izigame.me

I bought Xenonauts 1 a few years ago and loved it. Only then did I realize their inspiration were the old X-Com games, which I never played. I disliked the style of the new X-Com titles, but the grim and old-school style of Xenonauts 1 was exactly my thing and I loved the game, although I wasn't very good at it.
I was very happy to hear that Xenonauts 2 is now on Early Access and immediately bought it, despite its unfinished state. I regret nothing. it's a great strategic game. in short: The game is unforgiving, but mostly fair, grim, tactical, mostly realistic and has a wonderful atmosphere. It might feel repetitive at times and some people dislike that there are mission types now that have a time limit to kill a VIP or extract survivors (but unlimited reinforcements will spawn after 8 turns), but I personally found them interesting and not too hard to do. Doing the same kind of missions and map types over and over again doesn't get old, because there is always something new in it or some danger involved. if the game feels to hard for you, play it on easy and reload a lot, like I do, and it will still be fun to play, mostly. The only thing I really dislike apart from some small mechanics I will mention below is how many irreversible long-term mistakes you can make, if you focus on the wrong science, or similar, because you just didn't know what would happen later on in the game, which sometimes soft-locks you and forces you to start the campaign again.

Xenonauts 2 seems to be just as good as the first game with a much improved engine. It's strange how it looks a lot better but still somehow the same. At first I was a bit disappointed that the free view was actually just a snapped 45 degree turn with a transition animation, but you cannot really view the battlefield from all angles, as I had hoped. However, I quickly got used to it and it's not recognizable most of the time.
The game difficulty, again, is brutal, even on easy settings, if you are on your first playthrough. It is mostly fair, bot some things just bother me.
My points of criticism so far:
The game is split into two mechanics, a global map view with your aircraft and bases and the actual turn based combat missions. Both require a lot of knowledge about game mechanics the tutorial and the tooltips just don't give. In your first playthrough you will have many "Well, If I had only known that earlier.." moments that you might find make the game experience interesting or frustrating. The game mostly explains the basic mechanics and how things work, but gives you no help at all in long term planning so that you might find yourself under-equipped and low tech in late game because you put your focus on radar coverage and air superiority or, on the opposite, you might have the best equipped soliders, but you just never manage to deploy them or shoot down the superior UFOs or even detect them because you lack aircraft and radar coverage.
Same goes for the battlefield strategies: Often it will take many dead soldiers until you really understand what you absolutely shouldn't do. I tend to save and reload a lot to be able to learn from my mistakes, but if you like to play through a mission in one go without loading saves, be prepared to have half of your soldiers die because you just did not know a certain mechanic, yet.
The combat feels fun and super realistic and threfore also very punishing. I would say, 80% of the combat feels tough but fair, but there are these 20% that really make you get mad at the game for not telling you this or making such dumb decisions. Let me give a few example of combat mechanics I really dislike so far,
- Shooting around corners isn't a feature (yet?), so your soldier will either have 100% cover and no line of sight or 100% line of sight, but no cover depending on the angle of the shot. You cannot shoot around that corner without fully exposing yourself.
- Additionally, the game features so-called "overwatch fire" which means that the enemy can fire even within the players turn, if the player enters the line of sight of a prepared enemy. This means that if an enemy approaches my soldier, who is hiding behind a corner, I will have to step out of the corner in my own turn to shoot at him, but since that will put me in the line of sight of the enemy, he will be able to shoot first and possibly even kill my soldier, even though I was in a defensive position.
- Often the aliens will not only have superior weapons but also superior accuracy. So you will hardly be able to hit them behind cover, but they will sometimes shoot from a long distance at your soldier behind cover and one-hit them. I found myself reloading very often because I just couldn't accept that a perfectly defended position, even sometimes covered in smoke, was not enough to protect my soldiers from breaching aliens who just entered and killed everyone with one shot, but were missed by my own overwatch-fire.
- Some enemy types just have too many advantages at once. One enemy type has cloaking, high mobility, high range, high accuracy, some armor, high HP and high damage, not to mention a plasma grenade that just one-hit-kills everyone in a 4x4 area and can be thrown over the same distance as an assault rifle can be shot effectively. And then there can sometimes be 5 or 6 of them at once accompanied by battle-turrets. Even with easy setting and reloads I find that incredibly hard to tackle. But then again, I'm not a very skilled player.
- The amount of times an enemy triggered overwatch fire of my soldiers but they missed their impossible
shot and hit one of my own soldiers instead cannot be counted anymore. I would love to be able to decide, if overwatch fire will be triggered or not.
- The cover system needs some polishing. Crouching behind cover should make a difference as opposed to standing behind cover, but the game will just take the higher of the two reduced hit-chance values and ignore the other. On the other hand, shooting over three objects directly in front of your soldiers should not decrease hit chances, as they don't block the line of sight to the target that is far away. The game needs some way to calculate hit chances more realistically.
Also the research system isn't great yet. There are just too many options for a beginner to make decisions. You will find that ballistic weapons are absolutely fine for 10 missions, until all of a sudden, without any hint, they are just way underpowered and you wish you had invested in other weapon type research, but now it's too late. Especially because the plot often wants you to research plot-critical items instead - time that you cannot put into researching good equipment. In short: The game should inform us more about what kind of thing we risk neglecting or at least tell us what might happen if we don't focus on a certain aspect.
All in all, this game is just awesome and i love it. its technical state at the moment (End of July 23) is pretty good, although the end-game is missing, air combat isn't polished yet and some codex entries (which are generally very interesting to read!) are missing, too. I rarely had any crashes, just the loading times a re a little slow.
Be aware that save games might be unreadable after a patch forcing you to restart the campaign. Sometimes you can get around it by copying the old saves into a different folder (xenonauts-edit), but at some point, this might kill your progress.
8/10 - my personal GOTY so far, even in the current state. I hope the devs will fix all the problems and make this a perfect 10/10, because it definitely could be.