XCOM 2: War of the Chosen Game Review

Released: August 29th 2017

Developer: Fireaxis Games

Publisher: 2K Games

Price: £34.99

Certificate: 16

Formats: PC, PS4 and Xbox One

Format Played: PC

XCOM 2 stood out last year as one of the best and most demanding strategy games on the modern gaming market. For the 2017 expansion, Jake Solomon and Fireaxis sought to go above and beyond typical downloadable content to deliver a cohesive and wholesome package.

War of the Chosen is priced just below that of a traditional AAA PC release and yet it features a tremendous amount of content; the revamped campaign starts with three new soldier types and their respective factions. Reapers are masters of stealth and scouting, Skirmishers specialise in mobility and close-range combat and the Templars feature a slew of special psionic abilities that allow for a more aggressive approach. After an introduction through a new story mission, these factions will become a crucial part of the resistance effort. Covert operations allow your troops to take on a wide variety of actions from sabotaging the Avatar project to give you some much needed time to even hiring fresh staff and deliver bonus upgrades to your troops. As you gain influence with each faction, they contribute to a new card system which grants even more tactical options; this could be adding more movement options for missions on the ground or increasing the speed of construction at your base. But with new allies come new nemeses and the XCOM 2 expansion brings in the Chosen, three mighty alien disciples that dog your progress throughout the campaign. They have a chance of showing up on missions, ambushing covert actions and sabotaging your operations in many ways. On top of all that, they grow tougher over the course of the game, gathering more abilities. They’re a brutal challenge that ensures things never become unbalanced; managing to take one of them down feels suitably awe-inspiring.

But it doesn’t stop there; soldiers now form bonds with each-other than can be levelled up the more missions they go on together; pairing up two powerful soldiers and putting them in the new training centre room as they rank up can deliver some powerful attack combos alongside the ability to grant extra action points and negate negative effects. The panic effect (which saw soldiers miss a turn) from the base game has also been revamped; a collection of negative traits including fear of specific enemies can either be resisted or cause the soldier to go berserk or overly-cautious. These can be removed with the Infirmary room aboard the Avenger which has also been upgraded with the new “Breakthrough” options in the research field; occasionally Dr Tygan will point out a random area of research only available for a limited time which you can choose to proceed with or ignore. The final feature of War of the Chosen is the way it implements previous DLCs; Alien rulers such as the Viper King and Berserker Queen now guard ADVENT facilities and robotic Spark Units can now be constructed at your mobile base. All told, War of the Chosen is absolutely bursting with new features; there’s even a challenge mode with weekly leader boards which offers standalone missions to test your strategy skills.

The core gameplay of War of the Chosen remains unchanged, it’s still about moving your soldiers across the map, making effective use of concealment to set up ambushes alongside two action points to kill (or at the very least disable) the aliens. But the new facets in the expansion give way to more mission variety which makes for a more unpredictable campaign all-around. Several supply raids now see you tussling with ADVENT over who can extract the most crates by marking them for pickup and some underground missions might have you assassinating a key ADVENT commander. The retaliation missions (in which you defend your resistance havens from alien attack) have been massively improved with basic resistance soldiers that help fight the aliens on-site, but my personal favourites are the stealth rescue operations; occasionally a soldier may be captured by the Chosen and you’ll have to break them out. This results in a much slower paced mission where if you play your cards right, an extraction can be carried out without needing to engage the enemy at all. One enemy you will inevitably engage are The Lost; essentially zombie hordes decaying from years of alien radiation, this foe can be dangerous in groups but if you place your shots carefully, you’ll be refunded action points to thin the herd and push forward; the Lost will attack aliens too so it’s often worth letting them fight it out on occasion. ADVENT may have commissioned new enemies with the psionic Priests, flame-throwing Purifiers and sinister Spectres but when the titular Chosen join the fight, your heart will often drop as things get even tougher; their central strategy involves knocking soldiers into a daze so they can take valuable knowledge or worse, capture them and retreat from the field. This will call for a more diverse set of tactics; it’s worth sending your Reaper ahead to scout out enemies first or use the Skirmisher’s grapple hook to reach a higher position. Varying up the gameplay even more are SITREPS; these are positive or negative effects which spice up missions by bringing in The Lost or giving your squad the ability to re-enter concealment. Difficulty wise, the unforgiving side of combat is de-emphasised towards the start of the campaign to allow newcomers to get to grips with the new faction units but things quickly heat up after being introduced to the new factions.

Fireaxis has also worked to improve the technical performance for War of the Chosen; all the in-game action happens much more quickly now with more fluid animations and drastically reduced slowdown. In a way, this can make the proceedings even more intense as enemy attacks, particularly ones that kill one of your soldiers in a single hit feel more abrupt and lethal. I did come across a few game crashes when undertaking retaliation missions and installing mods but they didn’t occur too much to damage the flow and were easily fixable. Some new war and battle themes create a more epic feeling on each mission and the modding scene on the Steam workshop remains open with more content continuing to flow into the game. It’s great to see the developers take player feedback onboard and produce a more stable and flowing title.

Aside from a few crashes mainly caused by mods, War of the Chosen delivers phenomenal value, oodles of new gameplay facets and sharpens the original game’s strategic tactics to a razor-sharp edge. In short, it will likely go down as the best gaming expansion of 2017.

Rating: 9.5/10 (Superb)

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