![]() ![]() I was informed that the mission would be “difficult”, but I figured a crew made up of most of my best troops could handle it. This was a big one, given that if you let the Avatar project get out of hand, you permanently lose the entire game. While Thunder was away, I got an alert about a regular mission that would let me temporarily disrupt the aliens’ Avatar project by destroying a communications relay. ![]() They were extremely powerful together or apart, and the game implied that the covert mission wouldn’t be too much trouble anyway. I would have sent Lightning along with Thunder, but he was wounded from a previous battle at the time. To hunt The Hunter, I chose Thunder and a rookie squad member who I figured could use the experience. These came with risks - up to and including the possibility that The Hunter would kidnap one of my people - but mostly they just took time, forcing me to go on regular missions without some of my best and brightest. This involved sending a couple of high-ranking members of my tiny army on covert missions that I didn’t have direct control over. One of them, The Hunter, wouldn’t stop harassing my squads during otherwise routine missions, so I decided to collaborate with one of War of the Chosen‘s new factions, the cyberpunk-psychic Templars, to take him down. Until you discover their lairs and take the fight to them, they keep coming back better, smarter and stronger. ![]() There are three of them, each with unique abilities and strategic tendencies, and you can’t just kill them off like you can other enemies. These super-powered aliens intervene in battles as they please, provided you’re battling on their turf. The titular Chosen, it turned out, were Thunder and Lightning’s undoing. You can customise posters by posing characters as you please, picking environments, and adding text and filters, but I like randomising them to see what the game’s algorithms can come up with. When Thunder and Lightning first bonded, the game asked me if I wanted to make a poster of them, something War of the Chosen lets you do to commemorate and share memorable moments such as new bonds, hard-fought victories or even deaths. War of the Chosen takes it to the next level, turning that road into a Slip ‘N’ Slide greased with your tears. If you’re an XCOM fan, you know by now that, traditionally, caring has been a road that only leads to sadness. Bonds, you see, are also a diabolical trap, because they’re one of the many new ways War of the Chosen gets you to care about your people. But that description doesn’t really paint the full picture. This means it’s to your advantage to cram bondmates into XCOM 2‘s small four-to-six-character squads in many (but not all) situations. But they have to be together, or else these powers aren’t an option. Some characters, after spending enough time together in battle or during side missions, can become battle BFFs, granting them new powers such as the ability to give an additional action - the chance to move, attack, or use a skill again during a turn - to their bondmate. When I talk about the “bond” between Thunder and Lightning, I’m referring to one of War of the Chosen‘s most-touted new systems. As ever, your soldiers can and will die permanently - unless you save scum your way through every encounter, but that’s The Wrong Way To Play XCOM. However, it still maintains the base game’s overall structure, in which you assemble a ragtag band of rebels to slowly disarm your alien overlords’ secret “Avatar” project via a series of turn-based guerrilla skirmishes. Thunder and Lightning were the first of my characters to “bond” in XCOM 2‘s new War of the Chosen expansion, which overhauls the base game with new systems such as factions to collaborate with, persistent “chosen” enemies, and bonds between your squadmates. It’s one of my favourite tales I’ve experienced in a game this year, and it would have never happened had XCOM 2: War of the Chosen not crapped out an extremely ugly in-game poster. The story of Elisabeth “Thunder” Martine and Felipe “Lightning” Garcia is one of tragedy and triumph, of premature endings and new beginnings, of people profoundly impacting each other, even after cruel circumstances force them apart. Heaps of new systems that add variety, heart, and a sense of real-ness to player-created stories.Īccentuates some of vanilla XCOM 2‘s issues instead of fixing them.Ĭompleted the campaign in 44 hours (more of which was spent making posters than I ever would have thought possible). Turn-based Shakespearean tragedy (with aliens) ![]()
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