as with every game that evokes JA2: cleverness and wit are no longer part of that package
lieutenant hayflick’s NATO brain is showing
this is what I mean about the random events being a total waste of time
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I forgot to post the mod link, it’s at 6th floor in this thread.
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that’s really nasty.
MENACE has sold 250,000 copies.
In huge win for lesbians news, the Carda/Darby OTP was confirmed in their April fools joke
this last slide killed me
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With Xenonauts 2 finally getting a v1.0 release, I decided to play through the finished game.
It’s!!! Fine!!! I wrapped up the campaign last night after 66 hours, and had solid time with it!
This was a bit of a I’m Eating My Vegetables game where I really support this project and I’m very proud at what they’ve accomplished and desperately want something very similar to this, but also, I did not really have “fun” in the traditional sense playing it through. But I didn’t dislike any of it either!
My overall impression of the game is that it does a great job re-creating and refining the original X-Com mechanically, it’s really cool having a 3D engine that is laid out like X-Com was and modernized like this. I also liked some of the plot elements, so I actually would read each autopsy or research report or plot development - that’s never a guarantee with fan games, so I was happy to see the writing was pretty good.
I do wish this game did something unique with the engine and didn’t just do X-Com again with the serial numbers filed off. You could tell a new story! You could try out some new aliens! You could introduce new gameplay elements, or have new tech, or go to new places! Things that Terror from the Deep and Apocalypse did to great effect. Things that even XCOM 2 did, and Chimera Squad! But, at the end of the day, it is X-Com’s story progression again, it is X-Com’s aliens and tech 1:1, it is X-Com reconstructed with love but with no notion of what that game was trying to do at the time.
It’s also just visually extremely blah, everyone are in muted colors, in cement lots, performing combat that is relatively realistic-looking. I would personally describe this as milslop, where there is an absence of artistic vision, so it defaults to, “well, what would a military actually look like here? What would they do with this technology?” They would make it into a regular M16-looking gun, which is what all tech you research becomes in Xeno 2.
Compare this to the original X-Com’s vibrant comic book asthetic, where aliens are strange and colorful, the tech is unique and unconventional in its design, and the story is outlandish, like something out of the movie Lifeforce or an X-Files episode. Plasma blasts are big green goopy spoobs and explosions have fucking skulls in them, and lasers feel chunky and hit pleasantly. When things die they die making horrible screeches and screams. That’s the good shit. Even X-Com Apocalypse, for as ugly as I often find that game, it had a unique art deco futurist style and weird-ass extra-dimensional creatures that defied known science. That shit is cool as hell.
But whatever, as a fan game I’m extremely impressed by what the team has done here, it’s a classic X-Com experience that can run on a modern machine at modern resolutions with modern features and no fuss. This would not be a bad way for someone to be introduced to the way X-Com was prior to the Friaxis games.
There were some things that charmed the hell out of me. I love their new UFO interception system, it’s cool as hell! You can reposition, you can roll or warp around, you had cut your weapons to use the afterburners, you can retreat, you can have MULTIPLE CRAFT INTERCEPT! Having two weaker interceptors going up against a strong UFO is extremely badass, with one distracting the interceptors while the other gets in and lays into the terror ship or harvester. So good.
I also think the Wound and Survival system helps preventing save-scumming, since there’s a good chance your killed soldier might actually make it, albiet with a long-ass recovery, and retain the XP you’ve gained. This one change goes a long way to addressing some of the issues with the original X-Com’s punishing setup.
The biggest innovation of this game, for me, bar none, was the addition of riot shields to the battlescape. This is so incredibly needed, I’m shocked I hadn’t seen it in any sequel or mod until now. It sounds absurd but the ability to enter a room and absorb a volley of reaction shots, or barricade up a vulnerable unit, feels so essential. I also love that it follows, in general, actual SWAT tactics, which is something you should be encouraged to do in this game! Ideally, X-Com would be you performing as a modern tactical team, and forced to evolve your tactics as the game progresses. I liked how X2 had me using shields and smoke and shock grenades. More of this.
I’m a big fan of how the aiming is conveyed to the user, with a useful and efficient line that indicates what is obscuring the soldier’s aim, what is reducing their confidence in the shot. It’s useful, it’s clean, it increases the pace of the game. Great improvement.
Appreciated seeing the locations you drop into build like actual functional livable spaces, with parked cars and toilets and parks and waste baskets, it gives you cover options while also keeping the vibe that you these vile aliens have launched a terror attack on a civilian center and you’ve just arrived to stop them. It’s strange to say but a lot of X-Comlikes do not think to do this, they present a world devoid of life, seemingly constructed for you to battle in.
The Geoscape I found a little blah. It’s clear but it’s so static. For the record, I didn’t necessarily like the XCOM one either, I just feel like the O.G. drove home how you had this little marble of a planet and you were the only thing in charge of keeping it alive, so you’d rotate around your globe and plop down your bases and I dunno, it felt better. Maybe it’s just nostalgia though!
The base-building is 1:1 with X-Com and looks great, I particularly enjoyed how new aircraft would be shown in-assembly in the hanger bay. Great little touch.
During a base-invasion mission by an enemy carrier, I got to see all the parts of the base in the battlescape, which is as cool here as it was in the original X-Com. I’ve never quite understood why they made graphics for every little thing you had in the base-builder for the battlescape, just for this one rare kind of mission, but I’m glad they did, it’s a real treat.
I’ll put some of the other odds and ends in expand boxes so this post doesn’t run any futher.
But yeah, happy I played it, wasn’t in love with it but mechanically-speaking it’s a very good remake of X-Com. Nice seeing them more or less finish it, hope they do another!
Thoughts on the Story
I kinda liked the story! It’s not really any different than the original’s “you are invaded by a distant empire, go and kill their main guy and you will stop it”, but there’s some great little details here.
I’m a bit on the fence about them having an administrator lady who talks to you, the Commander, and tells you stuff. This is very XCOM, having you be an existing person that’s part of a small team: You, the Admin, the Lead Scientist, and the Manufacturing Guy Who Looks Like This:
I’m rereading the Diane Duane X-Com novel after not having done so since I was a kid, and I’m really loving how she does the narrative. It’s mainly a POV from the base commander lady as she ponders how best to respond to the invasion, but occasionally, it’ll cut to the lead soldier when she sends them on missions, so it’s two main characters really. It’s nice having a living, emotional touchpoint for such a terrifying and unknown threat.
But, I also love the way the original X-Com did it, where no character really gets named at any point, you are presumably the administrator and commander of the project. You absorb information purely through the reports you receive from your teams, including plot-relevant stuff like the nature of your enemies, where they’re from, how we might stop them, everything. I think the closer you can get to an experience where you are trying to wage a shadow war with a vast organization, dealing with global threats, juggling funding and manufacturing supplies and picking who gets saved and who doesn’t, the better. At its best, X-Com feels like the world is at stake and you are running the organization that will save it, not through some crazy acts of singular heroism but through securing supplies and arming your troops well and being smart about your encounters, the menial inglorious stuff, the shit that actually wins wars.
In the early game of Xenonauts 2, your previous base commander loses his mind and you escape with a small group to regroup. You later retake your original base and find he was under alien control. I like this whole thing! It’s cool to start scrappy and have a whole lot of unknowns. You fight “the Cleaners” who are suited up humans, not under any control, seemingly believing their cause correct.
When you eventually take the base, you discover that an older version of your organization found a crashed UFO in the ice, engineered a gate, and contacted the aliens in good faith. This then caused the aliens to get a foothold.
I love the detail that a Black Mesa-style org was messing with shit they didn’t understand, and this was the true cause of the invasion we now are dealing with. I also like that it made a cult of sorts of a previous version of our org, that’s a great, pretty fucked-up idea. They’re these lost souls we just have to put down.
Now unfortunately not a whole lot is made of any of this. The Cleaners are just simple easy enemies you overwhelm early in the game and never hear from again. It would’ve been nice to see this grow into something, but, it feels like an idea inserted into the early game to liven it up, and nothing further.
The next major plot beat is that you determine the aliens cannot possibly be traveling from a distant star, with the power their ships have. You then realize that the aliens are not traveling through space but through dimensions, that they are from a different Earth, and indeed, all aliens you have been encountering are forms of life that MIGHT have evolved on this Earth. The leaders, the Eternals, come from a world they have ruined through war, and seek other Earths to survive. They have only ever encountered non-sentient beings, enslaved them, modified them to serve in their army, and moved on to the next reality.
When the proto-X-Com opened the gate, they revealed the existence of this Earth to them, a verdant and populated world that was only a few generations from climate collapse, should nothing be done. That gives a pretty compelling and interesting reason for the aliens to do what they’re doing. I thought all of that was quite cool.
Now, looking to X-Com Apocalypse, I would’ve absolutely loved to see some options as to what to do next, maybe you can liberate some faction and join with it, or you can expand into another Earth, or put a foothold in their Earth, something like that, but nah it’s a linear experience unfortche.
The next notable thing is that a fucking orbital laser materializes in orbit and starts taking out cities!
I loved this idea, you get this little timer at the bottom that indicates when this thing will be done recharging and level the next city, presumably spiking the panic levels.
This is a good time to mention that the panic mechanic of this game never came close to mattering, no nation was ever remotely in danger of withdrawing from the project, which, well, was disappointing. I think if nothing else, this orbital laser situation should be making people lose their goddamned minds, it should be this huge fucking disaster, this sock to the gut you have to recover from.
But, as it is, I assembled a team and went immediately up there and blew it up, no muss no fuss.
Not a big deal turns out!
I’m glad they put this whole orbital laser thing into the game, because it’s a cool idea, it sets Xeno 2 apart from X-Com, and it theoretically would be a cool escalation to add in at the midpoint. I looked into it online and people just bitched too much about the new mechanic, so the devs pulled it back, and that’s why it’s so toothless. Ah well.
You do get to do a cool mission to take down the laser, and though the interior looks exactly like every other grey-ass featureless location in this game, it was a great concept.
You then ultimately tech up a bit and shoot down a battleship. I really love doing these battleship battlescape missions in X-Com, and here was similarly fun.
I definitely don’t think the layout was anywhere near as weird and cool as in the O.G. X-Com, but it had at least once fun surprise:
The upper floor has a more ornate, polished, luxury feel to it, and it’s because it hosts their leader species, an Eternal. They have an entire section of the ship with bedrooms and nice-looking hallways with tables on them, so their leader lives comfortably. This is such a great little detail, showing that the alien servants live in squalor while the leaders dedicate an entire floor of their ship to comfort. Loved that, and I of course loved shooting it up and breaking beds and shit.
Ultimately you build a teleporter gate of your own and take the fight to the Eternal’s home dimension, surely something so strange and exotic our minds can scarcely imagine wh-
Oh! It’s grey cement again huh. Hm.
We fight our way to a big open room, gun down some alijems, then I punched out their supreme leader with a robo-fist.
He doesn’t do or say anything, he just barks an alien noise and goes down.
YEAH BOI
You’re then given this rather surprisingly optimistic ending, where the Eternals surrender to you, you accept their defeat, then TAKE OVER THE MULTIVERSE and just run it from your Earth I guess. Nice to see some Chimera Squad stuff too with all the races working together.
Now the game had established them all to be sub-sentient but whatever I’ll just forget that bit. Pretty cool they wrote a little ending there! A little odd and tidy but it’s nice!
And one other thing…
The Colossus Suits
Okay real quick, I did have a whole lot of fun with these Jin-Roh-ass mecha power suits you get in the late game.
They just let you run through doors and walls and sometimes little aliens, you get drunk on power a bit. They rule!
And I just never got sick of how they let you hip-fire a heavy plasma cannon or simply deck someone with a big ol’ robo fist:
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I looked into why the game Looks Like That and found this little detail:
They hired and fired a concept artist three times in development, each time thinking that they’d never need the services of an artist ever again. Which is a big part of why the game is so much grey concrete. They thought they could get away with telling the one 3D artist on the team, “just make it like the first game, but in 3D. Also, do new stuff based on nothing but my vibes.”
They didn’t have a concept artist during the entire development of the final mission of the game. Only hiring the third to finish off some research art that had been missing for a few years.
This is what happens when you tell a 3D artist, “just make the final level an assault on a military base on an alien planet,” and provide no information or guidance on what an alien military looks like, the planet, the infrastructure, or even a color pallet to follow. They did the job they were asked to. They’re not an art director or even a 2D artist. They don’t make textures, they turn pictures into models, and without pictures they do their best.
X-Com wanted to be comic book style, XCOM wanted to be Gears of War meets X-Files, XCOM2 wanted to be mild dystopian holographic glass future, Xenonauts 2 wanted artists to not be necessary for a good looking game. They initially wanted cold war retro futurism, but that was the first concept artist. That all went away five years ago.
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Programmers not valuing the contributions of visual artists… where have I heard this before…
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I genuinely came away from this feeling like I’d played through an AI gen video game, as crazy as that sounds. I know the team worked on this for a long time and it all works well, but I had the same feeling finishing this game as I do reading something someone had Claude spit out.
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this also describes the first one exactly. I keep wondering why I was waiting for this game
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also why can’t you sidestep in xenonauts 2. why do they make you waste time units manipulating your body back and forth in certain directions when. you could simply step aside. like a human being. you also can’t backstep either like ??? okay whatever I guess. ja2 1.13 had these features when the fucking dinosaurs walked the planet
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i just want to stress its utterly deranged to ask people to do close quarters room clearing when they are not allowed to move in one direction and look in another. like. thats the whole fucking thing. thats literally something you are almost guaranteed to have to do
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This is what was driving me insane, the two new things that felt like improvements were the riot shields and the accuracy info blocks you’d get when looking at a firing angle. This game about breaching into rooms and hostile craft should really really be drawing from SWAT team shit, it should be core to the game mechanics that you’re behind cover, you’re leaning in, you’re pivoting from a fixed location, you’re breaking through walls, all that. That’s what this game’s combat is! You’re methodically securing shit by inches, paying a heavy price for exposing yourself or moving forward without support and without every bit of knowledge you’ve been able to glean.
Like you said, Jagged Alliance got a lot of this right already. Xeno 2’s slavish adherence to the oddities of the original means you have things like everyone moving a hard 90-degree angles and having to rotate at TU cost to “turn their head”, it’s exactly the kind of thing they should be refining. But that would require a step back, a question like, “what kind of game do we want to make?”, a question they believe already answered before they started.
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Can you actually use breaching charges to dynamic entry UFOs now? I used a mod for this in the first one because it was such bullshit you couldn’t, literally just so they could funnel you into a kill zone in the doorway to compensate for the AI’s inadequacies
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Yeah, they puncture the hull of a downed UFO. I ended up not using them because the weight add, the explosive radius of 4, and the fact that you don’t really get much benefit vs opening a door and shooting in.
Nice to have the option though, another 1:1 item with the original game’s high explosive.
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it sounds like what you’re telling me is they somehow found a way to make blowing holes in walls boring too
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Mostly it’s that there isn’t reeeeally a need for them, the UFO design is already such that, after you hit the two-decker ones, there’s still only one way to get into them, and that’s by taking the interior elevator. So bombing the walls of a UFO is just slightly too much of a hassle when you can go through the front door, have a shield guy open it, then toss a stun grenade or smoke through. Then you have your run of the room with your shield dudes.
I will say, one thing Xeno really improves on the original is by making the use of grenades and C4 and flares pretty easy:
Rather than having to equip them in your inventory to your hand, like you did in X-Com, they’re always “readied” there on the side, meaning you don’t have to burn TUs unequipping your primary, replacing it with the grenande, priming it, throwing it, then re-equipping.
One thing I never quite figured out was if having less weight overall, well below your capacity, would yield you more movement, since you wouldn’t be using up as many TUs. I would assume so, but, part of me suspects that you can fill up your inventory to the tippy dippy tip top and suffer no difference in TU spend than if you had a single bee in your inventory.
When you get the electro-stun grenades, this becomes pretty absurd because literally anything is instantly defeatable by hitting it with a few of these. It’s a case where they should put more protections in place for the aliens, because makes you end up using them all the time, where I think it should be a trade between taking an alien alive and stopping a powerful alien with a frag.
I also basically never used explosives on enemies, because it destroys their inventory, and especially here, you need to sell absolutely everything you find to keep above water financially. I had a fucked-up reverse-alien-abduction situation going on 3/4s of my team was devoted to live alien capture, so I could sell them to the black market and keep my projects from stalling out from lack of funding. This turned my org into a sort of hunting and scavenging operation, eager to strip the copper out of the wires on any alien craft we could get our hands on. It was fun and all but I would’ve like some reason to be able to be a bit more reckless and blow up some walls and shoot some missiles, it was just never a reasonable thing to do.
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the air combat minigame is genuinely the most innovative thing the xenonauts series has brought to xcom
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