Xenonauts 2 review

I'll be honest with you right up front: I loved the Firaxis XCOM games, but I never played the '90s originals. I know, I know. For years, people told me how good they were, and how the newer ones lost some of the magic. And while I may have bounced off of the first Xenonauts, Xenonauts 2 has finally revealed the truth to me. You guys were right all along. This rules.

There's something almost indescribably awesome about that moment in an alien invasion scenario where your scrappy little fighter shoots down a UFO for the first time and everyone cheers. It's like when the cavalry arrives at first light on the third day. We're up against a vastly superior foe, but with this small victory, it feels like maybe we can win this. Maybe there's hope.

Don't pop the champagne just yet, though. This is when Xenonauts 2 likes to take you down a peg, like the time it completely instagibbed my star sniper from halfway across the map even though she was in cover and wearing the most advanced armor my research teams have developed.

The quickload button has never looked so tempting. But what the underlying design understands so well is that the victories never taste as sweet if they're not built on the graves of fallen heroes. Hope can only come shining through when the clouds are dark.

The bones of Xenonauts 2 don't differ much from any other XCOM or X-hyphen-COM or X-COM-like you might have played. You're in charge of a secretive organization of scientists, engineers, and soldiers trying to stop an invasion by technologically advanced aliens—building and defending secret bases, dissecting captured foes, learning to use their technology, and stopping the six major regions of Earth from devolving into panic.

Doomsday

I completely failed to do that about 180 days into my first campaign and had to start over. This is a very difficult game, both tactically and strategically. I did not take to most of its systems intuitively at first. But that forced me to take a step back and think. It forced me to learn and adapt. And I really ended up enjoying that process after getting over the initial frustration. Contemplating what I could have done differently over a pile of dead soldiers is how I eventually won.

Xenonauts 2 is chock full of skill expression. Mastering the 'time units' you use to move, fire, and even rotate the vision cones of your soldiers, and learning how to deal with each of its deadly alien variants—dozens of them—can give you an edge on a tactical level. But that's not enough on its own.

Securing supporters and eliminating infiltrators on the strategic map is a whole minigame that requires you to prioritize reducing panic, gaining more funding, or controlling an entire region to get a unique bonus, like increased passive experience gain. The prices of different supporters change over time, so you can't really rely on a set build order.

Despite this, I was able to stay a step ahead of the aliens almost the entire time by reacting to juicy opportunities intelligently. But this interstellar menace doesn't go down without a brutal fight, and the lessons that contributed towards my victory were hard-won.

The one area where I felt really shot down by the difficulty curve, literally, was knowing which techs are must-haves by certain points in the escalation of the invasion. If you haven't got tier 2 or tier 3 fighter jets by the time the nastier UFOs start showing up, that's basically a game over that might take months to painstakingly play out.

It's not especially enjoyable to have my entire air force grounded, desperately trying to catch up as I watch the xenos have the run of the place.

Scramble fighters

I did love the real-time air combat when the fight was winnable, though. Especially early on, using the throttle controls and roll maneuvers at exactly the right moments allowed me to win some really lopsided dogfights, sometimes without taking a scratch.

Different UFOs require different approaches depending on their capabilities, which creates some really compelling fights when they get mixed and matched. It's one more little area where skill can come into play and add up to a big advantage.

The tactical battles are the star of the show, though. I started with eight and went all the way up to 12 squadmates, taking them to a variety of urban and rural environments reflecting everything from a North African market to a polar storage facility. The depth of the combat is remarkable, too, forcing me to carefully consider the smallest moves.

Room clearing feels tense and authentic, costing time units to kick the door down and look both ways. The safest way to play is to stick together, moving from cover to cover, crouching down every turn and leaving enough time units for reaction shots. But exciting timed missions shook me out of this routine, where I had to take some big risks that had me standing up and pumping my fists when they paid off.

The story is less remarkable. There are a couple twists regarding the aliens, but nothing too crazy if you've read a lot of sci-fi. But it gets the job done, maintaining tension, setting a good narrative pace, and mixing in moments of triumph with eerie periods where you're left guessing about what the aliens will do next.

It's in the moments in between where Xenonauts 2 shows off. The emergent stories, which have burned themselves into my brain—like the corporal I sent onto the UFO bridge to scout, mainly as a sacrifice, who dodged six plasma shots somehow and ended up sticking with me as a colonel all the way to the end. A random number generator that can one-shot a badass can also spare a rookie, and that's where the magic happens.

Squad customization is another rewarding journey, where I teched up from realistic ARs to lasers, gauss rifles, and eventually plasma. I loved seeing my squadmates progress visually from kevlar vests to basically space marines by the end, with powered armor and auto-med injectors that, nevertheless, still didn't keep them from getting annihilated by an unlucky roll now and then. The tension never goes away entirely.

This is coupled with saveable loadouts and certain items like grenades being unlimited once you research them, which maintains some resource management without it getting too tedious or fiddly. It can, however, start to get cumbersome toward the end to kit everyone out. The same goes for the more complex combat turns.

10 soldiers in the midgame feels like a really good number. Once I got the dropship upgrade to bring 12, that felt like too many. And base defense missions, which can have even more than that, were the only ones I really dreaded. They're a micromanagement nightmare with the number of friends and foes present, and they can't be auto-resolved.

Good hunting

Most of the enemies should be pretty familiar if you've played any version of X-COM, but many of their special abilities can be countered in clever ways, waiting for you to discover.

There are these floating egg tank creatures that are impervious to damage in a frontal arc, and they can easily one-shot multiple fully kitted-out soldiers in a single turn. Naturally, they were initially the last enemy I'd want to face in a mission. But there's a catch: they always turn to face the last thing they heard. When I realized I could solo them by throwing a grenade behind them to make them turn around, then unload into their backside with a machine gun, I actually yelled in triumph.

There's no dedicated overwatch ability, but units will take reaction shots if they end their turn with enough time units left. Unfortunately, they're not particularly smart about this and will autofire straight through a teammate to try to hit an alien that pops out.

This is frustrating to begin with, but in the long term, it increases the opportunity for skill expression in a way where setting up a door breach becomes almost like composing a song. Positioning everyone just right, keeping track of how many reaction shots they could take, and setting up contingencies for worst-case scenarios (they happen more often than you might think!) is incredibly satisfying when everything goes according to plan.

Maybe I fell so hard for Xenonauts 2 because I had never sipped X-COM Original Flavor before. But if so, that only speaks to how this uncompromising, dangerous, and detailed sort of tactics puzzle remains today, even without the nostalgia. The way it builds and releases tension across missions and campaign chapters is magnificent. And when the stakes are so high and the price of failure so steep, victory feels earned and tastes so much sweeter.

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