XCOM 2: The 10 Best Skills Ranked

The real-time, first-person combat of the Bethesda Fallout games might not make for the ideal handheld experience, but the older titles from Interplay Entertainment are just the thing for portable platforms. It's a wonder why these weren't brought to the PS Vita or Nintendo Switch in the past. Though the newer games have a big audience, some fans prefer the classics for the unforgiving difficulty and deeper RPG mechan


_XCOM 2 _ can be an extremely challenging game, and playing on Ironman can sometimes feel like a daunting experience. Unlike the normal modes, Ironman does not allow players to load previous saves. All progress is kept on a single save that updates constantly, making every action and consequence permane


Insane enemies will run around the battlefield and panic, preventing them from developing strategies to take you down. They can fire at their own allies, duck into cover and cower in fear, or even become mind-controlled for a few turns. Thanks to its large area, Void Rift remains one of the best crowd control and damage abilities in XC


Before embarking on a mission, players should carefully plan. Any mission that requires hacking, for example, will greatly benefit from at least one specialist who can hack from a distance. After building the Shadow Chamber, mission previews will show exactly the types of enemies that will be encountered on a mission. Any unencountered alien XCOM enemy will appear as Unkown . As players amass resources and options, preparing accordingly for each mission will have a major impact on its succ


Much of the fun of tactical RPGs comes from the player's ability to figure out their own strategies to use in combat. In addition to figuring out one's own strategies, allowing the player to customize their characters to some extent allows a player to further play into the strategies they prefer using while making these characters feel much more personalized. Whether through the use of a class system, abilities, or varied equipment, we hope Triangle Strategy allows players to customize the characters at their dispo


As a general rule, it is always a good idea to have a mission available that can reduce the Avatar timer. However, there is a way players can exploit it, even in Legend difficulty. Up to Commander difficulty, the timer that appears when all 12 blocks light up will always reset to its max whenever the progress is reduced by the player. This means players can exploit the timer if they have a way to revert Avatar progress. In Legend, the time that is lost during the timer is cumulative, but only up to seven days. Whenever the timer resumes after that, it will always start at seven d


Flashbang grenades will disorient enemies within a large radius. Being disoriented means a -20 penalty to Aim, -30 penalty to Will, reduced Mobility by 6, and restriction of the use of most specialized abilities. It will also cancel Overwatch, Mind Control, a Viper’s bind, and any other sustained abilities. These grenades can be extremely useful to reliably deal with dangerous effects while simultaneously debuffing multiple enem


In the end, the version of XCOM 2 available on either the Xbox One or PS4 is still, unavoidably, the second best crafted by the development team. The good news is that players who prefer their couch to their desktop won't be missing out on the quality of the experience, even if the level of polish takes a hit. And with every aspect of XCOM 2 contributing to the kinds of investment, tension, and stakes usually relying on players hunched over keyboards, glued to their monitors... well, being a couch potato may have never been a More inspiring ideas stressful experie


For whatever reason, very few tactical JRPGs in recent memory have featured PVP multiplayer. Allowing players to face off against each other simply adds more variety to the game as a whole. Additionally, as the game is centered around the player's choices, opposing players may have access to different characters, weapons, and other resources based on the choices they made, making combat even more var


Cover art for video games has had a tough time getting the recognition it deserves over the last ten years. This is predominantly due to the gaming industry's continued transition into the digital world, as gamers have been spending less time browsing their local game shop and more time using online stores from the comfort of their own h


This would be especially effective if particular characters weren't locked behind single decisions, rather than chains of choices that would encourage the player to experiment with their choices and greatly enhance replay value through tangible assets that are only available under certain conditi


There was a time when the revival of the science fiction franchise XCOM by Firaxis Games was seen as simply a small-scale, back-up title to the main event. But long before the squad-based shooter disappointed many, the traditional, turn-based strategy XCOM: Enemy Unknown had been launched to near universal acclaim, not only doing the brand justice, but reinvigorating the genre as a whole. The expansion Enemy Within doubled down on the fiction and gameplay - but it was **XCOM 2 ** that had the anticipation in its fa