The creators of XCOM are making what sounds very much like MARVEL TACTICS

A leak from the upcoming E3 video game convention has revealed that Take Two and their subsidiary Firaxis are developing a licensed Marvel turn-based tactics game. It sounds like some or most of the team behind the hugely popular XCOM relaunch series are working on the title.

There's been a bit of a fad for properties spinning off turn-based tactical games and whacking the name "Tactics" after the title. This started with the classic Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) and has recently seen entries like Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics (2017) and Gears Tactics (2020). However, the more recent iterations have been somewhat lacking in depth, often featuring passable combat but no strategic metagame to make things more interesting. If the XCOM team are working on this, I'd assume they'd be putting together a really good strategic layer as well. Hell, XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen with their Avenger totally-not-a-helicarrier and increasingly colourful, semi-superhero soldiers weren't far off being Marvel games already.

The last XCOM game, Chimera Squad (notably not made by the "main" XCOM team who were working on another project, possibly this Marvel game), experimented with stronger narrative elements and fully-voiced, pre-generated squad members who could not die in the traditional manner (instead being injured, with a full squad knock-out requiring a reload), which felt incongruous in an XCOM game but makes more sense as a dry run for a licensed game.

More news should come at E3, where Take Two will be unveiling their new projects on 14 June. As well as this Marvel game, reportedly they will confirm a Borderlands spin-off and a new project from the Mafia studio (but not a new game in that series). However, don't expect any news on Grand Theft Auto VI from Take Two's other studio Rockstar, as that game is still likely two to three years off.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

The alien occupation of Earth, aided by the ADVENT military force, continues unabated. XCOM, the organisation committed to defending Earth from alien invasion which is now acting as an underground resistance, has scored some major victories, inspiring the aliens to summon three powerful hunters - the Chosen - to destroy XCOM once and for all. But XCOM also has some new allies to bring to the fight...

War of the Chosen is a huge expansion for the strategy game XCOM 2. Just as XCOM: Enemy Within (2013) completely updated and revised XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012), improving every element of the game until it shone to perfection, so War of the Chosen attempts to do the same thing for XCOM 2.

In this game's case, it was more sorely needed. The vanilla edition of XCOM 2, released in 2016, was a fine game but also a slightly frustrating one. The turn-based combat section of the game was altogether more polished, more interesting, more varied and just plain more fun than that of the original game and its expansion. However, the strategic metagame was messier, less focused and less interesting than that of the original game. This left XCOM 2 as being a huge step forward over its predecessor in one area and a huge step back in another.

War of the Chosen certainly solves the biggest problem by giving you much more to do on the world map. The original generic Resistance faction has now split into three distinct groups you can ally with: the Reapers, an elite squad of ninja-like sharpshooters; the Skirmishers, a group of ADVENT soldiers who have escaped alien control and rebelled; and the Templars, a group of humans who have embraced the aliens' psionic powers. Winning the trust of each faction requires some work on the map screen, and in turn getting their support means you can aid them through covert actions, joint operations where XCOM and the factions work alongside one another in off-screen adventures. These operations also allow you to level up your soldiers outside of the traditional missions. The rewards - more intel, more Resistance contacts (allowing you to contact new regions without having to build more comm rooms) and even sabotaging the Avatar Project - are impressive and powerful. The factions are also fun in the sense that they had distinct characters to the game, voiced by veterans of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The aliens, of course, can also bring more friends to the party. There are now 3 powerful special alien characters who are each given control of one-third of the globe. Doing missions in one of those regions can see the Chosen intervening in the battle, giving you a mini-boss to fight. The Chosen can be driven off (but not killed, yet) and they can also achieve their own objectives (usually knocking one of your troops out and scanning them to learn clues to tracking down the Avenger, XCOM's mobile headquarters). Defeat the Chosen and they gain weaknesses (such as a fear of explosives or greater vulnerability to snipers). Fail to do so and they become stronger, eventually amassing enough knowledge to assault the Avenger directly. This has a whiff of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis System, a great game mechanic I'm surprised more titles haven't stolen. With the help of the new rebel factions, however, you can also track down each Chosen's lair, eventually mounting an assault to finish them off once and for all.

There are also new ADVENT troop types (including a flamethrower soldier and one with psi abilities) and a new, neutral faction called the Lost. Effectively zombies, the Lost are humans adversely affected by those green alien pods dropped all over the globe at the start of Enemy Unknown. These appear in missions set in abandoned cities and are attracted by explosions and gunfire. Canny players can trick the lost into attacking ADVENT forces, which is very entertaining.

On top of this, you also have new weapons, new research and much greater character customisation, including the ability to form bonds between pairs of soldiers which increases their combat effectiveness when deployed together. Soldiers also become tired after missions and need to be given time off to recuperate, encouraging you to recruit more soldiers rather than just relying one one single super team for every job. There's also tweaks to gameplay, such as offering the ability to reduce the number of time-limited missions from the vanilla game (which everyone hated).

The result is a bigger, brasher and more confident game than the original XCOM 2. There's a lot more going on and you have a lot more choices to make which are more meaningful. The game gives you more control and you do feel like you're running a worldwide resistance movement as you order covert operations to be undertaken, research some much-needed new tech or decide to launch an assault on an ADVENT base. War of the Chosen fixes most of XCOM 2's problems in one fell swoop.

There are, however, some issues. The onslaught of all this new stuff means that campaigns now last a lot longer than previously (my first XCOM 2 playthrough lasted 30 hours, whilst my War of the Chosen playthrough lasted about 50), which means a typical campaign now goes on so long that the game risks getting stale. One of the key issues with XCOM 2, the ridiculous length of time it took to resolve an action (3 days to pick up supplies when you know their precise location? 8 days to rescue a stranded engineer?), remains firmly in place and can make the early game unnecessarily punishing as it takes forever to get going. However, when you do hit a stride the sheer range of option and missions available also means that you will be levelling characters to max level very quickly, leaving you with a huge roster of top-tier soldiers for most of the game who can curb-stomp everything. This leaves the new alien threats, particularly the Chosen, feeling underwhelming as a threat once you hit the mid-game and utterly trivial in the late game period.

There's also the fact that although War of the Chosen dramatically changes an XCOM 2 campaign, the still basic structure is in place underneath and, once you get over the new factions and the Chosen, the game won't offer any new surprises. This was also true of Enemy Within, but in that case it was a very modestly-priced expansion pack which also replaced the original game. War of the Chosen, on the other hand, has been sold as a full-price game which requires XCOM 2 to run, making it a fairly expensive undertaking (less so these last few weeks, when it's been more readily available on sale). For such a higher premium people might be forgiven for expecting much more content. Firaxis have realised this themselves, recently adding the Tactical Legacy Pack which adds more weapons and equipment, more map types and a 28-mission, story-focused campaign, which certainly helps add variety to the game.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen (****½) improves the XCOM 2 experience and makes it a more rewarding, more fun, deeper and more compelling game. Both the strategic and tactical options gameplay are improved, and there's a richness in the experience that very few games can match. It's not perfect, though, and occasionally the game can feel a bit too whacky and crazy for a series originally rooted in paranoia and horror, whilst nearly doubling the length of the game risks it getting stale.

The game is available now on PC and via the online stores for X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

XCOM 2: Tactical Legacy Pack

Released back in 2016, XCOM 2 was a worthy, if flawed, sequel to the classic 2012 turn-based strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown (itself a remake of the 1993 game X-COM: UFO Defence) and its expansion, Enemy Within. A year later Firaxis released War of the Chosen, an interesting expansion pack to the game which, inexplicably, they decided to sell at the same price as a full-price game. I demurred on purchasing it until it came down in price.

It's taken well over a year, but the expansion has finally come down in price and I'll be checking it out in full soon. However, to make the expansion more worthwhile and better value for money, Firaxis have also released a new expansion for the expansion, the "Tactical Legacy Pack" to make it even better value for money, as it's completely free. Taking place between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 proper, the expansion charts how the XCOM organisation brought itself back from the brink of extinction after the aliens successfully conquered Earth.

The Tactical Legacy Pack contains several key parts, including a collection of challenge maps which pits your team against a tough objective as well as new items and maps (some of them revamped versions of fan-favourite maps from the original game and its expansion). However, the meat of the pack is something new to the franchise: a narrative and story-focused single-player campaign. A standard game of XCOM consists of two parts, a strategic metagame where you recruit soldiers, research new technology and make decisions on what operations to carry out next against the aliens, and a tactical, turn-based combat mode where you deploy the troops you've chose and outfitted in battle.

The Tactical Legacy campaign throws out the strategic part of the game in favour of a series of missions. There's no research, flying around the globe with the Avenger or recruiting new soldiers (at least, not in the traditional way). Instead you go from battle to battle to battle, with objectives being laid out during the loading screens and in-mission voiceovers. It's an experimental change to the standard XCOM formula and one that is quite interesting, removing as it does the agonising decisions on what troops to bring on missions and what equipment to use, as your troops are selected and outfitted for you.

The campaign is divided into four episodes, each consisting of seven missions. That's 28 missions to get through the story, and will in total take a player between 10 and 15 hours to traverse (depending on the difficulty mode you select). Each of the four episodes has a different focus: "Blast from the Past" sees Bradford (aka "Central") escaping from the fall of XCOM HQ and teaming up with some other survivors to carry out a mission. Along the way he and his new team attract more support and they realise they could transition XCOM into a guerrilla resistance force. "It Came from the Sea" is a nod at the 1994 game X-COM: Terror from the Deep, with XCOM having to fight off an invasion of aquatic chryssalids (sadly, there aren't any actual underwater missions). "Avenger Assemble" sees Lily Shen reluctantly taking to the field as she scavenges crashed Interceptors, UFOs and Skyrangers to get the rebel carrier, the Avenger, ready for launch. "The Lazarus Project" sees both Bradford and Lily entering the field to recruit more elite soldiers for XCOM.

Completing these missions also unlocks weapons, soldier recruits, maps and some new enemy types, all of which will then appear in a subsequent War of the Chosen campaign. The Tactical Legacy Pack therefore offers both a significant amount of gameplay on its own terms as well as a lot of new bonus stuff to enhance a new playthrough of the standard XCOM 2 campaign (although only with War of the Chosen installed; this stuff won't work with vanilla XCOM 2). Also entertainingly, the expansions allows you change the game's soundtrack, between the standard XCOM 2 soundtrack, the Enemy Unknown soundtrack or, impressively, a remixed and upgraded synthwave version of the original 1993 game soundtrack, which is very well-done.

It's hard to knock this kind of material, especially as it's free. One of the criticisms levelled at the pack is that a set of linear missions isn't very XCOM-y, which I sort of agree with. All of the new generation of XCOM games have had linear story missions popping up at one point or another, but as a change of pace from the traditional gameplay type before getting back to the procedurally-generated missions. If you're a purist who hates linear missions, then yes, this might not appeal to you. More irritatingly, the only way to unlock all the stuff from the expansion in a standard game is to play through the missions.

That said, the missions are pretty good and interesting. Selecting troops, equipment and upgrades forces players out of their comfort zone and gets them acquainted with troop classes and weapons they might not normally deploy. You can also massively ramp up the difficulty on these missions to very high levels to make them even more of a challenge for hardened players.

It may be churlish to criticise this amount of free content, but there are a couple of issues that arise. One is that the new missions don't make many concessions to in-universe logic: your soldiers include Reapers and Templars (from War of the Chosen) long before you may have recruited those factions. XCOM 2's conceit is that XCOM lost the war in the original game very early on, but this game sees XCOM using advanced plasma and laser weapons in combat and also features crashed advanced Interceptors from the original game. If, like me, you've not played War of the Chosen yet and decided to join in the hype train with this expansion, there's a hell of a lot of stuff left unexplained (even moreso if you didn't play vanilla XCOM 2 either). Also, given that XCOM 2 launched two and a half years ago in a pretty iffy technical state and has been patched several times, it was somewhat dismaying to see the game still managed to crash several times during my playthrough with occasional graphics and game logic bugs taking place.

Having said that, these problems are more niggling than catastrophic. If you have that itch that only quality turn-based combat can scratch, the Tactical Legacy Pack (****) certainly delivers on that front. The expansion offers a solid gaming experience on its own merits, adds a lot of fresh content to your standard War of the Chosen playthrough, brings in a lot of new challenge maps and skirmishes, expands on the XCOM story and lore, and even brings in a whole new (and presumably expensive) soundtrack. It's a lot of stuff for exactly £0 ($0). The Tactical Legacy Pack is available now on PC and will download automatically for all War of the Chosen players next time you install the game. Firaxis have been unclear on when and if the expansion will be added to the XB1 and PS4 versions of the game.

E3 2017 tidbits

The annual paen to shiny graphics and explosions, E3, is underway in Los Angeles at the moment. It's the year's biggest video game expo, a time for companies to make big announcements and grandiose promises that occasionally pan out but mostly don't. There is oddly little to get that excited about this year, but a few things stood out.

Metro: Exodus

The Metro video game series (comprising Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light) has been one of the most satisfying first-person shooter series of the last decade, going for Russian bleakness and evoking a sparse atmosphere of building tension and horror rather than going for bombast and lots of explosions. Metro: Exodus will apparently expand away from the Moscow metro (the setting for most of the first two games) and feature larger, less linear levels. Although highly promising (the red star steam engine looks cool), the concern remains that the first two games executed a single story brilliantly and ended at just the right moment. Here's hoping this third game enhances, rather than degrades, that legacy.

Total Warhammer 2

Or that would be the game's real title in a world that made sense, rather than the brain-numbingly silly Total War: Warhammer 2 (I'd take Total Waaagh!: Warhammer 2 at this point). Still, this sequel to the Creative Assembly/Games Workshop collaboration takes the war across the western ocean to Lustria, Ulthuan, Naggaroth and the Southlands. High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen and a "secret" race (who are totally not the Skaven) will join the roster. The sequel will have a stand-alone campaign but will also bolt onto the original Total Warhammer to unleash a massive, world-spanning conflict.

XCOM2: War of the Chosen

This is a comprehensive expansion for the splendid XCOM 2 which will add ruined, post-apocalyptic cities, complete with zombie-like mutants, as well as adding rival rebel factions you will be competing (and maybe fighting) against, but can also ally with against the alien threat. The game will also add new special alien bounty hunters who have been sent to take out your forces. Riffing off the Nemesis System from Shadows of Mordor, they will gain experience and level up as the game continues, becoming constant thorns in your side until you can finally take them out.

Anthem

A brand-new BioWare IP - their first in a decade - was always going to be a headline-grabbing moment. Unfortunately, the reception to Anthem didn't quite go the way BioWare were expecting. This is an action shooter which borrows - quite significantly - from the anime series Attack on Titan in its worldbuilding and setup, from Titanfall for its mechs (albeit much smaller than in that game) and from Destiny for its focus on co-op gameplay. Those hoping for a big, deep BioWare RPG like of old, or even another action/RPG hybrid like the Mass Effect series, were bitterly disappointed. Possibly prematurely, as the game actually looks pretty good.

Perhaps more notable were the games that didn't appear. Bethesda's science fiction mega-epic Starfield didn't make an appearance, despite heavy rumours, suggesting it's still a way off. Likewise CDPR held fire on Cyberpunk 2077, lending weight to the rumours it's now looking more like a 2019 release. Other games that looked reasonably interesting included Far Cry 5 and Bastard's Wound, an expansion for the excellent RPG Tyranny.

XCOM 2: LONG WAR 2 released

In a surprise move, the Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2 has been released on PC. During discussions earlier in the week no release date was given and it was assumed that it was still months away. But instead it's out now.

Long War 2 radically enhances the strategy game, adds a new soldier class (three if you count those incorporated from other mods) and gives the player many more options for fighting the alien menace, although the aliens also have more abilities to counter-attack. The early reception for the mod sounds highly positive.

The mod is available via Steam completely free of charge.

XCOM 2 to get revamped strategic layer

Firaxis have announced that their strategy game XCOM 2 is to get a revamped strategic layer courtesy of modders. The officially-sanctioned and authorised Long War 2 mod will allow players to take direct command of all the rebel cells on Earth, organising military strikes and recruiting new personnel directly.

This will make for a much more strategically involving game and makes contacting new rebel cells far more important than it was previously. It also means that everyone is involved in the fight against alien occupation rather than just your single group on board the Avenger. The mod will also introduce the Technical, a new soldier class who specialises in rocket launchers and flamethrowers, and Coilguns, a new weapons class that fits between the Mag Weapon and Beam Weapon layers. The mod will be released in the next few months on PC.

Based on the cliffhanger ending to XCOM 2, it is likely that we will see an XCOM 3 around 2019. Meanwhile, the original creator of the X-COM franchise, Julian Gollop, is developing a similar strategy game called Phoenix Point for release in 2018.

XCOM 2

2035. Twenty years ago, aliens invaded Earth. An elite military organisation was formed to stop them: XCOM. It failed. Despite a heroic effort, the world was overrun and is now run by a joint alien-human government called ADVENT. On the surface ADVENT is peaceful and benign, pressing forward with advancements in medical technology and science. But they rule at the point of a gun and more sinister experiments are taking place in the background.

Now an underground resistance organisation, XCOM is creating sleeper cells around the world and stealing the aliens' technology to turn against them. All it needs now is a leader.

XCOM 2 is a sequel to 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown (and its expansion, Enemy Within), itself a remake of 1993's X-COM: UFO Defence. The X-COM/XCOM franchise has a reputation as one of the greatest video game series of all time, its combination of managing the defence of the entire planet with commanding individual combat missions against the aliens providing some truly sublime gameplay moments. XCOM 2 starts with a controversial premise: you lost the war against the aliens in the original game and now have to fight back with an underground resistance movement. There's a canonical (kind of) explanation for why you may remember winning in the original game, but you can just rationalise it as an alternate timeline if you really want.

Gameplay is similar to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, although there are a few twists. Once again you have a base of operations and have to upgrade it, building new facilities and carrying out research and development. However, your base is now a mobile SHIELD helicarrier alien cargo ship called the Avenger. You have to physically move the Avenger around the world map to recruit new agents, pick up supplies and carry out assault missions. As well as supplies (which replace money from the first game) you have to glean Intel to uncover the alien plans and you have to be more tactical in how you get hold of resources like elerium and alien alloys, which are required to research and build new equipment. When a mission starts, the game switches to a turn-based strategy map as you guide your team of up to 6 soldiers to fulfil an objective. This can vary from killing all the aliens present to rescuing a VIP to hacking a data terminal, often against a punishing time limit.

As the game continues (a first playthrough of the campaign will take around 25-30 hours) new, more powerful aliens are introduced so you have to stay on your toes, constantly researching weapons and armour so you can survive these tougher opponents and take them down. XCOM: Enemy Unknown sometimes forced you to compromise between different research tiers and trees, but XCOM 2 is positively evil in how it forces you to switch between different objectives, rush around trying to put out lots of fires simultaneously and in how long everything takes when the aliens are almost constantly attacking. XCOM 2 certainly makes you feel like you've got the whole world against you. It's a much, much tougher game than its forebear even on the equivalent difficulty levels.

It's also a game that gives you a lot of options. Character builds were something you could get away with not studying intently in the original game, but XCOM 2 is so tough that optimising your upgrade path is much more vital. For example, you can pick upgrades for your Sharpshooters that allow them to snipe enemy targets across the map with chained shots and using other soldiers to spot for them. You can also eschew that and pursue a gunslinger series of upgrades that give them up to six pistol shots a turn. A pistol doesn't do much damage, but upgrade it to a plasma pistol and fire it six times and it rapidly becomes one of the most powerful weapons in the game. The other classes get similar upgrades, with Grenadiers able to deal out masses of high damage with explosives and heavy weaponry and Specialists getting powerful drones that can dish out first aid and force fields (effectively) from right across the map. Rangers get excellent scouting and melee combat abilities that makes them formidable both at range and up-close.

For those who love rolling dice and comparing stats, XCOM2 is immensely rewarding. For those who want to just enjoy the game and get through to the end, don't be afraid to whack the difficulty down to easy ("Easy" in XCOM 2 is really not all that easy at all) and save-scum your way through the game. It doesn't take prisoners.

The game does hit the same sweet spot as the original of combining the widescreen, epic war for humanity's survival on a global level with individual combat missions, allowing you to customise your soldiers in almost any way that you please. However, whilst in-mission combat is tenser, more varied and more scenic than before - helped by the new, randomly-generated maps - the global strategic game is a lot more annoying. Some things take inexplicably long amounts of time - three days to pick up a supply drop you've just been given the coordinates to? - and you can bet that a vital, non-skippable mission will crop up 2 seconds before you'd have otherwise successfully researched your next tier of body armour. The game does a great job of making you feel like you're up against insurmountable odds, but all too often goes over that line and makes it almost impossible to proceed. The problem is that this steep increase in challenge abruptly falls off once you get the best weapons and gear and the game becomes, if not easy, than relatively straightforward.

XCOM 2 (****) is therefore a very good game, but ends up being frustrating. The combat is more interesting than in Enemy Unknown and represents a major step forward over it, but the grand strategic game feels random, arbitrary and at times tedious, and is a bit of a step back from Enemy Unknown's. Combined with the much more punishing difficulty level, this makes the game hard to recommend unambiguously. If you enjoyed the previous game and want more of the same, but more hardcore, XCOM 2 is certainly worth your time. If you haven't tried the franchise yet, I would definitely recommend starting with the previous game before tackling this one. XCOM 2 is available now on PC.

Technical Notes
XCOM 2 launched in a heavily bugged state on PC, featuring unusual lag, inexplicable CPU and GPU spikes and frame-rate drops, and occasional crashes. I was lucky in that I experienced only one actual crash in the whole game, and this guide helped improve performance immeasurably. However, waiting for a more comprehensive patch to fix the game's problems may be advisable.

XCOM 2 announced

Firaxis and Take Two have announced that XCOM 2, the sequel to 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its expansion, Enemy Within, will be released in October this year.

The new game is set twenty years after the events of the previous ones and features a bit of an about-turn from the end of those games: the aliens have invaded, again, but this time in much greater force and have won, occupying the planet. XCOM has been forced underground, waiting until some degree of complacency has set in on the part of the aliens, and then striking back unexpectedly. The game features a mobile base, the Avenger, and XCOM teams launching attacks on alien forces both in rural areas and inside the gleaming, futuristic cities they have built for their human sympathisers/drones. There is more of an emphasis on stealth and guerrilla warfare this time around, with the game apparently drawing inspiration from the third of the original 1990s XCOM games, X-COM: Apocalypse.

The game will also use procedural generation to create battle maps, rather than simply rotating through the same eighty-odd default maps as in the original game. There will be new weapons, alien types and new character classes.

XCOM 2 is, unexpectedly, a PC exclusive with no console release mooted at the current time. Enemy Unknown did surprisingly well on console, so the decision to limit the release to PC only is interesting. Firaxis should be revealing why shortly, but there are theories that the new game will feature a much heavier modding focus than the previous ones.