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XCOM 2 has been well reviewed for Windows, but exactly how is it on Linux? I spent many hours defending the earth to find out.
Disclosure: Copy provided by Feral Interactive.
I had been waiting years to play the original remake of XCOM due to refusing to buy it on other platforms, and my patience paid off when Feral Interactive ported it over. No such wait with XCOM 2 as Feral worked their asses off to bring it to Linux for day 1. It’s not perfection—yet, but it is a cracking strategy game.
It has been about 22 years since the original X-COM/UFO game too, which makes me feel really old now.
The Earth is but a shadow of its former self, with it being lost to alien control. A new organisation named Advent walks the streets and pretends to be humanity’s friend. It’s time to rebuild the XCOM organisation, and take the fight to the aliens.
My review
I won’t touch on everything, as I will end up writing way too many pages on this game.
The game certainly feels a lot more personal than the previous game. In the early parts of the game you really are made to feel like a part of the world, part of the actual crew, rather than some nameless person giving orders. Well, you’re still nameless apart from “Commander”, but the way people talk to you and the general story involved do make it more personal. I really like this too, it feels much more engaging!
You also see a little bit of banter between staff pop up now and then when you’re back at your base. It’s the little things like that always make the bigger picture a bit sweeter. Some of it has even managed to make me crack a little unexpected chuckle.
The classes are also very similar to the first XCOM: Your Ranger is meant to be your close combat specialist (with their very own sword), you have the heavy weapons from your Grenadier, a Specialist with a little robotic drone pet (which is really bloody useful for enemies on low health for guaranteed kills), a Sharpshooter for your sniper shots and finally a Psi Operative to use special mental powers but they need to be unlocked later on. There will be another class later on in a DLC too in the “Shen's Last Gift” DLC.
The game mechanics will be very familiar to XCOM players, as the general in-mission strategy is almost identical to the original game once you get going. That’s a good thing in my opinion, why change up something too much that worked well before? You get the usual half/full cover system to protect your soldiers, an assortment of weapons, different abilities and overpowered aliens.
There’s only really two differences in-mission this time around. Some mission you will start hidden so you can plan out your attack better, and some mission the aliens will get reinforcements drop in with a cool cutscene.
Some parts of the actual mission can be funny too—I thought I had a Sniper on a rooftop at one point, but someone shot at them, and they fell through the roof. I actually went around looking for them, until I zoomed in to see the hole and found them in the shop below, hah.
That reminds me, I don't think my Sniper is very well camouflaged:
I do love the customization options, and no my entire squad is not pink.
It doesn’t just feel personal because you feel more a part of it, your soldiers also feel more alive in the game world. If you’re coming back from a mission and someone is wounded, they might limp towards you and then slump over. I didn’t expect to see that, and it’s a nice touch.
Another nice little touch: If you stay too long on the mission end screen shown above, the Skyranger will begin its descent into your base ship. That was really cool to see!
One thing I find a bit silly is that when you pick a new research option the research dude doesn’t speak, even though he’s right in front of you—another him pops up in a little corner of the screen to acknowledge your order. It’s a small niggle, but it breaks the flow a little.
One of my favourite features in XCOM 2 is the ability to train a Rookie into a specific class. No longer do we depend on the random generator to provide us with the classes we want and need. We can do it ourselves! With the right facility built to do this through of course.
An interesting new feature, and part of the game that tries to screw with you are the Dark Events. Events which each carry their own debuff against you, and sometimes the choice is pretty easy, you can bet I stopped them grabbing some armour:
They really do mess with you though. In my current game the aliens always get reinforcements during guerilla ops, and it’s making it quite challenging. I seriously can’t wait for that to be over, as it’s screwed me up a few times already.
There are no more alien terrorising events. What we have now instead are Advent Retaliation missions. They are just as brutal and downright frustrating at times too. My first one went as you might imagine—total utter failure. It doesn’t help that this guy was freaking me out a bit:
What the fuck are you?!
What gets me is still the little things about the game. Like the picture above, my soldiers know how big that monstrous thing is, and they point their guns and torches up at it. Shooting at people and missing shows the enemy looking behind towards where the bullets hit, and little bits like that come together so beautifully.
That “Faceless” is a real damn nuisance too. The first time I encountered one it went rampaging from soldier to soldier destroying everything in its path, and boy do they do a lot of damage. They swing their massive arms around and annihilate a line in front of them. The second time around I managed to end its existence while only losing one Rookie, and that was a very narrow victory. He was actually a bit terrifying with me sat in the dark with headphones on. I do love the sounds all the aliens make, really great work on that front too.
There seems to be a number of different types of missions for rewards now too, the first XCOM seems so locked down in comparison that I’m not sure I could ever go back. One example are Supply Raid missions, where you clear out a bunch of Aliens and nick their kit. The game is just so much more interesting with you being the ones doing the hit and run tactics.
Some parts of the game are hilariously over the top. I can remember a specific mission where “TheBoss” (yeah, I named my troops) ran towards an alien pulling out his sword, as he thrusted into the alien the entire wall of the building next to him and the adjacent car blew up in a huge explosion—I didn’t know Michael Bay helped make XCOM 2.
The voice acting is all around better and more varied in this release too. Each time I play I hear one or two new lines when my people are panicking, being mind controlled and generally being useless soldiers.
Your ultimate goal is to take this down, the Avatar project:
I won't spoil what it is.
The only thing I am still unsure about are the mission timers. On one hand I can see that they force you to make some interesting decisions, but they can also totally ruin the fun at other times. I’ve actually played a mission where all of my units were within 1 turn of escaping (not even dashing, normal movement), but I hit the timer and they were all MIA. I was a bit annoyed, but it certainly didn’t stop me playing (I might have reloaded a save on that one!).
If you need some icing on the cake that is this excellent strategy game: Mods are supported from Day 1. There’s already over 300 mods, which is insane. If you are finding the mission timers a bit troublesome you could try this mod to increase them, or this mod to remove them!
Almost everything about the game is just better overall. It’s bigger, badder, more personal and downright mesmerizing. I go through such a mix of emotions when playing XCOM 2 it’s unbelievable at times.
It’s going to have an insanely long playable life thanks to the mod support. I am seriously excited to see what people can come up with.
Issues
Rather than repeating myself, it’s probably best you head over here to see the issues I had with it initially. There’s performance issues galore, missing AA options, camera issues and more.
I don’t personally think it was ready for release, as there’s far too many niggling issues that have been left in—a lot of them easily reproducible. I have been enjoying myself rather a lot with it (obviously), but it feels rushed out and I hate that feeling. XCOM 2 is a PC only release, so I just don’t get how it was put out like it was, especially considering it’s not a cheap game either. I don’t blame Feral or Firaxis, it’s the publisher who is almost always pushing hard for a release regardless of issues.
Final thoughts: 89% chance of hit? Totally missed, died. Welcome back, Commander.
I really do love it, even with the obvious flaws right now. It’s fantastic to have it on Linux, and my hour counter in-game won’t stop going up any time soon. It’s easily going to surpass the previous title for played time.
Grab XCOM 2 from the Feral Interactive store, and support them directly. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Disclosure: Copy provided by Feral Interactive.
I had been waiting years to play the original remake of XCOM due to refusing to buy it on other platforms, and my patience paid off when Feral Interactive ported it over. No such wait with XCOM 2 as Feral worked their asses off to bring it to Linux for day 1. It’s not perfection—yet, but it is a cracking strategy game.
It has been about 22 years since the original X-COM/UFO game too, which makes me feel really old now.
The Earth is but a shadow of its former self, with it being lost to alien control. A new organisation named Advent walks the streets and pretends to be humanity’s friend. It’s time to rebuild the XCOM organisation, and take the fight to the aliens.
My review
I won’t touch on everything, as I will end up writing way too many pages on this game.
The game certainly feels a lot more personal than the previous game. In the early parts of the game you really are made to feel like a part of the world, part of the actual crew, rather than some nameless person giving orders. Well, you’re still nameless apart from “Commander”, but the way people talk to you and the general story involved do make it more personal. I really like this too, it feels much more engaging!
You also see a little bit of banter between staff pop up now and then when you’re back at your base. It’s the little things like that always make the bigger picture a bit sweeter. Some of it has even managed to make me crack a little unexpected chuckle.
The classes are also very similar to the first XCOM: Your Ranger is meant to be your close combat specialist (with their very own sword), you have the heavy weapons from your Grenadier, a Specialist with a little robotic drone pet (which is really bloody useful for enemies on low health for guaranteed kills), a Sharpshooter for your sniper shots and finally a Psi Operative to use special mental powers but they need to be unlocked later on. There will be another class later on in a DLC too in the “Shen's Last Gift” DLC.
The game mechanics will be very familiar to XCOM players, as the general in-mission strategy is almost identical to the original game once you get going. That’s a good thing in my opinion, why change up something too much that worked well before? You get the usual half/full cover system to protect your soldiers, an assortment of weapons, different abilities and overpowered aliens.
There’s only really two differences in-mission this time around. Some mission you will start hidden so you can plan out your attack better, and some mission the aliens will get reinforcements drop in with a cool cutscene.
Some parts of the actual mission can be funny too—I thought I had a Sniper on a rooftop at one point, but someone shot at them, and they fell through the roof. I actually went around looking for them, until I zoomed in to see the hole and found them in the shop below, hah.
That reminds me, I don't think my Sniper is very well camouflaged:
I do love the customization options, and no my entire squad is not pink.
It doesn’t just feel personal because you feel more a part of it, your soldiers also feel more alive in the game world. If you’re coming back from a mission and someone is wounded, they might limp towards you and then slump over. I didn’t expect to see that, and it’s a nice touch.
Another nice little touch: If you stay too long on the mission end screen shown above, the Skyranger will begin its descent into your base ship. That was really cool to see!
One thing I find a bit silly is that when you pick a new research option the research dude doesn’t speak, even though he’s right in front of you—another him pops up in a little corner of the screen to acknowledge your order. It’s a small niggle, but it breaks the flow a little.
One of my favourite features in XCOM 2 is the ability to train a Rookie into a specific class. No longer do we depend on the random generator to provide us with the classes we want and need. We can do it ourselves! With the right facility built to do this through of course.
An interesting new feature, and part of the game that tries to screw with you are the Dark Events. Events which each carry their own debuff against you, and sometimes the choice is pretty easy, you can bet I stopped them grabbing some armour:
They really do mess with you though. In my current game the aliens always get reinforcements during guerilla ops, and it’s making it quite challenging. I seriously can’t wait for that to be over, as it’s screwed me up a few times already.
There are no more alien terrorising events. What we have now instead are Advent Retaliation missions. They are just as brutal and downright frustrating at times too. My first one went as you might imagine—total utter failure. It doesn’t help that this guy was freaking me out a bit:
What the fuck are you?!
What gets me is still the little things about the game. Like the picture above, my soldiers know how big that monstrous thing is, and they point their guns and torches up at it. Shooting at people and missing shows the enemy looking behind towards where the bullets hit, and little bits like that come together so beautifully.
That “Faceless” is a real damn nuisance too. The first time I encountered one it went rampaging from soldier to soldier destroying everything in its path, and boy do they do a lot of damage. They swing their massive arms around and annihilate a line in front of them. The second time around I managed to end its existence while only losing one Rookie, and that was a very narrow victory. He was actually a bit terrifying with me sat in the dark with headphones on. I do love the sounds all the aliens make, really great work on that front too.
There seems to be a number of different types of missions for rewards now too, the first XCOM seems so locked down in comparison that I’m not sure I could ever go back. One example are Supply Raid missions, where you clear out a bunch of Aliens and nick their kit. The game is just so much more interesting with you being the ones doing the hit and run tactics.
Some parts of the game are hilariously over the top. I can remember a specific mission where “TheBoss” (yeah, I named my troops) ran towards an alien pulling out his sword, as he thrusted into the alien the entire wall of the building next to him and the adjacent car blew up in a huge explosion—I didn’t know Michael Bay helped make XCOM 2.
The voice acting is all around better and more varied in this release too. Each time I play I hear one or two new lines when my people are panicking, being mind controlled and generally being useless soldiers.
Your ultimate goal is to take this down, the Avatar project:
I won't spoil what it is.
The only thing I am still unsure about are the mission timers. On one hand I can see that they force you to make some interesting decisions, but they can also totally ruin the fun at other times. I’ve actually played a mission where all of my units were within 1 turn of escaping (not even dashing, normal movement), but I hit the timer and they were all MIA. I was a bit annoyed, but it certainly didn’t stop me playing (I might have reloaded a save on that one!).
If you need some icing on the cake that is this excellent strategy game: Mods are supported from Day 1. There’s already over 300 mods, which is insane. If you are finding the mission timers a bit troublesome you could try this mod to increase them, or this mod to remove them!
Almost everything about the game is just better overall. It’s bigger, badder, more personal and downright mesmerizing. I go through such a mix of emotions when playing XCOM 2 it’s unbelievable at times.
It’s going to have an insanely long playable life thanks to the mod support. I am seriously excited to see what people can come up with.
Issues
Rather than repeating myself, it’s probably best you head over here to see the issues I had with it initially. There’s performance issues galore, missing AA options, camera issues and more.
I don’t personally think it was ready for release, as there’s far too many niggling issues that have been left in—a lot of them easily reproducible. I have been enjoying myself rather a lot with it (obviously), but it feels rushed out and I hate that feeling. XCOM 2 is a PC only release, so I just don’t get how it was put out like it was, especially considering it’s not a cheap game either. I don’t blame Feral or Firaxis, it’s the publisher who is almost always pushing hard for a release regardless of issues.
Final thoughts: 89% chance of hit? Totally missed, died. Welcome back, Commander.
I really do love it, even with the obvious flaws right now. It’s fantastic to have it on Linux, and my hour counter in-game won’t stop going up any time soon. It’s easily going to surpass the previous title for played time.
Grab XCOM 2 from the Feral Interactive store, and support them directly. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
QuoteIt’s easily going to surpass the previous title for played time.
Currant most played title?
Personally have some silly hours on boarderlands 2 :D
Good review , still on the fence whether to grab this Turned based aint really my thing. Tried so hard to get into civ beyond earth
0 Likes
Personally, I'll be grabbing this game...
...
...after my next paycheck. Adulting sucks.
...
...after my next paycheck. Adulting sucks.
1 Likes, Who?
I love this game. I runs great on my System76 Oryx Pro (i7, 980m). Will be racking up a lot of hours with this, so glad it's on Linux!
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Segata Sanshiro Feb 13, 2016
Great review! I really love the game too, and would agree that it's better than the original (but not by a lot for me).
One small thing that really gets to me is an issue on the older game, which is still present but not as bad. I like to have all my soldiers' voices match their nationalities, and not sound like generic Americans because it makes the immersion better and feel truly GLOBAL not like Armageddon or Independence Day where "the earth being destroyed" seems to take place just in the States.
There's maybe 30+ nationalities to choose from (which is enough), but only a handful of voices. This would be OK if it was a budgetary concern, but they went through the trouble of providing 10 Spanish voices for each gender ALL FROM SPAIN, which makes up less than 10% of the hispanophone, how much effort would it have been to get some voice actors from a few different countries for 7 of those voices instead? Same with English. This time we see 10 American, 4 English and 2 Australian voices (which is an improvement from the last game) but seriously, could some of those American ones not been Scottish, Irish or South African? Why do we need 10 American voices and 10 Spanish voices which all sound identical? Seems like a waste of money.
This was the same with the names and locations. I had soldiers from Brazil who had Spanish names, and ones from Turkey with English names - ONE guy spending ONE day typing in names would have made this better. Whenever the ship lands in a new region, it looks identical to the last with identical people. On missions, a city in India looks the same as one in Russia - a few unique assets would have been nice. The game starts to feel a bit like this after a while.
Anyway, I make a huge deal out of it, but it's not really - I just appreciate attention to detail. The game is friggin' awesome for that to be my sole issue with it.
One small thing that really gets to me is an issue on the older game, which is still present but not as bad. I like to have all my soldiers' voices match their nationalities, and not sound like generic Americans because it makes the immersion better and feel truly GLOBAL not like Armageddon or Independence Day where "the earth being destroyed" seems to take place just in the States.
There's maybe 30+ nationalities to choose from (which is enough), but only a handful of voices. This would be OK if it was a budgetary concern, but they went through the trouble of providing 10 Spanish voices for each gender ALL FROM SPAIN, which makes up less than 10% of the hispanophone, how much effort would it have been to get some voice actors from a few different countries for 7 of those voices instead? Same with English. This time we see 10 American, 4 English and 2 Australian voices (which is an improvement from the last game) but seriously, could some of those American ones not been Scottish, Irish or South African? Why do we need 10 American voices and 10 Spanish voices which all sound identical? Seems like a waste of money.
This was the same with the names and locations. I had soldiers from Brazil who had Spanish names, and ones from Turkey with English names - ONE guy spending ONE day typing in names would have made this better. Whenever the ship lands in a new region, it looks identical to the last with identical people. On missions, a city in India looks the same as one in Russia - a few unique assets would have been nice. The game starts to feel a bit like this after a while.
Anyway, I make a huge deal out of it, but it's not really - I just appreciate attention to detail. The game is friggin' awesome for that to be my sole issue with it.
2 Likes, Who?
I was apparently approximately among the first 1000 players who beat the game on Commander difficulty Ironman.
(At least counting only those who get Steam achievements).
It's an amazing game. I am looking towards them ironing out the kinks it has and I am also looking towards what amazing things will the modding community come up with.
(At least counting only those who get Steam achievements).
It's an amazing game. I am looking towards them ironing out the kinks it has and I am also looking towards what amazing things will the modding community come up with.
0 Likes
So they didn't break the stuff that worked, and improved everything else? No wonder it's got so good scores.
I'll obviously purchase it once I see the issues patched.
I'll obviously purchase it once I see the issues patched.
0 Likes
Quoting: Segata SanshiroThis time we see 10 American, 4 English and 2 Australian voices (which is an improvement from the last game) but seriously, could some of those American ones not been Scottish, Irish or South African?
Actually there's definitely one Scottish and one Irish in there, but I think they're just described as UK voices. Sadly, no Welsh representation.
1 Likes, Who?
NovenTheHero Feb 13, 2016
It sucks that a lot of mods are not working as advertised.
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Quoting: NovenTheHeroIt sucks that a lot of mods are not working as advertised.
If this is a problem with the Linux version, report it to Feral Interactive.
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NovenTheHero Feb 13, 2016
Honestly I think it has to do with case SenSitivitY since all the files in my install folder are lower cased and all the mods have a case structure like XComGameData.ini.
Quoting: TheBossQuoting: NovenTheHeroIt sucks that a lot of mods are not working as advertised.
If this is a problem with the Linux version, report it to Feral Interactive.
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