XCOM 2: Long War 2 Mod Impressions
The definitive XCOM 2 mod is finally here so buckle up for a long and grueling campaign against the ADVENT forces. Long War 2 from Pavonis Interactive launched last Friday, nearly overhauling the complete base game. Among a rework of the classes and weapon tiers in XCOM 2, the difficulty has been tweaked to force players into longer missions and an even longer campaign. Before diving in, I was curious how the Long War 2 team would reconcile the traditional drawn-out approach with the “alpha strike” tempo of XCOM 2. In short, Pavonis has done a great job integrating the themes of XCOM 2 into their new mod.
XCOM 2 is all about fighting back as a resistance force and Long War 2 introduces new mechanics that thematically fit. Your ultimate goal is still to stop the Avatar Project from completing, but there’s more of a series of intermediate goals this time around; while previously you would establish resistance networks around regions, this time you have more managerial control over resistance havens. Each haven can be modified to provide more supplies or intel depending on your priorities. You can even work to completely remove ADVENT forces from a certain area after a while. Managing the Geoscape has now become an integral part of growing into an effective Commander.
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“In short, Pavonis has done a great job integrating the themes of XCOM 2 into their new mod.”
Perhaps the largest change to Geoscape, however, is the infiltration mechanic. This is something I would strongly encourage to read up on for anyone who is just starting a Long War 2 campaign. In XCOM 2, you typically select one of three missions that appear periodically. By choosing only one, you are effectively choosing what two dark events you want to happen. Long War 2 changes this up with infiltration: you select a squad to take on a mission with the hopes they can complete the objective without too much ADVENT resistance. The more a squad is infiltrated, the less enemy resistance there is. Unlike XCOM 2, a bigger squad is not always the best option for infiltration since it will raise the time required to completely infiltrate the site. While this mechanic still provides a trade-off, the stakes are higher. If you bring too few soldiers, you can’t be sure you’ll survive large pods of ADVENT. If you bring too many you will surely face more and possibly stronger enemies. Wounds take much longer to heal in Long War 2, so even a tick of damage can mean a soldier is down for at least a couple of weeks. Risking injury on too many of your soldiers can cause your situation to spiral out of control.
As for the difficulty of the missions themselves, standard XCOM rules aren’t very applicable. On missions without a timer, firefights can get incredibly tense. Expect many missed shots on both sides as cover provides more of a defensive bonus. This also implies that flanking shots are absolutely key and you must often make a tough choice if you should risk putting a soldier in danger for a better chance to take down an enemy. As someone who has beaten XCOM 2 a couple times, the learning curve for me wasn’t about the tweaks to hit chance and cover mechanics, but rather learning what enemies will try to do. The developers claim that Long War 2 improves enemy AI to have better combat tactics and I must agree. Enemies now seem to work as a team when they have the numbers advantage and play much more defensively when alone. Of course, these behaviors could have easily been in the base game, but vanilla XCOM 2 put such an emphasis on attacking and locking down pods before they even have a chance to attack. Now, pods are bigger so the odds of you taking out an entire group of enemies in a single ambush are way lower. The laser and coilgun tiers of weapons help you scale more gradually to the overall heightened ADVENT power, but you always feel outclassed by ADVENT, which I believe to be a good thing; otherwise, there wouldn’t be that trademark persistent struggle of a Long War mod.
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“Long War 2 won’t appeal to everyone, but if you’re looking for what feels like a new game built in the XCOM 2 engine then I could not recommend it enough.”
I think the biggest downfall of Long War 2 is the incorporation of the mission timer introduced in XCOM 2. Mission times have been altered slightly, but not nearly enough. I became so frustrated with the extreme limits imposed on me that I bumped all of my mission timers up by 4 turns, something that many others in the community seem to agree on. I think that the timers offer an adrenaline-pumping experience if calibrated correctly, but the nature Long War 2 needs to be taken into consideration a bit more when determining the turn limit. The timers can force players into situations no one would want to be in under normal circumstances; the entire LW2 experience is about being in non-ideal circumstances all the time so you might imagine the scenarios that a short turn limit can force you into.
Long War 2 won’t appeal to everyone, but if you’re looking for what feels like a new game built in the XCOM 2 engine then I could not recommend it enough. Sure, I’ve screamed at my computer more this past weekend than I ever have, but those moments when your entire mission rests on a 18% shot after a string of missed 80% shots are what I live for in XCOM. Thank you Pavonis Interactive for what is truly an amazing labor of love.