For this review, I will break the game into three parts. The First being the gameplay and the second being the story. The reason for this is because of the way the gameplay is and for some they will benefit from having it explained and having examples given. As for the story it will be explained in that story. Then finally my personal experience with the game.

First: the gameplay. The first thing to take note of is that the game is turn based. This largely allows you to plan out where everyone goes. There is the ability to add weapon attachments, which make the weapons better. There is also the ability to customize the look, and backstory of your soldiers. There are also the PCS (Personal Combat Sims) which improve specific stats of your individual soldiers that you give one to. There are also different levels of tech mostly for the weapons but also for armor and certain things in your base, which you will eventually be able to upgrade. You also in the base game have the four main classes and then rookies who have no class yet. The four main classes are the Sharpshooter, the Grenadier, the Ranger, and the Specialist.

The sharpshooter is the sniper who also has a pistol, they have two paths that they can take the Sniper or Gunslinger routes for their levels. Sniper obviously makes them better at sniping where as Gunslinger improves their pistol by giving them abilities for the pistol.

Next up is the Grenadier. The Grenadier is the heavy weapons user. They use what is basically a gatling gun and they also use a grenade launcher to launch grenades. They have two paths to travel the Demolition Expert which lets you have a bit of armor for you and the ability to destroy the enemies cover (I haven’t used this path much).

Then, there is the Heavy Gunner which lets you shred enemy armor, supress your enemy, holo target (which gives your ally’s a bonus to hit), and chain shot.

The Ranger is the shotgun-wielding, sword-carrying I-run-in-there-and-either-shoot-or-stab-my-enemies class. They tend to die a lot when I use them. They have two paths they can travel the Scout and the Assault. The Scout path path makes them sneaky and able to take half cover and make it full cover. The Assault makes you really good at stabbing the bad guy’s also you can run and gun (you can take a full movement and still shoot or over watch). It also gives you the ability to just run without triggering your enemies over watch.

Finally the Specialist – they are the hacker or healer or both depending on how you mix and mash their abilities. They have two paths the Battle Medic and Combat Hacker. The Battle Medic is a really good healer of course. The Combat Hacker is a really good hacker. They do all of this with the help of their GREMLIN.

Now for the story. Which is the part of the game that really pick up towards the end in my opinion. The reason is because at the end you are really just left rushing the ending if you reach it and don’t have other things in the game you want to do such as finish all of the research options or get all the squad upgrades and so on and so forth. Until that point you really only have story objectives. These are things you can achieve at any point but you should be wary of the Avatar project’s progress that is in effect the bottle neck on how much time you can spend mucking about. The Avatar project’s progress forces you to attack blacksites to lower its progress so you have time to achieve your goals.

The story ends with you taking the fight to the elders in the base game at least, I haven’t managed to get the DLC War of the Chosen at the time of writing this. But nevertheless, the ending of the base game leaves a hint at what will probably be the main conflict in the sequel. I will not spoil the ending because of the the amount of time it takes to get their and the amount of tries it took me to get there.

Now for my personal experiences with the game. I have played this game for 162 hours total. I have made a list of characters from multiple games who have survived and become like gods of death on the battlefield by luck. They now appear in all of my games and whenever I see one I am very happy. I have probably had over 20 of my soldiers die over multiple campaigns. I have only ever beaten this game once. I beat it on the easiest difficulty and even that was incredibly difficult. This game is hard on any difficulty. I have lost games simply because I didn’t have enough troops to continue on. I have also lost a soldier that had never been damaged for an entire game then on one mission one basic enemy got a lucky hit and crited him and insta killed him. Needless to say I was not happy with that because he was my highest level soldier.

In the end I love playing this game. If I have piqued your interest you can get Xcom 2 here.