The warlock can also teleport fresh troops onto the battlefield, and then warp them across the battlefield to pop up in unexpected places, or unleash psionic attacks to leave your soldiers in a daze. We narrowly carried the day, but she and the other survivors of that team were listed as traumatized, and she was immediately scarred with a new negative trait: she was now “cautious” and likely to cower behind cover during a battle. At the end of the mission, he made one of my support troopers killer her “bondmate”-each team member develops special connections with other members of the XCOM team that provides special bonuses when they are on missions together-sending her into a traumatized panic. The Warlock is a spell-caster who, the first time I encountered him, methodically mind-controlled members of my squad and turned them against each other. Or, if things go poorly, the second-act of Predator. You don’t always know when they’ll show up, but each time they do, it’s like a superhero showdown. Over time they get more dangerous on both a tactical and strategic level, so even as you put one down, you know that they’ll be even nastier the next time around. One of the three semi-immortal “Chosen” of the title, the warlock is a hero character that the aliens use to stalk the XCOM team as they go on their missions. But where that abstraction left lots of empty space around arbitrary-feeling challenges (steal the widget from the secret base or this red bar will fill-up!), War of the Chosen fills that empty space with enough personality and atmosphere to create the memorable moments that the original campaign lacked. War of the Chosen doesn’t really change that. For the life of me I’ll never understand why it has the trappings of a territory-control game when territory and geography are abstracted into meaninglessness. XCOM 2’s original campaign felt like an outline of a strategy game rather than the finished product. It doesn’t substantially change anything about the original campaign, but all the new features, characters, narratives, and-most importantly-possibilities have quietly made XCOM 2 one of my favorite games of this year. War of the Chosen wedges all these new elements into the original XCOM 2 campaign, transforming it into some kind of tactical turducken. For a surreal moment, War of the Chosen had turned into Indigo Prophecy, until the physical manifestation of evil network data was killed by a woman with a shotgun. Oh, that was right before an alien hard drive took on a luminous, living form and caved-in the roof with some kind of black-hole grenade that nearly killed my machine gunner. A mission or two earlier, some kind of ice-snake showed up at a high-security alien facility, froze half my squad, and strangled my sniper. Weird shit just happens in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, this year’s expansion to the 2016 sequel to Firaxis’ hit tactics game. This isn’t a particularly special mission, to be clear. Additional screenshots courtesy of 2K Games.
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