Time to use my necromancer skills on this thread.
For thise who didn't notice, XCOM 2 got a nice new expansion called "War of the Chosen".
It's similiar to Enemy Within that it changes the entre game so much, that they have to keep it as seperate starting option for players.
This thing adds even more than Enemy Within and that expansion was already crazy.
I ry not to spil that much and just talk about the general gameplay features, that were added. Apart from new aliens, weapons, items and missions, the main focus are the three new bosses, the Chosen.
These aliens can appear on any mission and make your life miserable. You can kill them like any other enemy but they will then teleport out instead of actually dying. The key part of the game is to find the hideout of each of these bosses and finish it off there.
To do this you get support from three new NPC factions. You have to make contact to these factions, estabelish a good connection with them and they allow you to support on covert actions. Covert actions are non-playable missions (like in Enemy Within), whre you send out soldiers for a specific time and they will eventually return with a result. If they are successful, you get loot, progress, xp, you name it. Your soldiers can even get stats from doing these missions. However, they can get hurt, ambushed or even captured on these missions. the last one is really bad for you because captured soldiers get now tortured from the Chosen in order to learn the location of the Avenger (your base). You can rescue the soldiers in a special new mission type that involves stealth.
Additionaly to covert actions, each of the three factions give you access to new classes (or more specific, they give you one of their own soldiers). The special classes can choose from multiple skills.
While we're at skills, these are also new. The typical two branches are still there but with a new building, the training center, you can now branch out to a third path with randomized skills for each soldier. and you can even get skills from BOTH skill trees at once. Soldiers get now skill points for kills, these can be used to buy skills that you didn't choose by level ups or you can choose fromt he third branch that is randomly generated for each soldier. Additionally you also have "XCOM" skill points that are shared with each soldier.l These can be obtained from good strategic moments in battles like flanking an enemy or getting a good shot from an ambush. Defeating Chosen (even in the mission where you cannot kill them for good) also gives a good amount of these.
Now the features don't end here. A new enemy faction was added too. The Lost. These are your typical horror zombies that were exposed to alien radiation for 20 years. They are mindless, they are undead and they are very hostile towards anything. This includes the aliens as well, on missions were you fight both Lost and aliens, the Lost will alsso attack the aliens.
The Lost are drawn by loud noises (reminds of the L4D zombies a lot) and you can use grenades to lure them in specific regions, for an example in enemy clusters. keep in midn that the Lost will still attack you if they can.
The Lost don't have many HP, most of the time 2-4, in some stronger cases about 5-8. You can almost always one-shot them. But they come in big numbers, it's not rare to suddenly fave 20 of them at once. To counter this, each kill on a Lost will net you another free action to use. Cue for heroic zombie survival fights. In many missions with Lost it's impossible to beat them, they are too many, you have to evacuate after you finished the objective. The Lost add a nice variation to the mix bu can also annoy he hell out of you in missions where you really don't want them. *cough* Chosen shows up.
Except that, XCOM 2 is still XCOM 2, the main objective is still the same, the plot device is still the same with some variations here and there to fill in the Chosen.
A nice and welcome change are in the retaliation missions. There is now a variation to the standard version where the civilians are brought together at a safe spot and protected by resistance soldiers who ge their own turn an can attack and
kill aliens for you. This makes these missions a lot easier and not so chaotic as they used to be. The aliens will in this variation however ignore your troops mostly and attack the civilians if they can to make up for that change. This includes aliens that you engaged already and are two steps away from one of your soldiers.
A last note, XCOM 2 has now daily challenges. These single player missions can be played for points in a daily leaderboard. It's a common thing in other types of games but I didn't expect in XCOM2.
And whiel we're at XCOM, he maker of XCOM has started a new game which will come out 2018. It's XCOM. With horror. It is, fromt he concept, XCOM Enemy Unknown but the twist is that enemies are procedurely generated on your behaviour and your playstyle. they adapt towards your stretegy, if you use a specific type of weapon often in missions, you will face enemies that are resistent towards it.
To make it even more crazy, the game will feature huge bosses with multiple attack patterns and you have to shoot of limbs in Dead Space Style to remove attacks from the boss and kill it off.
The premise of the game is that after a global virus broke out and infected wildlife and humans, the survivors settled in big megacities to be safe. The virus mutated its hosts and gave them properties of every specimen it had infected. The result are creatures with grotesque limbs made from different species. It looks very promising.
https://phoenixpoint.info/
