XCOM 2: War of the Chosen review—A world worth saving

XCOM 2 looks, sounds, and plays like a turn-based strategy game about beating back an alien occupation. Trust me, though: it's really a game about putting out fires. Over time, the game grows increasingly overrun with tasks that force you to pick and choose just a handful of permadeath-laden, turn-based missions to send squads on. Not every mission can be tackled, of course, and you just have to live with the extra aliens, reduced monthly income, and encroaching game-ending conflicts from the fires you can't put out.

That's how the base game began, anyway. Over the course of a campaign, it became clear that XCOM 2 didn't have enough fuel to keep the fires burning. One crack squad with enough experience, arms, and armor could eventually put any number of aliens to shame in the turn-based ground game. The overarching strategy layer then became an exercise in endlessly beefing up until you were as ready as can be for the final assault.

War of the Chosen, the game's first and likely last full expansion, deals with that problem with a simple maxim: more is more. More maps, more enemies, more abilities, more buildings, more to manage between missions, more story and characters, more bosses. In short, more fires that grow into raging infernos in the mid-to-late-game.

The Chosen few

The titular Chosen who now stalk discrete zones across the Earth are most emblematic of this maxim. The trio acts like a miniature Shadow of Mordor nemesis system, repeatedly ambushing you on otherwise innocuous missions and referencing past battles. Each of the three Chosen—the Warlock, the Hunter, and the Assassin—comes with a basic set of abilities as well as auto-generated names, strengths, and weaknesses. Over time, they'll also develop new strengths if the XCOM squad isn't quick enough to sniff and snuff them out.

To aid in that snuffing is the other biggest addition in this expansion: resistance factions. In vanilla XCOM 2, the human resistance was around but largely invisible: a nameless, faceless conveyance of quick boosts between missions. You could scan overworld blips for resources the resistance left behind and expand your actionable territory by contacting its unseen representatives (which basically amounted to scanning different blips).

In War of the Chosen, however, dissident Earth is split into three unique factions, each of which conveniently matches the territory of a given Chosen. In turn, each cabal comes with its own unique properties both on and off the battlefield.

Each group's characteristics (and characters, for that matter) make this the most distinctly story-driven XCOM product to date. That might seem unnecessary in a game about mathematical triage and risk analysis, but it's exactly the kind of addition I never knew I needed from the series. The drama of every "97 percent" shot missed and every mind control attempt resisted is heightened beyond the usual statistical frustration. Now it's personal, thanks to distinctly named, voiced, and dressed participants on both sides.

Human-on-alien-on-alien/human hybrid violence

Among the resistance, the Reapers are alien-eating stealth troopers that don't get spotted when the rest of an XCOM squad does. This makes them excellent scouts. The Skirmishers used to be alien ground troops but have since shirked off the mind control that made them so disagreeable. On site, the human-alien hybrids rewrite battlefield positioning with grappling hooks that pull themselves and enemies around at will.

These first two groups are inserted via a flashy new story mission that also introduces the Chosen, the "Lost" (a sort of environmental hazard in the form of zombie hordes), and exploding, flamethrowing alien troopers called Purifiers. Just like the base game, War of the Chosen throws a lot at you very, very quickly. Given that, by this point, I was already dealing with the usual mind-controlling Sectoids and poison-spitting Vipers, the turn-based strategy portion of the early game can sink an unprepared or unlucky player quickly.

Unlike standard XCOM 2, however, the overarching strategy layer is full enough to match the grid-based battles. Each resistance faction allows you to issue Orders—month-long buffs that are basically the inverse of the original game's negative Dark Events. But this wouldn't be XCOM if the odds were even. Every month, the Chosen build toward assaults on XCOM HQ. If they succeed, they trigger a make-or-break defense mission that means "game over" if you lose.

For all the personality in most of the new cut scenes devoted to these moments, it's odd that the third resistance faction, the Templars, gets almost none of it. When you discover the melee-focused psychic commandos on the overworld map, there's no zombie-infested, Chosen-embattled story scene signaling their appearance. They just... show up with an exquisitely arrogant welcome from John de Lancie (oh, did I most of the new resistance characters are voiced by former Star Trek: The Next Generation actors?).

Balancing favorites

This is a shame, because like the other two juntas, the Templars are great. Their units start every mission moderately weak but gain strength, evasion, and mobility with every melee kill. Not to mention they can soak up one enemy hit per turn, provided they attacked on the last one, making them excellent front-liners.

In fact, all three new unit classes are so good, you probably won't want to use your standard XCOM grunts that much anymore. That goes double if you have the robotic "SPARK" soldiers from the Shen's Last Gift DLC. With up to just six slots on any given squad, ordinary Grenadiers, Sharpshooters, and the like can easily to take a backseat.

But War of the Chosen prevents playing unit favorites by adding yet another nuisance to manage. Besides being physically wounded, which locks a given unit out of missions until they heal, soldiers can now develop negative psychological traits, not unlike Afflictions from the equally difficult, risk/reward game Darkest Dungeon.

Going on too many missions in a row makes soldiers tired, which makes them more susceptible to these traits. That means regularly cycling through units—and experimenting with lineups—is more important than ever if you want to prevent your units from panicking at the sight of robots or ignoring your commands.

Balancing out those quirks are Fire Emblem-esque relationships between squadmates that give active and passive new abilities. These relationships start by being letting the participants take extra turns once per mission but quickly add accuracy bonuses, elemental resistances, and more as the pairs get cozier.

Back and forth battles

It's not just the psychological pros and cons, or Dark Events versus resistance orders. All the new dangers in War of the Chosen seem to have equally fresh counters to the point that I'd guess developer Firaxis wanted every player to be able to accomplish everything in a single run. Every soldier can learn every skill in their class. Every resistance faction can be courted and appeased. Every special weapon and order can be procured. The tradeoff is all those new fires to put out and new perils that must be wriggled out of in the turn-based tactics portion.

I'd still say War of the Chosen skews slightly easier than the base game, at least on normal difficulty. This is thanks, in large part, to the less dramatic bits of rebalancing: My earliest guns struck more often; the Sectoids were less of a pain thanks to a new weakness to melee attacks; etc. The sheer number of options available to me via resistance operatives seems like more than regular enemies can keep up with. Even the ever-respawning Chosen are at their most deadly merely on the month-to-month meta layer. In combat, they each come with their own best practices to follow to strike down in a few turns.

That's not some terrible criticism. XCOM 2's main problem isn’t that it was too easy but that there just wasn't enough to hunch down and worry over (well, that, and a heaping helping of bugs that seem mostly fixed in this expansion). In the original game—once you learned the old "best practices" for approaching a mission, researched everything there was to research, and leveled up every soldier you cared about—you had a straightforward shot to the end and the credits.

Now, assuming you don't intentionally drag things out, there's always a difficult choice to make. Which units do you send on auto-completing Covert Actions for the resistance? Which Chosen's death do you make a priority, assuming you have time to kill any at all? Which Resistance Orders do you think will best hold off the Chosen for at least one more month? Questions like these occurred in XCOM 2, but not enough to lend the endgame any urgency or to give your vision of XCOM much personality.

Even if you do get ahead of the curve in this expansion—which certainly still happened for me, although not nearly as drastically—there's still the personal touch of the Chosen, resistance stories, and naturally occurring soldier relationships to make each campaign feel somewhat customized. War of the Chosen might just be more XCOM 2, but "more" was exactly what the once-sterile sequel needed. In this case, more really is more.

The good:

• Story and personality enhances XCOM 2's tense mathematics more than you'd think
• There's now actually stuff to do in the middle and late stages of the campaign
• Chosen and resistance units are unique, powerful, and interesting
• More new maps, mission types, weapons, and other minutiae than I have time to mention
• John de Lancie is always part of "The Good"

The bad:

• Templars get the short end of the story stick
• Custom soldier designs don't import from your base XCOM 2 save

The ugly:

• Despite vastly improved optimization over the messy XCOM 2 launch, I've had a number of crashes and freezes. YMMV, of course.

Verdict: War of the Chosen is the definitive way to play XCOM 2. Even if you weren't impressed with the original package, this feels like a whole new game. Buy it.