XCOM 2 (Vanilla) Review

September 2026

I first played XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2016 on the Xbox 360, and it was a memorable game to me in part because of a catastrophic pyrrhic victory towards the end of the game that effectively ended my campaign. I lacked both the resources to replace my lost soldiers and equipment as well as the mental strength to accept the deaths of all my people.

XCOM 2 has as similar story, in that I picked up a second hand copy of the game for my Xbox One in 2017 and didn't manage to complete it. I made even less progress through the game than I did in Enemy Unknown, because I felt the pressure in the strategic layer to be overwhelming, and my military prowess in the tactical layer to be greatly underwhelming. I have attempted to the play the game a number of times since, including once on Steam, but never managed to stick with it enough to finish it.

Now, in 2026, I've finally gotten around to seeing it through to the end (twice!). I've always fondly (?) remembered how XCOM made me feel when my soldiers would succeed miraculously or die spectacularly, and I had the itch to give it another go with Star Wars: Zero Company having recently released.

The first thing I want to write about is the aforementioned pressure of the strategic layer. It really is masterful in the early stages of the game, and especially for a new player who doesn't understand how it works. I can't think of another game I've played that hits you with such visceral stress from the beginning, and refuses to let up. There's a true sense of dread as the Avatar Project progress ticks up at a rate faster than you can handle, and it has you thinking the campaign is already careening towards failure before you've even gotten started. In reality, it's more forgiving than this and you've got a lot more time than you think to get things back on track, but it does an incredible job at immersing you as the Commander of an underdog organisation that really shouldn't stand a chance at all.

My favourite feature of XCOM has always been the soldiers and customisation. I'm not the kind of player that spends hours creating characters in other games, and neither do I in XCOM 2, but I find making at least a few small adjustments to the random recruits attaches me to them. The lethality of XCOM 2 and the randomness involved in actions amplifies this attachment to a perhaps unhealthy degree. I hate watching my characters die. I love watching my characters make incredible, against-the-odds moves that completely save an otherwise precarious mission. The tension between these two things are something XCOM 2 does exceptionally well. I found myself talking aloud while playing this game very often, usually to do one of four things: trash talk an alien for missing, congratulate a soldier for succeeding, berate a soldier for missing six 55% shots in a row, or most frequently, complain about how unfair the game is. I think this is in part due to randomness, of course, but also because of how attached I get to my soldiers. There's just enough personality available for each character that they do manage to feel distinct from each other.

Mechanically speaking, the tactical layer feels really good. I'm not a turn-based tactics expert, but I think it has plenty of depth without feeling overwhelming. New aliens are introduced to you at a fast but manageable pace, tying in to the pressure the game wants you to feel like you are under. The aliens themselves have good variety, and target priority gets interesting the more aliens are available and active at once. Map destruction is very fun and allows for some creative ways to get around otherwise dire situations. The turn timers force you to take risks to succeed but most of the time are generous enough to allow you to do everything you want to do in a mission. I enjoyed pretty much everything about the combat in this game, it feels punchy and lethal and gives you room for interesting decision making. In comparison to a game like Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (which is not as "purely" turn-based tactics as XCOM 2 is), it just feels so much better to play. Rogue Trader's combat gets very boring very quickly, as you just use the same combo on each character over and over again. Even though your soldiers in XCOM 2 are generally simpler, the game throws far more interesting combat scenarios at you and gives you plenty of reason to worry about even minor tactical mistakes.

The strategic layer is also nice. It's a cool contrast from the combat that makes the rebellion against the aliens feel far more grand than just jumping from mission to mission. I will admit to finding the time limits to start Guerrilla Ops and Council Missions to be quite annoying at times, because they would so often become available on the last day of scanning. Even though there's a small window in which you can finish scanning before starting a mission, I usually had to leave what I was doing and come back afterwards just to finish the last little bit. I get that it aligns with the theme of urgency that I've been very impressed by elsewhere, but specifically in this instance it bothered me because I just want to grab my last 100 supplies for the month, please and thank you.

The narrative of the game is a bit underwhelming, but I think that's fine. Not every game needs to have a tightly woven narrative, and some games benefit from lacking such a thing. XCOM 2's story beats are short and clear, and don't have much explanation beyond "we've researched and engineered the thing you need, now we can progress". I don't think it needs too much more than this. A little more might be cool, sure, but the real meat and potatoes of XCOM's narrative is in the gameplay. The game isn't geared around you remembering the discovery of the artefact that turns things around for the resistance, it's geared around the story of the soldiers who, after unfortunately triggering 3 pods of aliens after already losing a soldier, manage to hack two enemy mechs and instantly turn the tides in their favour. Leaving the scripted narrative thin leaves a lot more room for the emergent storytelling between your soldiers, and that's XCOM's speciality in my mind.

Overall, I'm glad to have finally come around on this game. I feel like the developers of this game managed to thread the needle perfectly in almost every aspect of the game. I mean this in the sense that there's exactly the right amount of content to feel fulfilling but not excessive. The progression of the game feels perfectly timed to be challenging and full of pressure, but to feel more overwhelming than it actually is. The game, as a whole, is "just right", and that's something to be commended for, even 10 years later.