I played Xcom: Enemy Unkown and loved it, played on classic difficulty and the game remained challenging right up until towards the end. Then the training and gene mods and expensive equipment all kicked in and after a challenging game you feel like you earned a few easier missions.

Then I played Xcom 2 straight after .... Firstly let me say this is a game designed for hardcore strategists, masochists and people that love re loading saves so much that their escape key has PTSD. I am none of those things, im just in it for a good fun game and I am simply not built for this game at all.

This game became not fun very quickly. They nerfed everything the player can do and buffed the living poop out of everything the enemy does. So you start with the same squishy soldiers and the enemy right from the go has advanced units that are all way stronger than the first. Promotions of your soldiers happen way less as well assuming they even live long enough to see one. I played 23 hours, restarted 3 times and never saw a single promotion to anything higher than Sergeant. Your troops are way squishier than before and its very common to be hit with a critical hit, even when in full cover from the other side of the continent, and die instantly which then obviously causes approx. 612 million people to panic and run around like they have just dipped their manhood in a bath of fire ants. With the exception on the new Advent forces all other aliens are 2-3 times stronger in all areas than before with over powered new abilities. The enemy didnt have many explosives before but dont worry now they have been fitted with the 'They love them like a fat kid loves cakes if cakes were grenades' system, meaning if your troops are within a 15 mile radius of each other its about to rain explosives like America just discovered oil in your face. Its not uncommon to have 2 of your soldiers mind controlled at the same time or in quick succession and then half your team are killing each other like there is only one slice of pizza left. All of these things can happen in the first few turns so this is why it feels like the game is literally forcing you to constantly re load saves and make small changes every time to mix up the odds or you will have no people left very quickly. If you dont constantly re load saves, you spend all of your money on recruits, replacing equipment (if you can afford it in the first place) or dealing with soldiers with morale so low they couldnt go toe-to-toe with a ladybird.

God forbid you let a soldier get injured ... The healing recovery times are insane! Its not uncommon for an injured troop to be out of action from 25 to 50 days! So you better have 400 rookies to keep replacing everyone with or youre gonna have a baad tiiiiime. It feels like the game makes you sacrifice rookies to keep all your good soldiers alive which makes no sense and if one of your good soldiers dies after a fair amount of time in the game good luck training someone up. You have to have about 3 squads all equally trained up in all job areas in order to have a somewhat decent chance of fielding a good squad. How do i get all those soldiers trained up, you ask? Not a damn clue ....

The new holo globe or geo map or whatever its called is awful and frustrating. You have to fly your ship around the world which takes ages and passes loads of time, then you get to a location to scan for 3-7 days, only to find after one day an urgent missions pops up the other side of the world which you have to fly all the way back. Then when you get there you send your poor troops on the usual suicide mission and then you have to spend days flying back to get the resources again. It all seems a big waste of time and it is not smooth at all.

This entire game is a constant massive race against time and boy does it not let you forget. You can not sit back and enjoy anything because if you let the aliens get two steps ahead you will die. The large amount of pressure on the player ruined it for me (im sure some people love this) as I cant enjoy the game in my time. Plus I had to restart several times and as most of the scenes and voice overs and similar things are unskippable I was forced to watch the same old things over and over like some kind of white noise torture.

The next part is nothing to do with the base game. I thought i would check the workshop to see if there are any mods i can use as a last ditch attempt to make it easier and put some of the odds in my favour. I did find some possible mods for this but they resulted in a series of hard resets following whole PC crashes, missing menus and glitchy actions. So after that i decided to uninstall.

I could go on but to sum up. I do not recommend this game unless you hate yourself and want to punish yourself with the biggest headache of a game I have ever come across. Such a massive disappointment after a brilliant first game.