Xenonauts 2 has improved on its predecessors in basically every way, while maintaining a religious adherence to what made the genre both immortal and vaguely inaccessible at the same time.

If you've tried to play the Classic SciFi strategy game XCom before and its old, rough edges and jank bugs are a bit too much to handle, pick this up! It's been rebalanced to be approachable and intelligible, but also rigorous and difficult. Small quality of life improvements pile up to a heaping helping of good fun.

This is one of those games that is a sub-narrative generator. Soldiers that you named "PooPants The Expendable" take their inadvisable two-pistol, body-armorless approach to gritty tactical warfare and surprise you at every turn with clutch rolls. Veteran Riflemen somehow manage to miss shots with 90% success rates because they were having intrusive thoughts about a brick of cheese. A lone soldier throws enough smoke bombs to smoke out Cheech and Chong as a means to incapacitate a psychic alien leader. An Unnamed farmer NPC destroys a platoon of lizardmen with a shotgun before bleeding out deep inside the downed alien mothership.

The enemy plays by the same apparent rules that you do, and the overall vibe is that you're playing the cool asymmetrical tabletop game with a small novel's worth of rules that you can never convince all your friends that it would be a really cool time and they would love it if they just gave it half a chance.

The Early Access label means there's a few frame hitches here and there, but by and large the heaving bulk of game that you interact with at the moment is wildly polished. I'm having a really great time streaming it and naming soldiers after my chat regulars. It's a good time. I promise you'll love it if you'd just read this small rulebook.

Xenonauts 2 has improved on its predecessors in basically every way, while maintaining a religious adherence to what made the genre both immortal and vaguely inaccessible at the same time. If you've tried to play the Classic SciFi strategy game XCom before and its old, rough edges and jank bugs are a bit too much to handle, pick this up! It's been rebalanced to be approachable and intelligible, but also rigorous and difficult. Small quality of life improvements pile up to a heaping helping of good fun. This is one of those games that is a sub-narrative generator. Soldiers that you named "PooPants The Expendable" take their inadvisable two-pistol, body-armorless approach to gritty tactical warfare and surprise you at every turn with clutch rolls. Veteran Riflemen somehow manage to miss shots with 90% success rates because they were having intrusive thoughts about a brick of cheese. A lone soldier throws enough smoke bombs to smoke out Cheech and Chong as a means to incapacitate a psychic alien leader. An Unnamed farmer NPC destroys a platoon of lizardmen with a shotgun before bleeding out deep inside the downed alien mothership. The enemy plays by the same apparent rules that you do, and the overall vibe is that you're playing the cool asymmetrical tabletop game with a small novel's worth of rules that you can never convince all your friends that it would be a really cool time and they would love it if they just gave it half a chance. The Early Access label means there's a few frame hitches here and there, but by and large the heaving bulk of game that you interact with at the moment is wildly polished. I'm having a really great time streaming it and naming soldiers after my chat regulars. It's a good time. I promise you'll love it if you'd just read this small rulebook.