Xenonauts 2 – The Boys Are Back In Town [Review]

After a thousand years in space, slowly floating from one uninhabitable planet to the next, the distress call was finally picked up by HMS TomsGamingVault, and the package was retrieved. After carefully thawing out the mysterious object, it—lo and behold—turned out to be the sequel for the awesome Alien defense simulator Xenonauts—the people of Earth cried out in rejoicing! Hence, the artifact was named Xenonauts 2.

Now, the question to ask—is it a worthy successor, or not? Read below and find out!

Cold War?
While Xenonauts 2 is a sequel, it’s more a reimagining than a true sequel that continues the story. I don’t mind the basis of this premise, seeing as the game is more or less set out to be a refinement of the first title. In many ways it is, but, unfortunately, the flair of the original—the Cold War setting—does not come through much. I’m not saying Xenonauts played into it massively mechanically, but it had touches of it everywhere, with even a prequel book, Xenonauts: Crimson Dagger, setting the Cold War mood. In Xenonauts 2, you are just told it’s the Cold War, but this time around you don’t even get a date when the alien invasion takes place. Instead, it’s just counting days from the point of your takeover as leader. Not very immersive, for an immersion geek.

To be fair, though, it has a mechanic that is directly linked to the Cold War with its Doomsday clock. It’s something you have to manage to prevent nuclear war between the West and East. However, I find it lacking in flavor, which is a shame, as so much more could have been done with this setting. Nothing really looks to be from the era either, and this Doomsday mechanic, as mentioned, is the only thing reminding you that it’s supposed to be taking place during the 70s–80s. It’s a disappointment, seeing how generic the setting can come off as, and that more wasn’t done with this. Imagine having to fight off an American or Soviet task force, before engaging the aliens, with it playing a deeper role on the reputation on the managerial level, but alas, it was not to be.

Cleaners
One cool narrative aspect, though, is the faction called Cleaners. It’s a human faction you have to contend with in the beginning of the campaign, and they consist of entirely human agents. They are part of an earlier UFO investigation team, doing what you are doing currently, but came under some kind of nefarious alien control, which corrupted the bunch. What makes it interesting, is that this faction is something besides the aliens to fight, much more close to home, and I like to believe they are part of a “failed Xenonauts 1 campaign.” No, this is not something official, but the META makes sense in my mind and puts a smile on my face. 

Strategy and tactics
Being an X-com-like game and a sequel in a series that plays it straight to the original, there isn’t too much to talk about here. The combat is essentially the same, and it keeps the turn-based deadliness from the first game. Rookies will get blasted! There are refinements of course, but I feel it’s mostly engine related, going from an obscure 2D engine, strung-together-by-sheer-will-and-tape, to a 3D one, Unity in this case. However, that said, the moment-to-moment gameplay is as enjoyable as ever, especially if you play by ironman rules, meaning: dead is dead. Losing your best alien mass-murdering commando, you have named after your mom to an overgrown lizard will put a tear in anyone’s eye. In other words, it’s a classic feeling with now a few more gadgets to play with.

Where Xenonauts 2 has seen more changes is in its strategic level. You still have to build a base, hire soldiers, engineers, and scientists—the good old stuff, with a few additions. On the strategic map, where you also shoot down UFOs from the sky, you now also earn “Operation Points” passively. These points are used to eliminate infiltrators that sabotage your research rate, for example. They are also used for bonuses, whose cost depends on region and usefulness. Later on in the campaign, they are also used to establish new bases, get a new set of recruits, and lower national panic in alien-infested regions.

Fighting the UFOs in air combat can be made to be automatic, but I highly recommend turning this setting off, as battling the UFOs by yourself can be very rewarding—especially when you are down to one fighter with half a wing, and just a missile and a few rounds of machine-gun fire and still make it out victorious! There is also an option here to delegate UFO ground assaults to corresponding nations. I find this added “feature” misplaced, as it makes the game shorter, and a form of delegation is already in the game by just letting local forces take care of the crash. The delegation system will give you more money (apparently), but it’s also a semi-hard lock on any UFO ground assault beyond the first two crash sites of any type. This means, if you try to go on a third crash site, you will get punished with rising panic, and a steep cost in Operation Points. Baffling decision to add this, so I fully recommend you turn this off. You do that by activating “Extended” mode in the campaign options.

Twenty-hour war
One huge problem with Xenonauts 2, sadly, is that it’s extremely short for this type of game, with the above option made to make it even shorter. X-com, Xenonauts and even the modern NuXcom games are massive beasts compared, which in the end turn those titles into an epic experience. When you reach the end, you feel like you have been through hell and when that final alien asshole lies dead with a fist-sized hole in its chest—you can’t do anything else but let out a great sigh of relief. In Xenonauts 2 however, it’s more of a “that’s it?” Yeah, it’s that short, with the many phases of the campaign coming stacked on top of each other. Oh, you researched a new cool rifle—well, here is the next stage of it, chump! I think I used the laser rifle for one mission, before it became old tech.

I don’t understand why the devs made this decision, because the game has plenty of weapon tiers, aliens to harass you, and spacecrafts to glide across the sky, but everything is crammed into a twenty-five-hour experience. And at least twenty percent of those hours I just waited for my research to finish to tackle the final mission.

You see, in the beginning of the game, you and the alien foes will be on an equal level, but when you reach the halfway point in the campaign, the aliens will outpace you in tech. At this point, staying alive for any Xenonaut agent will be the hardest thing they ever do in life. Yet, the relief comes fast, because when you make it through this stage, you are on an even level again, soon to be outpacing the aliens. Their progression and aggression ends while yours continues. You essentially become a force of death and carnage, which to be fair is fun for a while, but quickly becomes dull, seeing as almost nothing can harm your buffed out men in shiny high-tech armors.

Basically, Xenonauts 2 could have been longer, with much better pacing, but for whatever reason, it was made to be a short game—in a niche strategic genre with marathon length games. Brave, yet a decision made to be anticlimactic in the end.

Stylish
The new 3D engine allows for better visuals and models, which are of good quality. The game in general runs better with it too. The destruction feels improved, and looks visually finer with more detail. The only negative on the graphic front is that the maps can come off as a little too flat when you fight in the jungle and such exotic places. The urban maps, like the docks, are top-tier, though, making me wish they would have added more cityscape environments. House‑to‑house and door‑to‑door fighting has always been exciting in the X‑com‑likes, and the docks are a perfect example of this. 

The overall battle sounds are pretty standard. Nothing that stood out to me here. It works, essentially. However, the music is terrific. It’s very atmospheric, and instantly sets the mood, particularly when you creep around the farmland hedgerows during nighttime, trying to avoid stepping into a Reaper nest. Top marks!

Conclusion
Xenonauts 2 is in many ways an improvement over the original. Yet the ambition to make it more of a cleaner gamified experience, the immersion took a hit. It’s just a more streamlined and sleek experience, at the cost of thematic flair and length of the campaign. Regardless of that, my twenty hours spent in the game were very enjoyable, with many cool moments of death and despair—both for me and the alien invaders. I should also add that modding will play a bigger part in Xenonauts 2, as the 1.0 version comes with Workshop addition for Steam. So who knows what kind of awesome mods we will get in the future—maybe its own form of Long War!

Thanks for reading.

– Thomas