Some 20 years ago, aliens came to our planet under the guise of wanting to bring peace and prosperity to the masses. However, their true intentions were far more sinister. Many fell for the ruse, but resistance forces formed all around the world, led by XCOM – Extraterrestrial Combat Unit. In order to win the planet back, you’ll have to overcome waves of aliens and mechs. And lag. Lots and lots of lag.
2K Games has finally released some of their most beloved games on the Nintendo Switch, and among them is XCOM 2 Collection, featuring the full game and all of it’s DLC. As a complete newcomer to this franchise, I was excited to step out of my comfort zone and explore a game I knew little about. And while I’d say overall, I enjoyed the game, the experience was marred by long load times, horrendous frame-rates, missing animations and character models, a few glitches, and a sharp learning curve that is not friendly to newcomers.
https://youtu.be/RQ1_qswDw1g
Rising Through the Ranks
XCOM 2 is a turn-based strategy RPG where you command groups of four to six soldiers in battle against alien foes. Each unit gets two actions per turn that can be used to move, shoot, hunker down, enter into overwatch, a state in which you will shoot at an enemy as soon as they enter into your sightline or use items. Completing missions will level up your soldiers into one of four classifications: Grenadier, Sharpshooter, Ranger, and Specialist. Each of these comes with their own skill tree and special abilities to choose from as they rise through the ranks. Battles became infinitely more interesting and fun once units had more skills. Learning how each of these them worked in action and figuring out the new strategies was exciting. You are given a degree of customization that can be daunting at first, but once understood will let you play the game in a way that is unique to you.
But don’t get too attached to your soldiers. Once they go down in battle, they are down for good. Any work that you put into levelling them up is gone and you’ll have to start over with a rookie. Losing units is a big part of the game, so much so that in the tutorial you are forced to put soldiers in a position where they killed. I liked that this was done; it told me outright that I was going to suffer some losses – this is a war after all. I did manage to carry one Ranger throughout the entire campaign and she became essential to my victories. Jane “Cajun” Kelly was often my only unit that wasn’t a rookie, so despite what I said at the beginning of this paragraph, I did get attached to her and did whatever I could to keep her alive. This was stressful at times, and I’ll admit, I did have to reload my save file to correct mistakes once or twice, but it ultimately made the game more fun, having a unit that could do more than just basic actions.
Avenger, Assemble
Outside of battle was where I had the most difficulty getting interested in the game. Your base of operations is a large Helicarrier called the Avenger, and you are responsible for managing every aspect of it. There is a lab where you can direct scientists to research a variety of things, engineers who can build your equipment and more facilities, the armoury, where you can recruit new soldiers and manage existing ones. Finally, there’s the bridge. This takes you to a world map and is where you’ll be selecting missions, scanning for intel and supply drops, and building your resistance network.
You’re limited in how much you can take on at a time, so you’ll have to prioritize what you feel is important. But that becomes difficult when you are bombarded with incoming communications, time-sensitive missions and notifications that the aliens are making progress on their secret project. You are constantly being pulled in different directions, and it often feels like the game is trying to panic you into attempting missions that you are nowhere near ready for. There were many times when I had few available soldiers or wanted to focus on getting supplies for an upgrade, but I was told that I had to take on this mission or else I would experience dire consequences. I lost a lot of troops that way and spent a lot of resources on things that I didn’t want through all of this. I decided to start ignoring some prompts near the end of the game, and this actually worked in my favour. It allowed me to focus on what I felt was most important actually better equipped me to deal with the consequences. I spent a lot of the game being annoyed and frustrated with my time outside of battle, but thankfully I figured out a way to make it work for me.
Going Berserk
Going in blind is something I rarely get to do these days, but that came at the cost of a lot of frustration, specifically regarding the DLC that was included. When you start a new file, you are asked whether you want to integrate the DLC packs into the campaign, with a brief and vague explanation of each one. Wanting the full experience, I enabled them and began the game. Not knowing what was part of the base game and what wasn’t, I selected missions as they came up based on their assigned difficulty levels and whether or not I felt I had strong enough units.
Eventually, I came across a mission requiring me to infiltrate a Viper’s nest and eliminate all the hostiles. It was difficult but manageable. Until the Viper King came out. He had twice as much health than any enemy I had ever encountered and got to take a turn after every single action I took. He decimated my squad, opened a portal and disappeared. After that, there was a random chance of him (or two other Ruler class aliens) to appear in any mission and destroy you again. This completely breaks the game for newcomers like myself. Missions that are already proving to be difficult are made nearly impossible, especially in the early game when you have few strong units. I would’ve appreciated a warning in-game, telling you exactly what the DLC included and that it probably isn’t for beginners.
And I would love it if I could end the review here, with a few complaints, but mostly positive opinions. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. I had a lot of issues with the performance of this port. From the beginning, I knew I was in for a rough time; the load screens were ridiculously long, the frame rate started dragging as soon as gameplay started, and character models were missing during important actions. I directed one of my soldiers to pick up an unconscious body, and it looked like they were pantomiming the order. This all happened in the tutorial, and it only got worse from there.
Every mission began with a stuttering scene of soldiers jumping out of a plane and the map and units messily loading onto the screen. Soldiers choppily performed actions, if they were allowed to perform them at all, and their turns would take forever to end. Enemy units zipped around wildly on the grid before ending up where they wanted to be, and sometimes, they would disappear entirely from view, even if you were only a few squares away from them. There were many times where I shot an enemy and it didn’t react, as if they forgot to put in the animation. And on top of that, the damage occasionally wouldn’t show up, leaving me completely unaware of whether I made the shot. All of these issues are made even worse when there are more than seven or eight enemies on screen. The final stretch of the game performed horribly, as the aliens were throwing every enemy type at you in waves in a larger map than usual.
Verdict
XCOM 2 Collection is a difficult game to get into. You’re required to figure a lot of things out on your own, and things can get very overwhelming at times. Patience will be rewarded though, as the gameplay only gets better as it goes on. But I cannot recommend it on the Nintendo Switch. There is an absurd number of technical difficulties and glitches that make it a chore to get through, and unlike the gameplay, the performance gets worse as the game goes on.
[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]
