Players once again resume the roll of The Commander, who has been kept on ice by aliens for the last twenty years. Recovered after a desperate gamble by the sweater-loving Bradford, the linear plot then guides players to a climactic and intense final mission, with random events occurring all across the board as players race to beat the clock against a mysterious alien proj
The truth is, XCOM still exists, though it's become a shadow of its former self after world leaders and bases either surrendered or were destroyed. Reduced to a covert guerilla military operating in cells around the globe, this new "Resistance" has more than the standard aliens of the original game to contend with. Those monsters are back and scarier than ever, along with entirely new creatures - but it's the humans who serve the aliens - known as the ADVENT - that pose the most insidious threat. The odds seem insurmountable, and fight failing until resistance intelligence locates, then extracts their secret weapon: the Command
XCOM 2 is an almost infinitely replayable game, especially with mods. However, some things in the game proper just suck up too much time. Action cutscenes — a plague on some otherwise good games — have been viewed countless times. Scanning resource caches in the Avenger takes forever. Some battle animations take up half of any encounter. Why is there a 30-second animation every time a grenade is thr
As well as providing a beautiful view of the SLG Game community's landscape, Shadow of the Colossus ' cover art is brilliant for two main reasons. Firstly, it shows the game's "David vs. Goliath" theme in a very striking way with the enormous size difference between the two figures. While the second, very spoiler-heavy reason is that it foreshadows the game's ending . Wander has his sword out, ready to fight the colossus, while the enormous creature has its back to the playable character, seemingly not interested in fight
The cover art may not have any striking images or elements of foreshadowing like the previous entries, though it does exactly what it sets out to do; show the updated visuals in a way that will warm the hearts of the franchise's pre-existing fans while making it vibrant enough to stand out to those who had never heard of the series bef
XCOM 2 introduces plenty of new gameplay elements that fit this new style, like player-placed extraction zones, the aforementioned ambushes, and a complete restructuring of character classes to reflect the focus on guerrilla combat. Players will find themselves thinking hard about which classes to bring into a particular firefight, and finding the right combination of soldier types will be a hard-fought trial-and-error process. Likewise, when players start in concealment - a new stealth aspect that is brand new to the franchise - they'll find themselves tediously organizing ambushes to maximize their overwatch impact, and we found the new gameplay complimented XCOM 2 quite nic
Like any good work of art, Far Cry 5 is dripping with interesting details and insight at every turn, with the influx of guns in front of a church showing it's not the sort of place for a relaxing Sunday pra
Who doesn't like clicking twice, six to eight times to finish an already long, grueling mission? Most people! In particular, modder tracktwo must have really hated all that extra clicking at the end of missions, because they are the author of the Evac All m
Three years after XCOM: Enemy Unknown took the strategy world by storm and proved that turn-based titles could still shake up the industry, Firaxis has followed up with a successor that is certainly capable of carrying on the name. Within XCOM 2 , players will find a challenging title that not only improves on the core gameplay experience from the original game, but adds plenty of new elements to keep die-hard fans on their t
Oh, Central Officer Bradford. Sincerely, thank you so much for your service to this planet. But, for the love of all that is holy and good in this world, please stop talking. Players who have gone back in for another round or 50 of XCOM 2 have gotten very familiar with Bradford’s constantly repeated remind
The AI has evidently gone through a large improvement as well, and we found that the ADVENT opposition (that is, the controlling alien power) were often searching for flanking opportunities and ways to maximize their damage output. The faceless oppressors do tend to go on suicide runs more often than one would expect, but we found that the AI performed with pure brutality across all difficulties, and fans accustomed to the high standard of challenge that XCOM is known for won't be disappointed here. Players will find themselves having to readjust strategies on the fly mid-mission more often than not, and that's part of the beauty of XC
Borderlands 3 isn't the only game to take inspiration from religious artwork, as Far Cry 5 's cover is a clear reference to one of the most famous paintings of all time, Leanardo De Vinci's The Last Supper. The reference is an ingenious way of telling players just how highly regarded Joseph Seed is among his cult memb