But that weakness gives depth to your soldiers and will add color to your personal journey through XCOM 2. If a Bondmate dies, the remaining soldier will develop an emotional scar which will manifest itself as a weakness on the battlefield. Early on you can even try to engineer those bonds by sending soldiers with the highest potential to bond together on the same missions regularly.Īs much as Bonds are a boon, they’re also a trap. You can preview the potential for your soldiers to develop bonds in the barracks back at base with a new stat called Cohesion. War of the Chosen also introduces Bonds, which can develop between soldiers after they’ve gone on a mission together. Then you’ll get the opportunity to devote resources to tracking them down, and if you’re lucky you’ll even receive the option to launch a rescue mission. When you send troops on covert missions or leave them behind on the battlefield, there’s a chance that they’ll be captured. That’s because this time around, Firaxis Games amped up the drama, building new game systems and entire narrative missions around natural turning points that go against XCOM. Before every mission I make a save file, sometimes even at the end of every round of combat, and I reload them when something goes wrong.īut save-scumming is the absolute wrong way to play War of the Chosen. It’s a habit that’s grown over my years spent reviewing the game.

Hello, my name is Charlie and I’m a save-scummer.

Firaxis Games/2K Games Turn on Iron Man mode, you big baby Sometimes they harvest them for information instead. When the Chosen take your soldiers down in battle they don’t always kill them. Their legacy lives on in the sequel, and you should at least get to know them a little before you get started. Watch it all to learn about Central as well as Dr. In fact, here’s a link to all of that first game’s cutscenes, including the Enemy Within DLC. Unless you’re really excited about the backstory in Enemy Unknown you don’t need to have played it to understand what’s going on. XCOM 2 fundamentally builds on the systems present in Enemy Unknown, and War of the Chosen bolts onto that framework and expands it. I’m here to tell you that you should skip both of these earlier games and go straight to this new DLC. My Twitter feed has been clogged with people asking me if they need to have played the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown or XCOM 2 to understand or even be good at War of the Chosen.

Skip the original and start with this DLC Here’s what I wish I’d known going in, and a few tips for stepping off on the right foot.

There are new features like Ability Points, new enemies like the Spectre and the Purifier and a couple of entirely new systems that aren’t terribly well explained. But it also throws a few wrinkles into the classic formula. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is here, and by all accounts it’s the best version of XCOM ever made.

Xcom 2 war of the chosen save editor