Hot Take: Chimera Squad is BETTER than XCOM 2

[chefcook90]

I've got 160 hours and 67% achievement completion in XCOM 2... and I still haven't finished the final mission on ANY of the campaigns I've started because it always devolves into a REPETATIVE, REVERSE-DIFFICULTY CURVE SLOG during the late game, and I end up dropping the run out of BOREDOM.

Without DLC, XCOM 2 is straight up tedious. DLC makes it a lot better, but breaks the balancing to the point that you need to play badly ON PURPOSE to make the game challenging.
Like, imposing a rule that completely bans the use of Reapers, the Assassin's weapons and the Archon King suit.
Actually, were Psi Operatives base game? Because those were broken too.
Also Bluescreen Rounds.
And Flashbang Grenades.

Chimera Squad, there's no wait times - only action.
No spending literal hours scanning on the strategic map for resources and pickups
No passing time to wait for research to finish or squad mates to finish healing
No battle fatigue
No spending 90% of missions scouting for enemies instead of actually fighting enemies
No wiping out entire pods with 6-man alpha strikes before the enemy can even fire a single shot off.

Also the Chimera Squad has a BRANCHING STORY! The closest XCOM 2 had to that was very slight differences iin Chosen dialogue depending on which order you took them down.

Anyway, I just binged a full Ironman run of Chimera Squad in 16 hours, and now I'm playing a second non-ironman run on Impossible for for the Impossible Dream achievement, while also trying a high-damage output team on Story difficulty for the "...And Clear!" achievement (clear an entire room during Breach phase) which is proving challenging even on Story difficutly :P
Firstly you need to roll a room with only 4 enemies and since there are only 3 shotgun users (Axiom, Claymore, and Godmother), your 4th man is going to need to get lucky with a crit to OHKO unless you're lucky and there's a 3-4 HP enemy in the room.
It IS possible to do on the first rooms of the opening Progeny and Grey Phoenix missions, but it would take a ton of save-scumming, and save-scumming is for people who prefer playing XCOM 2

[Bozzl]

So you don't like XCOM? got it.

[Zedonova Nova]

some people don't need a computer.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by Zedonova Nova:

some people don't need a computer.

Bro, ok kinda off topic, but how do you play Helldivers on Suicide Mission difficulty but have 3000 hours of XCOM 2 without playing the game on any difficulty higher than NORMAL?

I mean, it's TURN BASED - if you have that level of tactical awareness in a real-time game you should be able to run Impossible Ironman no problem.

EDIT: lol it's been a while, so I forgot what the difficulties were - it's what, Rookie and Legend?

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by Bozzl:

So you don't like XCOM? got it.

Nah, I liked Enemy Unkown / Enemy Within a LOT - I've beaten that multiple times because it was actually fun to play through the entire thing.

Honestly I think replacing unrest and UFO encounters with Avatar Project progress really hurt the strategic gameplay, especially when War of the Chosen makes it utterly irrelevant.
Like, you can just send a lone Reaper in to plant X4 charges in a facility without ever firing off a single shot, and put the exfiltrate marker right outside on the same turn you set the charges, so the enemy doesn't even have a chance to attack you before you extract lol

There's like, no urgency in XCOM 2 even though there's supposed to be an INSANE amount of urgency based on what's going on in the story.

And don't get me wrong, I do like XCOM 2 plenty - I wouldn't have sunk as much time in it as I have otherwise, but I also remember that it SUCKED when it first came out, with an insane amount of bugs and ludicrously long load times.

[MacGyver]

Phoenix point is better than both games

[Ittrix]

Originally posted by MacGyver:

Phoenix point is better than both games

Pheonix Point has it's fair share of jank, honestly. Maybe it's fairer share.
It's got the same reverse difficulty curve many XCOM games suffer from. Do it right, and most missions can be cleared by a single soldier in a few turns. One, if you're lucky.
That and it's tactical layer can be both tedious and backwards. The optimal way to deal with nests being to let them attack as many cities as possible, for example. Trading is absolutely busted (though sucks to do manually).

The majority of it's DLCs have extremely negative reviews for the same reasons, except they usually skew on being unfair towards you rather than the game. Vanilla is generally easier for Phoenix Point.

I love it, but it's got the same black sheep category that Chimera Squad earned for different reasons.

[Gerarderloper]

Yeah the repetitive missions in Xcom2 can be a slog (especially in long war of chosen mod).
Which is why at half-way point I generally only doing COUNTER dark event missions and specific resource ones with higher payout.

If XCOM3 ever gets made (seems unlikely), I hope they put some more work into making the missions more dynamic and progressive so things can get interesting or unexpected rewards can be found. Like procedural dynamic multi-task missions etc with much bigger maps and re-deployments. BUT still retain the global security aspect of things, we don't want another xcom apocalypse really.

[chuckpolk]

It’s a good pre-school version of XCOM, the whole game is best seen as a tutorial to prep toddlers for the big boy games that came before it.