Xenonauts 2 [Early Access] – Round Seven

After much suffering and hardship, patch 5.0 is finally out on the experimental branch for Xenonauts 2. Now, this is an early version of the patch, which the devs state is in a fairly buggy condition. And that I can confirm, as the progression for solving the Cleaner conspiracy is not working correctly, nor is the status for nationwide panic. Despite these issues, it’s fully playable (so far), and I have given it a few hours for testing. Since it’s this buggy, I won’t play for too long to ruin the experience. But here are my impressions of the new mechanics, and other changes I have discovered.

Doomsday
The first noticeable new thing is the doomsday counter, that for each day counts towards nuclear war between West & East. When it reaches 100, the world ends in a glorious blaze of destruction. It’s an interesting addition, but unfortunately a bit undercooked. It adds some relevance to the setting, considering Xenonauts 2 takes place during the Cold War. Furthermore, it also works as a tutorial for the new region specific upgrades and modules you can upgrade – to give bonuses or remove enemy influences. So far, so good. 

What makes it kinda pointless, is that it only lasts the first 50 days or so, until the alien invasion starts for real. Then West & East join hands and sing kumbaya. The threat of nuclear destruction is removed, and the only thing you have to do is spam “better relations” with the points you get on a daily basis. Just like Khrushchev did during the Cuban crisis! It’s good that it adds context to the background, but other than that, it felt entirely meaningless from a gameplay perspective, and it seems almost impossible to fail to boot.

Let’s talk further about the new world-map agent mechanic, which comes with some major changes for the economy. After staving off nuclear war, you are free to spend the points you get daily on whatever you want on the regions. Some actions give bonuses to research, or money and similar stuff, and some remove enemy agents that sabotage your progress. It’s rather basic stuff, yet, it gives you something to do on the geoscape while waiting for UFOs to blast out of the sky.

However, what these new mechanics change is how much money you earn from the basic funding. Before I could afford to build up a base with the initial funding, but that’s impossible now. The cash you get is now locked behind these actions on the world-map. This means that the economy will be a lot tougher in the beginning, so get used to patrolling the skies with only one plane for a while. I liked this change, as I find the increased economical challenge fun – making it much more important to capture loot and alien corpses for money. After a few economical upgrades, it quickly stabilizes itself. I’m at a point now where it feels I have more money than I should, comparable to older builds of the game. Regardless, it’s a cool change for the beginning of the campaign. It makes it feel like Xenonauts is somewhat of a scrappy organization, like the narration implies.

Cleaners
From what I noticed, not much has been changed with the Cleaners, except that they now come with much fewer missions. The autopsies and interrogations for the Cleaners (humans), comes automatically, no more research required. Your engineers can’t use them for target practice anymore either, so you can’t upgrade the damage to them. This segment of research has seen a major change in general, as of now, you just have to do this engineering test once for each alien species. Not sure how I feel about this, since I don’t want a simplification of the game with fewer strategic options.

One thing I’m pretty clear that I dislike, is the new “delegation system”. Now, after you have shot down two UFOs of the same kind, the local forces take over the ground action for them (the greedy governments want loot). Meaning, that you can still go on these missions, but you will get penalized for it by having the “panic” level increase. It’s like a forced “anti-grind” system on the player. For some reason, Chris (the main dev) has a strong aversion to some light grinding… in an X-com genre game. Has he seen the mods for OpenXcom? Also, it makes no sense lore-wise either:

“Damn, those Xenonaut assholes took our mission right from under our noses. Let’s join the aliens, guys! (after some nationwide panic)”

Why would a funding nation that has given Xenonauts full mandate on everything Xeno – to destroy them, now suddenly act like children because of some random tech? You get money, sure, but it should be the lazy gamer option (like it was), instead of the optimal choice. I don’t understand this change at all. I have not seen the panic penalty yet, since I’m still waiting for a third destroyer. If it’s something like a 5 point penalty, it will probably not matter too much, but in context of the setting, it feels a little retarded.

Ground combat
The meat-grinder, aka the ground combat, got some interesting changes. The Sebillian got a weapon upgrade. They now use machine-guns instead of rifles, which means if they get a chance to fire, they will shred your agents to small chunks of flesh. Perfect size for a yummy snack for a giant lizard! Very dangerous, but from what I noticed, if you suppress them, they don’t have enough time-units to fire back even once. This change makes them simultaneously more dangerous, and less so, depending on how you handle them. Bring lots of flash-bangs!

That’s not all, they also got some kind of new terrifying grenade that does explosive damage, and spews toxic gas. Getting caught in the deadly smoke of this thing will melt your poor agent’s lungs. I ran through with one guy, curious to see what it was, and each smoke tile he ran through, it took a 20 point damage chunk out of his health. I guess we have found a new use for the gasmask now, so that’s cool. 

Another change is for the Mantids. Some of them come with a new weapon that sends aggressive bugs your way, instead of deadly plasma fire. These critters will bite and tear in melee with surprising strength. While a cool weapon that reminds me of X-com: Apocalypse. I find the Mantids equipped with this new weapon a lot easier to deal with, as they used to be pretty deadly snipers. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty cool addition that switches up the ground combat. Make sure to keep pistols or melee weapons around for these angry ankle biters.

Saving civilians
A nice addition is that you can order around civilians now, instead of having them run in circles on the battlefield like headless chickens. When you are next to one, you can tell him or her to run for the exit, which spawns next to your craft. Pretty nifty, not just from a gameplay perspective, but also from an immersion viewpoint. We are here to save people, after all, and now you can tell them to haul ass to escape the brutal warzone. 

A few more changes that I noticed from last time is that the grenade launcher got an arc now, finally! It has become a useful weapon after so many patches. Maybe I can stop dreaming of the rocket launcher from the first Xenonauts. Mechanical doors are back to staying open, so no more door abuse/hiding. If you open them now, you have to be prepared, since there is no turning back. The doors will close after a turn, though. And for the final change I observed: new sounds for some weapons, like the accelerated guns. They sound a lot cooler now, and does no longer share audio effect with the normal ballistic weapons. 

Thoughts
As mentioned, I have not finished a playthrough yet, and I probably will not do so. There are a lot of new things I have not experienced, which means I can not report on them. However, from what I have tested out, there are some interesting changes here, and in general the game feels more polished. Most things work in its favor, but I really question the decision of the newly introduced “delegation system”. The X-com games are grindy by nature, so I don’t understand the need of making the experience less epic. It’s supposed to be a struggle, since we are ultimately fighting high-tech invading aliens. I don’t want a 20-hour experience conveying this, I want a massive game that lasts for a good while! And I doubt the ones playing this genre lack the attention span for it. 

Even so, I’m confident that Xenonauts 2 will be a great game when it reaches 1.0. It feels good that we are finally getting closer to the end, as it has been in Early Access for quite a while now. With that, I want to say goodbye for now, as this will probably be my final report on it – until the 1.0 review, that is. So, happy alien slaying! See you next time.

/Thomas