The game XCOM 2 has its glitches but it cuts a decent picture overall.
XCOM 2 came out on PC to critical acclaim back in February, and has now been released for the PS4 and Xbox One. It features the same addictive strategy gameplay found in Enemy Unknown while making several improvements and fine-tuning the systems.
In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, players were defending Earth against an alien invasion. But irrespective of what happened in your game, XCOM 2 starts 20 years later and presents a scenario where the mission had failed. Humanity had been defeated as the council nations betrayed XCOM and surrendered to alien control. People now believe that the aliens came in peace and have accepted them as rulers. As commander, you were being experimented on until the day you are rescued by the remaining members of XCOM. It is now your mission to dethrone the aliens and take back your planet. This twist from defense to attack is exactly what was needed in an XCOM sequel as the situation presents itself as far more interesting and in an encouraging manner. Just this shift in context alone makes your circumstances more dire; resulting in impactful victories as well as heart-breaking defeats.
The controls work well enough with a controller, in fact they feel more streamlined. Cycling through your options, weapons, deciding to go into overwatch mode and moving the camera are all easy to use. It feels fast and intuitive compared to how spread out it was on the keyboard. Unfortunately, some of the bugs have carried over to this console release so its not perfect.
Same is true for the performance issues, which aren’t as notable in a turn-based game, but still hinder your enjoyment. Random hitches, frame rare drops, delays in executing command and the general sluggishness of some of the actions makes XCOM a far from ideal port.
That being said it feels right at home on consoles. While the performance issues and bugs from the PC version have made their way to consoles, the game still earns a strong recommendation. There aren’t many other strategy RPGs on the current consoles and they aren’t nearly as good as XCOM 2. Even though ports of the older XCOM games onto older generation consoles struggled, the newer generation consoles cope quite well with XCOM 2 and make it a far more enjoyable experience.
