A detailed cross-section of the vessel lets you zoom into rooms to initiate research and building projects. A central cluster of rooms can be cleared out to build new facilities, and on the bridge you access the Geoscape, a map of the world that lets you choose where you want to park your spacecraft.
To fight back, you must expand your reach from your lone starting territory by contacting nearby resistance groups. Time is frozen on the Geoscape, but when you park over an objective—make resistance contact; acquire resources; contact the black market—you activate a timer and spend precious days to claim it. This is nerve-racking. At any moment your scans can be interrupted by an alien attack, or a mission that will let you attack the aliens. You can choose to ignore some of these, but it’s not wise. Missions net you important resources, give your soldiers a chance to gain experience, and counter ‘Dark Events'—varied alien initiatives that, among many options, can half your income for a month, or send an interceptor out to hunt The Avenger.
Just describing the strategic layer doesn’t capture the rhythm of success and setback that makes it so gripping. The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously. You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You can’t have all of these. You can probably only have one. In 1989 Sid Meier described games as “a series of interesting decisions.” XCOM 2 is the purest expression of that ethos that Firaxis has yet produced.
Brilliantly, you even have to scan to collect your monthly cache of supplies, hidden in the landscape to escape alien detection. I have left supplies on the ground for a week because I needed to recruit an engineer. I needed to hit an alien base to reduce the Avatar Project count—a doom clock that is very bad news if it maxes out. I needed Advent corpses to get a vital armour upgrade. I needed a cup of tea because it was all getting a bit too much. This narrow series of opportunities fits the fantasy perfectly. You take whatever you can get. You’re scraping food and fuel out of the dirt to keep The Avenger in the air.
The moment the timer freezes during a scan, I stop breathing. There’s a notification screen you have to click through to find out what is about to try to kill you—I swear this is intentional, to let the sense of dread register for a second or two. If you’re lucky, it’s the council getting in touch to give you a thumbs-up and tell you they’ve dropped some sandwiches for you in South America. If you’re unlucky you’ll be faced with XCOM 2’s equivalent of Enemy Unknown’s Terror missions. Dubbed Retaliation, these once again ask you to rescue civilians from the battlefield while the aliens’ best troops try to annihilate them. I have to steel myself for every fight, knowing that a bad performance could ruin my plans.