Forum Overview :: XCOM 2 :: Just a lot of cheap shit

[quote name="fabio"]Lots of cheap shit you couldn't possibly have forseen on your first playthrough so you start over (or at least save scum the shit out of). Feels like there's too many bottlenecks to the point where it becomes overly fussy. Rather than just selling them (you must now physically travel to black markets to sell stuff), you must spend alien corpses to build <i>everything</i>. Good luck remembering all of which corpses you'll need. Is Buffalo Bill running this outfit? DO NOT SELL BASIC ADVENT TROOPER CORPSES EVER EVER EVER. You need them to build the first armor upgrade. You need them to build exosuits. This is dumb because basic advent troopers virtually disappear from the alien lineup very quickly into the game. Buy the time I realized I needed the corpses, I was lucky for 1 out of 12 enemies to a basic trooper. Then you need them for exosuits and no way are you researching those and can afford to build proving grounds and their shit before basic troopers dry up. My keyboard flipping moment was getting what the game alluded to was XCOM2's capture device: "Examine officer's corpse, capture officer" for main story line. So I get one. On a tough mission, I maneuver and calculate that I can safely move in a wounded trooper to stun the officer and then evac. I "stun" the officer, and...the stupidest goddamn thing happens. The electronic avatar of the alien's internet code pops out of the officer's cyber implant and manifests into a very tough enemy. This kills my wounded soldier. This causes all 3 of my other soldiers to panic and run out into the open where they are all slaughtered. <i>I was wiped out because I could not foresee that stunning an alien would provoke a fight with the alien internet.</i> I'm shaking as I type that it's so fucking stupid. 2nd deathspiral that made me restart was trying to long term plan around all the arbitrary expansion mechanics. There are so many goddamn bottlenecks in this game. You have a cap on the number of regions you can contact to draw income from, and increasing that cap involves building com center rooms. Fine, it's like satellites in Enemy Unknown. But to make contact with a region, you must spend days hovering over it to scan it, and unlike EU time is a limited resource here because the aliens are advancing their doomsday weapon and it's an opportunity cost on other things you could scan. So you spend time but then you must spend money to build comm centers but also money on power for the comm centers then on top of all that you must spend another resource ("intel") before you can even start scanning regions to make contact. I have no idea why they bothered with intel; I never go out of my way to get it and I always have more than I can realistically spend. What got me about the region contact mechanic: the secret alien bases that power the alien doomsday project can only be attacked if you make contact with the region they are located in. So you're expanding not just for income, but to increase your ability to destroy the doomsday facilities. What's stupid though is that you must spend one of your limited "comms" slots before you can start scanning to make contact with a region. Did you already spend all your comms slots on basic expanding for income like would be everyone's first instinct? Well fuck you there's no way to attack those doomsday facilities until you have a free comms slot to contact that region. Can you abandon regions to free up comms slots? Noooo! Save up the price tag for comms slots, then wait out the long construction time until you can get back to it. The doomsday progress shot up way too far my 2nd attempt because I got caught by this. Why can't I just drop useless regions and divert the slots over to branching out towards the doomsday facilities? Well, you <b>can</b> drop regions to free up slots...by letting the aliens destroy them. Every couple of weeks the aliens will launch a terror mission against a region you own. If you do not stop them immediately, you lose contact with that region and have to go scan again to get it back...but it frees up a precious comm slot. You quickly realize that the most efficient strategy is to <b>ignore terror missions</b> because it lets you blitz through expanding when you don't have to worry so much about building more comm centers. I can actually afford shit once I don't have to worry about those. That's pretty dumb and no way would someone play like that their first time. You have to excavate new rooms...on your flying helicarrier? o_O Why is the secret resistance flying around in a super high profile helicarrier and dropship? It's like playing an insurgent simulator where ISIS is flying around in a C5 Galaxy and helicopters and you're wondering what happened to the USAF. Speaking of which, one are they completely whiffed on is the theme. It's like they totally forgot you're supposed to be insurgents after the intro cutscene and tutorial where they make you think it's going to be a stealthy smash n grab call for evac (manually place landing zone!) affair and enter missions by blending in with civilians before setting off bombs everywhere. This is all completely abandoned after the tutorial. You place the evac zone in smash and grabs for maybe 4% of missions. The rest is indistinguishable from Enemy Unknown where you're screaming in on dropships as you rappel down to be greeted with yet another "eliminate all enemies" objective. Every mission is set up like you're <b>supposed</b> to sneak around patrols, hit the objective, then quickly get the hell out before the response slaughters you. But no there is that mandatory "eliminate all hostiles" victory condition staring at you. There's no point to trying and sneak past any patrols. You get into position to gun down the very first one you run into because you're going to have to kill them anyway and why leave enemies at your back? There's also the stealth mechanic where human civilians will rat you out and sound the alarm every time they spot you. The fuck? So we're insurgents, yet fly around in massive aircraft, with zero ability to blend in with the occupied civilian population, and always stick around to mop up every single enemy soldier with all the time in the world? Did somebody at Firaxis pussy out at the thought of playing a remotely realistic Taliban sim? If you took out the intro cutscene and your crew's dialog quips, you'd swear that the sequel had the humans beat back the invasion and are now going on the offensive by refitted an alien battleship and invading <i>their</i> planet, flying around unopposed in a super carrier and blowing up peaceful prosperous urban locals just trying to enjoy future Starbucks. Oh yeah, the dialog. Whoever wrote the stuff for the main scientist dude needs to be fired, and kicked to the curb to live in the cardboard box of the guy's voice actor. The majority of amateur Russian games have better English acting than him. They managed to write an even more autistic scientist than Overwatch's Symmetra and have some fan act him out. Technical? Why does this game run like shit? Huge load times for everything. Tons of pauses (good god I can't imagine how bad the pauses are <i>without</i> the dont waste my time mod). Lots of slowdown. It doesn't even look better than Enemy Unknown. I guess technically there's more advanced lighting but it just doesn't look appealing so why didn't they stick the EU's simple look that ran smooth? I can run The Witcher 3 on medium settings than I can run this on "minimal" (one step below "low"). I'm announcing right here and now the new standard for graphical performance: if your game is less gorgeous than Witcher 3 yet somehow runs worse, you have completely failed. The campaign is still better than Enemy Unknown![/quote]