The aliens attack on all fronts, so as Earth’s last line of defence, the Xenonauts need to be everywhere at once. Last week, Russia. Yesterday, North Africa. Today, you’ve brought down a UFO in the skies above America’s heartland. You can’t let the alien tech go to waste, so your dropship descends, landing in a cornfield next to a barn. White and red; rural Americana, straight out of an oil painting.
With SWAT-like discipline, you approach and kick in the doors. Glowsticks sail through the air, illuminating the darkness where they land. In the far corner, a pair of red eyes glint in the synthetic yellow phosphorescence. You don’t hesitate, immediately bringing the creature to its knees with a rifle shot.
Before you get your second round off, a shotgun-wielding farmer runs in from the back and unloads into the Secton’s head. You should be thankful for the assist, but he’s just stolen a valuable kill from your sniper, who’s one notch away from a service medal. You pretend to feel bad when another Secton ambles out of the darkness, raises its laser pistol, and de-atomises the farmer into a pile of foul-smelling goop. Should’ve left it to the professionals, you think, as your idiot mechanised weapon platform ploughs straight through the barn wall like a fleeing cartoon character.
Last Rites
Xenonauts 2 has a habit of making you unsentimental about death. When a skittering parasite launched by a vicious alien mantis chews right through your sniper’s chest, don’t expect a theatrical scream or musical sting when they slump to the concrete. The most you’ll get, if you’ve sent them off alone to some shrouded corner of the map for reconnaissance, inching forward gradually and cautiously to dispel the fog of war, is a swift burial in the returning shroud.
Used to the crushing fanfare of a beloved squadmate’s death in Firaxis’s XCOM revival games, losing troops like this initially feels abrupt. There are no nicknames or eyepatches or customisable hairstyles here. When that sniper goes down, it isn’t a grimly hilarious bit of emergent storytelling, but a harsh reminder that you really can’t let your guard down, even for a moment. There’s a real charm to the game, but it’s got no time for glorious sacrifices and even less for dumb heroics. And there’s no time to mourn, either. If I want that sniper rifle back, I’ll need to go collect it from the body. Back into the fog it is, then.
Check your 6
The hardest lesson I had to learn during my first few hours with this more sober, exacting, and simulation-minded approach to a modern XCOM revival is this: Xenonauts do not have eyes in the back of their heads. They don’t even have particularly good peripheral vision. End a turn without decent sightlines on all possible angles of approach, and it’s not uncommon to watch helplessly as a shot flies out from darkness and one-day-from-retirements your favourite Sergeant. It feels brutal and capricious the first few times it happens, but good strategy knows how to take you on a journey from cursing fickle RNG to realising that most of your problems are avoidable. Shore up your vectors. Advance slowly. Drink more water, etc.
There was plenty I could have done for that Sergeant, from covering vulnerable angles with shield troops or tossing smoke grenades to veil her approach, to simply saving a few action points (‘time units’ here) to end her turn crouching. You’re always going to be outgunned and often outnumbered, but by backing you into a corner, Xenonaut’s difficulty encourages you to scrape in the dirt for any small advantage. You’ll start noticing nuances, like how those riot shield troops can crouch to provide mobile cover that still lets anyone behind them shoot safely. It’s a canny marriage of theme and systems that means you’re soon goaded into playing like an alien-hunting SWAT team actually would: meticulously, without unnecessary risk, and completely absorbed in the moment.
Mr. Worldwide
The bones of the geoscape map will be familiar to anyone who’s played classic XCOM or Firaxis’s reboots. You’ll build multiple bases across the planet and populate them with soldiers, scientists, and engineers. You’ll research and reverse engineer alien tech to keep up with an ever-expanding roster of extraterrestrial threats as you attempt to keep regional panic down to prevent continents pulling funding from the Xenonauts project, failing the campaign if you lose too many. You’ll deck your bases out with hangars and radar arrays to identify and intercept incoming UFOs, trying to preserve fuel while you tail them over land to ensure access to a lucrative but deadly crash site mission.
So perilous are those missions that your soldiers are rewarded with a medal just for surviving one. There aren’t any superhero ability trees here – as brilliant as XCOM 2012’s multi-activation ability chain kill streaks were, it’s clear Xenonauts entire ethos is to get as far away from all that as possible. Instead, your soldiers are rewarded for risking life, limb, and face with shiny badges, dolled out for pulling off feats like surviving big damage, or racking up kill streaks. Medals give stat bonuses, making your soldiers hardier, or be able to carry more equipment. It’s an elegant way to add some light storytelling while also making the death of a veteran sting, since having to roll out with a full roster of rookies puts you at a real disadvantage.
If I’ve painted a picture so far of a game that takes an unromantic, perhaps even antiseptic, approach to its pulp paperback sci-fi, I should reiterate just how charming Xenonauts 2 can be. Like its inspiration, the game eschews a coherent species of extraterrestrial threats for the tactical variety of a diverse array of weird little guys, unified in the goal of leaving Earth as scoured of intelligent life as post-Musk Twitter. All your faves are here. Little grey guys with big heads. Little grey guys with big heads (psychic edition). Big lizards. Floating brains that like to hide in crashed UFOs until one of your soldiers opens the door and immediately gets one-shotted. Robots that require half your team to take down.
It’s equal parts terrifying and exciting to encounter a new threat, but the real fun occurs when you manage to stun one, take it home, stick it in a tube, and have your scientists run observations. Xenonauts 2’s explicit narrative is doled out through well-written text scrolls and pop-ups. Sometimes, you get sci-fi tinged worldbuilding. Sometimes, you get some lovely nonsense. You learn that Sectons like solving puzzles; that the bastard mantids that give you so much trouble in the early game are actually herbivore spaceship pilots. There’s never an abundance of text to chew through, but what is there provides a solid anchor, especially for a game content to let most of its story play out unscripted on the battlefield.
The spice of death
One big change over the original Xenonauts here is the sheer amount of mission variety. Over the course of the first few hours, you’ll ambush a convoy of trucks transporting resources for a group of alien-controlled humans named ‘The Cleaners’ (proof that giving mysterious entities extremely mundane names makes them all the more terrifying, also see: The Gentlemen from Buffy). You’ll escort a friendly VIP and assassinate or capture one belonging to the Cleaners. You’ll sabotage computers and abscond with the data. You’ll rescue abducted civilians from alien containment tubes.
Xenonauts 2 encouraging slow play as much as it does, there’s real tension when it forces you to succeed under time constraints. Waste turns, and those abducted civilians get teleported to the mothership, or you get overwhelmed by cleaner reinforcements. Later in the campaign, you’ll start having to defend your own bases from alien assaults, and taking the fight to alien strongholds.
It all adds up to something that feels like no element of the ideal UFO defence fantasy was spared inclusion; no granular element of the simulation applied thoughtlessly or abstracted to the point where it was more or less automatic. It’s a slow burn, for sure. There are four speed options on the geoscape and the fastest is often a complete trap, since there’s nearly always something you could be working towards in what might feel like downtime between assaults. And, yes, I absolutely missed having the custom name space to be able to give my troops stupid nicknames so I could better mourn their inevitable deaths. But none of that stopped Xenonauts 2 getting its hooks in me like few strategy games I’ve played recently. Call me the US government following a series of horrific war crimes, because I am suddenly very interested in talking to you about aliens.
