XCOM 2

The best decision Firaxis made in XCOM 2 is also the one that makes people put it down: you are almost always on a clock.

Its predecessor had a problem the whole genre has. Given unlimited turns, the optimal way to play a tactics game is to creep forward one tile at a time with everyone on overwatch, triggering enemy groups on your terms. It's safe, it's correct, and it's dull. XCOM 2 fixes it by simply not giving you the turns. Extract the VIP in eight. Hack the terminal in six. The bomb goes off in twelve.

Suddenly you can't play safe, because safe loses. You have to decide which soldier is exposed this turn, which objective you're abandoning, and whether a 68% shot is worth taking when the alternative is running out of time. That's triage, and it's the most interesting thing turn-based combat can ask of you.

Why it still holds up

The whole game is built to support that pressure.

Concealment starts each mission stealthed, so the opening is a puzzle about positioning before you choose to be seen — and choosing when to break concealment is often the whole battle. Cover is destructible, so the map degrades as the fight goes on. Enemy pods activate and scatter, meaning a mistake compounds across turns rather than costing you one soldier.

Above that sits a strategic layer engineered to keep you behind. Research, engineering, contacts, resistance work and the doom clock all compete for resources you don't have enough of, and the correct answer is always "several of these, and you can afford one." It's the same triage a level up.

And the soldiers are the reason it lands. They have classes, ranks and nicknames, they get promoted into specialists you've invested in, and they die permanently. Losing a colonel you've carried through fifteen missions isn't a mechanical setback, it's an event — the same trick Battle Brothers pulls with mercenaries and Darkest Dungeon with its stable of hopeless adventurers.

War of the Chosen deserves its reputation. The rival Chosen who hunt you across the campaign and remember your encounters, the resistance factions, the fatigue system forcing squad rotation — it doesn't add content so much as give the campaign an antagonist. If you buy this game, buy it with the expansion.

Median recent playtime is 80 hours, ten years after release.

The mods are half the reason it survived

You can't discuss XCOM 2's longevity without the Workshop, and it matters more here than the usual "there are some nice mods" line.

The community built things that function as different games. Long War of the Chosen restructures the entire campaign into a far longer, harder war with reworked classes and a different strategic tempo — the kind of overhaul that would be a paid expansion anywhere else. There are total conversions pulling in whole other settings, quality-of-life packs that fix the interface's rough edges, and an effectively bottomless supply of new classes, weapons and enemies.

For a large share of the people still playing in 2026, the vanilla game is the platform and the mod list is the actual product. That's why the launcher complaints carry the weight they do. When reviewers say a required launcher interfered with Workshop content, they aren't reporting an inconvenience — they're reporting that the version of the game they'd assembled over years stopped working. One review puts it exactly that way: the vanilla game has taste-level problems they used to be able to fix with mods, and could no longer.

It's also why the reported 2025 terms change lands so badly on this particular title. A clause that customers read as making modding a bannable offence, on a game whose community built Long War, is a provocation regardless of how it's actually enforced — and enforcement is not the point. Uncertainty is enough to make people stop investing time in a mod list.

If Workshop content is your reason for buying, check the current state of launcher-and-mod compatibility before you spend money. That's an unsatisfying sentence to write about the best-supported mod scene in strategy gaming, and it's entirely the publisher's doing.

The complaint that isn't about the game

Here's what surprised me reading the negative corpus. Bucket it by year and it doesn't cluster at launch — it clusters in 2021 and 2022, five and six years later.

That's when the publisher launcher arrived. The most-upvoted negative review on the game, with around a thousand helpful votes, is about being required to install an always-online launcher to play a game that didn't have one when it was bought, and which the reviewer says exists to gather data and advertise other titles. Below it: a player with 908 hours who stopped buying from the publisher entirely; a player with 1,147 hours whose launcher stopped recognising that they owned the game and offered to sell it to them; and several reporting that the launcher interfered with the Steam Workshop mods that were, for many, the entire reason to still be playing.

There's a 2025 addition too. A well-upvoted review states that Take-Two updated its terms of service across its catalogue such that modding and displaying exploits became bannable offences, alongside a forced arbitration clause and class-action waiver for users in most territories.

I've read the reviews rather than the contract, so I'll characterise that as what it is — a claim made by customers, strongly upvoted, about a document you can go and read. But the pattern is the same one I found on Cyberpunk 2077 earlier this week, and it's worth naming: on older games, the live controversy is increasingly not about the software at all. It's about the terms attached to it, changed after purchase.

The honest caveat about the design

Not everyone should buy this, and the reason isn't the launcher.

A well-argued negative review from 2017 makes the case plainly: almost every mission has a timer, the ones that don't tend to have infinite reinforcements instead, and the strategic layer applies the same pressure. For a player who enjoys tactics games precisely because they allow patient, considered play, XCOM 2 removes the thing they came for and does it deliberately.

I think the trade is correct — it produced the best combat in the genre — but "correct" isn't "universal." If you loved Enemy Unknown for its pace, you may genuinely prefer it, and a substantial group of long-term players say exactly that.

8.5 out of 10. Rated 8.5 out of 10.

XCOM 2 with War of the Chosen is one of the finest strategy games ever made, and at NZ$34.95 with a decade of mod support behind it, an easy recommendation on the merits. The timers are a feature, the soldiers are unforgettable, and the campaign still generates better stories than most scripted ones.

Half a point comes off for age-related performance and rough edges, and half for the ownership experience: a required second launcher added years after purchase, ownership failures, mod disruption and a terms update its own customers are angry about. The game got better over ten years. The deal around it got worse.