XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen

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XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is an expansion pack for the 2016 turn-based tactics video game XCOM 2, released for Windows on August 29, 2017. Versions for macOS and Linux were released on August 31, 2017, ^[1] and a Nintendo Switch port was released on May 29, 2020.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen vient prolonger votre combat contre ADVENT, avec toujours plus de classes, d'ennemis, de missions, de cartes et plus encore. I stopped playing XCOM 2 around 2 years ago. I really liked Long War 2, but the problems that the game itself had were many and anoying. From crashes to memory leaks to 'stuck under Avenger bug' this was one of the most unstable games I've ever played. I still loved it though. I logged over 400 hours in XCOM 2 playing with LW2 and some other. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, is the expansion to the 2016 award-winning strategy game of the year. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen adds extensive new content in the fight against Advent when additional resistance factions form in order to eliminate the alien threat on Earth. In response, a new enemy, known as the “Chosen,” emerges with one goal.

Gameplay[edit]

XCOM 2 is a turn-based tactics video game. A defense team known as XCOM must repel and resist an alien invasion. The War of the Chosen expansion makes changes to XCOM 2's campaign structure and adds new enemies, story elements, new hero characters, modifiers, and more behaviors for characters.

The expansion introduces a new set of enemy aliens called the Chosen, three elite alien-human hybrid warriors tasked by the Elders to defeat XCOM and recapture the Commander; The Assassin, who relies on stealth and melee attacks; the Hunter, that uses a long range rifle that fires bullets that track their targets; and the Warlock, who uses psionic powers and can take control of several of the player's units at once. As the game progresses, the Chosen gain new exclusive abilities over time, and eventually become able to launch a direct attack on the Avenger. The Chosen continue to appear occasionally during missions even after being defeated, and can only be killed for good once their base is destroyed as well.

The game also introduces three rebel factions that antagonize each other, but grant special hero classes once their allegiance is earned; the Reapers, specialized in sniping and stealth, the Templars, who employ unique psionic abilities, and the Skirmishers, former ADVENT soldiers with exclusive equipment and tactics. Each faction also provides covert ops missions in which soldiers can be deployed to obtain extra resources, delay the Avatar project, or gather info about the Chosen's strongholds, as well as other benefits. Other new features include a revamped strategic layer and the 'Bond' system, in which pairs of soldiers develop special abilities that are accessible when both are deployed during a mission, however, when a bonded soldier is killed, their partner may temporarily enter a 'berserk mode', ignoring any player orders and attacking targets at random, or they may panic, becoming uncontrollable and fleeing from battle. For research, breakthroughs and inspirations are made to increase the speed that researchers work at, sometimes instantly being able to complete a project.

The expansion also adds a neutrally-aligned zombie-like enemy type called the Lost, former humans created during the invasion that will attack both ADVENT and XCOM in battle, along with new ADVENT units with exclusive abilities.^[2]

Other new features include a daily challenge mode, as well as the ability to create posters featuring your custom characters that will appear inside the game world.

Release[edit]

War of the Chosen was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017. It was released on August 29, 2017.^[3]

Tactical Legacy Pack[edit]

An add on for the game called 'Tactical Legacy Pack' was released in October 9, 2018. It features a series of missions set between the events of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, new items, new maps and the option to play the game using either the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown's soundtrack or an all-new soundtrack based on X-COM: UFO Defense, the first game of the original X-COM series.

Xcom 2 War Of The Chosen Tips

Reception[edit]

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen received 'generally favorable' reviews from professional critics according to review aggregator website Metacritic.^[5]

IGN's reviews editor Dan Stapleton praised the amount of variety War of the Chosen added to the mission objectives and campaign of XCOM 2. Although he found there to be some balance issues, he thought that both the Hero classes and the Chosen were great additions.^[7]Game Informer reviewer Ben Reeves was impressed by the amount of content included in the expansion, noting that it could almost have been a standalone game.^[6]

Accolades[edit]

Eurogamer ranked the game 46th on their list of the 'Top 50 Games of 2017',^[8] while Polygon ranked it 17th on their list of the 50 best games of 2017.^[9] Readers and staff of Game Informer voted it for 'Best Strategy Game'.^[10][11] It also won the award for 'Best Expansion' in PC Gamer's 2017 Game of the Year Awards;^[12] and was nominated for 'Best Strategy Game' at The Game Awards 2017,^[13] and for 'Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year' at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.^[14] It won the award for 'Game, Strategy' at the 17th Annual National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards, whereas its other nomination was for 'Game Engineering'.^[15][16]

References[edit]

1. ^'The fight for Earth rekindled — XCOM® 2: War of the Chosen released on macOS and Linux'. Feral Interactive. Retrieved 20 September 2017.
2. ^Kelly, Andy (July 12, 2017). '12 new features in XCOM 2 expansion War of the Chosen'. PC Gamer. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
3. ^Newhouse, Alex (June 12, 2017). 'E3 2017: XCOM 2 Expansion Announced, Adds Shadow Of Mordor-Esque Nemesis System'. GameSpot. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
4. ^'XCOM 2: War of the Chosen for PS4 Reviews'. Metacritic. Retrieved May 18, 2019.
5. ^ ^ab'XCOM 2: War of the Chosen for PC Reviews'. Metacritic. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
6. ^ ^abReeves, Ben (August 24, 2017). 'XCOM 2: War of the Chosen'. Game Informer. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
7. ^ ^abStapleton, Dan (August 24, 2017). 'XCOM 2: War of the Chosen Review'. IGN. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
8. ^Eurogamer staff (December 26, 2017). 'Eurogamer's Top 50 Games of 2017: 50-41'. Eurogamer. Retrieved December 30, 2017.
9. ^Polygon staff (December 18, 2017). 'The 50 best games of 2017'. Polygon. Retrieved February 12, 2018.
10. ^Game Informer staff (January 4, 2018). 'Game Informer's Best Of 2017 Awards (Page 4)'. Game Informer. Retrieved January 4, 2018.
11. ^Cork, Jeff (January 4, 2018). 'Reader's Choice Best Of 2017 Awards (Page 4)'. Game Informer. Retrieved January 7, 2018.
12. ^PC Gamer staff (December 15, 2017). 'Best Expansion 2017: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen'. PC Gamer. Retrieved December 31, 2017.
13. ^Makuch, Eddie (December 8, 2017). 'The Game Awards 2017 Winners Headlined By Zelda: Breath Of The Wild's Game Of The Year'. GameSpot. Retrieved December 31, 2017.
14. ^Makuch, Eddie (January 14, 2018). 'Game Of The Year Nominees Announced For DICE Awards'. GameSpot. Retrieved January 20, 2018.
15. ^'Nominee List for 2017'. National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers. February 9, 2018. Retrieved February 16, 2018.
16. ^'Horizon wins 7; Mario GOTY'. National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers. March 13, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2018.

External links[edit]

I’ll be honest: when War of the Chosen was announced, I wasn’t very excited. Although I deeply love XCOM, it felt like they were trying to cannibalise the second entry’s success instead of risking derailing the franchise with a third entry. Turns out they marketed the whole thing wrong.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is not yet another alternate universe storyline, but like Enemy Within did to its predecessor, it improves upon virtually every good facet of the base game. War of the Chosen takes the vanilla XCOM 2 experience, stretches it to the breaking point, and proceeds to fill in the gaps with exceptional new mechanics and toys.

The latest Firaxis' expansion shows its colours the moment the campaign starts, with a new cutscene both before and after Operation: Gatecrasher, XCOM 2’s (now obligatory) tutorial. That prologue plays mostly the same as in the base game, but after the first mission, War of the Chosen takes a turn right, and never looks back.

The main change comes in the form of new factions interwoven into the game’s narrative. Operation Gatecrasher -- formerly based on the intel of Resistance operatives -- is now acted upon information gleaned by an agent of the cloistered Reapers. They are one of three new resistance groups that rebel against ADVENT forces, and it’s up to you to unite them all under the XCOM banner and work together to eliminate the alien threat on Earth.

However, each of these factions has a counterpart in the form of the Chosen, a trio of Alien operatives whose sole purpose is to hunt down the Commander. Possessing unique traits that are procedurally generated on each playthrough, these enemies act like mini-bosses that have a chance of appearing whenever you undergo a mission in a territory they’re in. When beaten, they retreat from the battlefield, and will continue to plague your operations until you find out where they are hiding and take them out, once and for all.

Those guys make an exceptional job of making you hate them within the first 20 seconds.

Finding them, however, is a fight into and unto itself. You’ll need to run covert actions with the help of the aforementioned factions in order to accrue intel on the Chosen and locate their base of operations, and it often takes dozens of hours before you get the chance to storm their hidden stronghold. Those covert operations take place as staff assignments or two man ops that play mostly offscreen, but it the mission goes south, you are given control of the squad and must fight them out of their predicament.

When things really went south and a soldier got left behind during extraction in the base game, there was a chance they would be kidnapped, resulting in a rescue mission to bring back the imprisoned operative. War of the Chosen, however, takes it one step further, and the eponymous alien hunters go out of their way to kidnap and interrogate XCOM’s soldiers. Given the classified nature of the Resistance operations, the longer a soldier is imprisoned, the higher the chance of a Chosen finding out your location and launching an assault on the Avenger.

Which is a bad idea, since being attacked is the opposite of what you should be doing.

Regardless if the Chosen comes to XCOM or XCOM goes to the Chosen, you will need to take them out at some point, and that’s another way your new clandestine friends can be put to good use. The new factions feature extremely capable and powerful individuals, who have been fighting the alien regime for 20 years. As your relationship improves, the factions start to send those soldiers to aid the war effort, providing you with an invaluable weapon when confronting the Chosen. The faction operatives possess their own special class, giving you skills and abilities that differ from regular XCOM agents and further expand your tactical options.

The aliens also had their tactical arsenal expanded, with several units like the flamethrower-wielding Purifier or the psionically inclined Priest bolstering the ADVENT ranks. Those new units range from slight reskins to bonafide new archetypes, which offer an exciting variety in an already quite sizeable enemy roster. Making things better is the new photobooth mode, that allows you to take a squad pic after you finished the mission.

The photobooth is a bit underwhelming and obtuse, but its a great way to capitalise on that post-battle adrenaline.

Of course, this plethora of new units would be pretty boring if you had to fight them on the same old randomly generated maps, but War of the Chosen successfully delivers on that point as well. New environments, like sewers, tunnels, and abandoned cities are added in the expansion, with the latter being especially interesting. Devastated by alien bioweapons during the original invasion, the old metropoles are now filled to the brim with the Lost: aggressive zombie-like creatures that are attracted to the sounds of battle.

In order to deal with their large numbers, the game features a new mechanic: killing a Lost with a primary weapon grants you a free action, effectively allowing a single soldier to keep shooting endlessly -- as long as they have ammo and kill a Lost with every shot. That helps you manage the situation, but not enough to feel safe against the Lost; they come in swarms, quickly overrunning humans and aliens alike, and provide a very different experience to the usual warfare found in XCOM 2.

XCOM 2 makes better zombies than all proper zombie games in the market.

These new additions do change the feel of the game, from military guerrilla to something more campy and dramatic. Gone are the quasi Tom Clancy-esque infiltrations of city centers to attain an objective, and in are incursions into long forgotten derelict cities and ornate alien wildlands. The expanded focus on narrative adds a more theatrical edge to the emergent gameplay of the franchise, which further dissociates the base game from the expansion.

One of the ways this narrative gives actuality to what once was imagined is via the new bonds system, a feature that allows two soldiers that work cohesively as a duo to form a squadmate bond. The nature of this bond is purposefully left vague -- friends, brothers, lovers -- but the rewards are real enough: bonded operatives get special abilities and bonuses, from aim boosts to extra actions and more, adding another layer to this already drastically complex tactical simulation.

And for some reason, their animation always looks like they're arguing.

And speaking of complex, the strategy layer also gets a revamp. Covert ops and factions relations are coordinated via the Geoscape, as is the newest monthly Resistance Orders. Featuring XCOM and faction “cards” that provides boons like reduced debris clearing time or cheaper recruitment of rookies in specific regions, this new feature allows players to prioritize their personal strategy every month.

There is also a SITREP system that dynamically adds new modifiers to specific missions, such as larger enemy numbers or extra concealment charges to XCOM operatives. These alterants serve as another layer of procedural generation to customise your experience, and the new mission parameters mostly succeed in changing the pace. They do not appear in every sortie, but are visible in the Geoscape beforehand when affecting an operation.

There was no change to existing rooms in the Avenger, but you do get a number of new buildable facilities.

Besides the SITREP system, War of the Chosen also brings new operations to the mix. Taking out ADVENT generals, destroying uplink nodes, and rescuing Resistance agents are just a few of half a dozen new mission types, all either completely new or upgrades of older versions. Terror events were also revamped, now featuring proper resistance fighters and doing away with individual civilians that must be evacuated. The focus of those ADVENT retaliation missions now rely on taking out the attackers before they wipe out the camp, and you must clear little pockets of activity as you sweep the area engaging every enemy in sight. The AI resistance fighters actually help you, by shooting aliens with unerring accuracy (but causing very little damage), which helps mitigate the increased number of enemies in these operations.

That perfect accuracy works for both sides, however, and it is one of the flaws in War of the Chosen. It represents the biggest problem with the expansion: for all the new things it introduced, XCOM 2’s most egregious flaws haven’t been touched. NPC interaction consists of zero missed shots, with ADVENT troops one shooting civilians from across the map with 100% accuracy. Enemies are all-knowing, capable of seeing around corners and detecting you in situations where you clearly should have the upper hand. Stealth is still actively discouraged, as inactive patrols magically home into your position if your squad spends too many turns concealed. Those design decisions are made with the intent to up the stakes and keep the player emotionally engaged, but end up backfiring and only serve to make the game feel artificial and unfair.

In the end, however, War of the Chosen is just as good -- if not better -- than XCOM 2. It takes everything that was good about the base game and improves it, adding a ton of new features and overall making a brilliant game even more complex. This expansion, like Enemy Within before it, managed to take an already outstanding experience into something truly exceptional. Very few franchises manage to so competently unite amazingly polished gameplay, brilliant strategy, and a wonderfully constructed universe -- let alone do it twice -- but XCOM did it.

Polished gameplay, brilliant strategy, and a wonderfully constructed universe are complimented by a host of tasteful new features.

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