and remote detonation of grenades on the enemy’s belt, and all sorts of defense buffs, and, most importantly, the creation of another action point for an ally.
Brain control is now one-time and for the entire mission - an alien from under it does not go away. This immediately fixed a whole feature of the tactics of the last series - to make sure that the captured enemy will die in 3 turns, or to drive him away. Shooting at the captured reptile is now also possible (finally). And yet - if everyone sways sequentially and in missions, then the psionics sway on the base and experience is not saved. But you can choose the branches yourself. Also an interesting model.
What is wrong
It seems that the “golden age” principle was applied to the fighters (balancing with the timing of development - a sniper is cool among beginners, among special support level specialists, and heavy infantry among cool ones). Well, they got a dofiga of strange abilities like a quick pistol fire at a sniper. As a result, the same sniper is one of the best front-line fighters.
A lot of abilities on random. The best example is a double shot of a heavy infantryman. He shoots with low accuracy (in general, the probability of getting somewhere around 50%), and if he hits, he shoots with low accuracy again. A sniper has a series - if he got and killed, then another shot is given. Spectacular, crashing, but if you don’t play save-load, you don’t need to.
The optimal composition of the squad is generally funny. Due to the constant timers and the need to run to the other side of the map, snipers and support fighters become very uncomfortable, so in the second part of the game they become completely unnecessary. As a result, two heavy infantrymen with massive fire, two rangers with double shots and two psionics with a “zero strike”, “inspiration” and “break” in the role of magicians go to the final mission.
It seems that a certain story with the combinations of fighters was laid in the game - for example, a heavy infantryman knows how to pick armor, and a sniper shoots at a rip-off. As a result, it turned out not so at all - the combining skills of fighters are vanishingly few.
Timers appeared in most missions. The main tactics on high difficulty in the last part was simple - a competent ambush and wait until the bastards get out. Intelligence was done by one fighter who ran far and hard - and from behind grenade launchers and snipers. Apparently, the developers did not like this style of game, and they decided to make sure that our squad constantly ran along the map and burst into other people's constructions. In general - it was possible, but the unpleasant sensations from the timers remained. Moreover, in places, these timers are unrealistically contrived - either our SkyRanger cannot fly the extra 50 meters to evacuate (I wonder why), then the aliens give SOS from their plate within 10 minutes after pressing the alarm button (probably dialing on the dialup). In general, it is strange.
In planning ambushes from camouflage, the capabilities of the fighters are also quite crookedly used. The simplest thing is that you cannot cover an ambush with two grenades at once: there is no action planning. Yes, and it is not necessary - the game is about something else. But this "plasticine" limitation of the interface is sometimes simply enraging.
Our Ranger is the safest place in the world. On a number of missions, he just hangs out somewhere nearby, there is already an evacuation cable sticking out. But no one ever sees him. And no one ever shoots before the last but one splash screen. Well, there are also enemy transports that regularly land troops to us - fast and maneuverable. So, if I were in the place of the aliens, I would boldly sacrifice one of them just by ramming them with the Ranger - but no.
Enemies again get new technologies with us. And it really infuriates - in a world of victorious capitalism, enemies must be with heavy weapons right away. For half a year around the world, aliens did as much as they could not in the previous 20 years - and they improved the turrets around the planet, brought new races, and even brought sectopods where they used to be frail sectoids.
By the way, I thought the whole game that they were hiding something from me, and these 20 years were gone. Think for yourself: what did the aliens do during this period? That's real - what did they do, that everything dangerous happened only at that moment when the game started? It appears that they pushed speeches and developed cities. And nothing more dangerous. Everything looks like a year or two after the first contact, but not 20.
Or such a trifle - our fighters constantly use either the military or the police jargon of the twentieth century. These are the negotiations of the Americans - 10-4 instead of “accepted”, “Menace 1-5” instead of “thirty-third” and others. He plays cool on the atmosphere, not really on the realism of the world. I do not believe that in 20 years nonprofessionals (judging by the biographies, by the way, my detachment consisted of 75% escaped prisoners) will use the jargon in exactly the same way.
In general, enemies are stupid champions. How can you not find your own huge transport ship, which constantly flies back and forth and spoils life for everyone - I can’t imagine. There, the Americans, a long time ago, found all military bases in Australia, promising the citizens a game - cellular for the coordinates of a black helicopter. And thousands of people crawled google maps to get the phone. And here you will catch one hefty object without shielding. Yes, these figs even knocked down the first Ikkomites with shit and stick planes, damn it!
Or, a scientist knows about the original sectoid (up to its DNA features), but does not know about Elirium. Surprise, damn it, what we found in the engine!
Look who meets the Ranger in establishing contacts with resistance in the Far East:
Again, you can’t specifically punch walls with shots. You can’t miss someone - just completely past all the fighters. There are no helmets again - that is, they seem to have a plot, but in fact there are none - convenient for the interface, but terribly unrealistic.
Summary
In general, we have before us a beautiful game in the spirit of clip thinking for generation Z. A minimum of text, a maximum of Instagram battles. The beauty of effects is more important than realism. Hardcore scares buyers away. Plot? Well, somehow converge. The atmosphere of the world? There is some kind, but it seems to have been severely cut for the sake of gameplay.
Here is how this screen saver. And the place, it seems, is good, and the bends of the female armor (instead of the universal one), it seems, do not interfere with the operation, but these fucking glamorous flashlights for everything and secret penetration - don’t tell my slippers.
I played with pleasure, but constantly remembered the first old UFO with nostalgia. Here's what was missing:
These are such Broadacasts from official resistance on the air:
Discussions of our actions by the government (and a blow to Elliot's face):
Good briefings with normal graphics, diagrams, intelligence reports, interrogation data:
Well, judging by the cards, at least the dashboard will be exactly atmospheric:
You can imagine what kind of game it could be. And, in general, there is one simple point that could remove the unreality of what is happening - these are contacts with resistance. Game-mechanically, they would either throw up a new technology (themselves), or they would ask to produce guns, or we would see their research center, where we could give part of the science, or something else would happen like outsourcing the production of a tank. Other cells, too, could lead part of the plot, and not rely entirely on us. But all this would require far from prefix management with tables in the end - therefore, apparently, it turned out to be overboard.
In general, of course, it’s definitely worth playing, XCOM 2 is a damn good and successful alteration of the first part. But at the same time, alas, she should not be a legend.