If you’re playing XCom 2 , and you encounter a human-looking enemy that has white hair and a purple visor that covers the entire face, have all your soldiers target that enemy. That is probably the only chance of successfully completing that mission. That type of enemy is called an Avatar, and thankfully they are rare. They have extremely high mobility, armor, and damage potential. To make matters worse, Avatars have powerful psionic abilities as well. Many aliens can mind control the player’s soldiers; Avatars can mind control up to three at one time. This enemy can kill a well-equipped squad by itself if it’s not dealt with quic

If it isn't evident already, this is a meaty expansion. Firaxis Games has done a splendid job adding details that have far-reaching implications for the game as whole, and this makes playing through the game with the expansion enabled feel like a completely new experience. It's a huge challenge to take all the new introductions in stride at once, but nobody plays XCOM because it's e

We'll start with namesake of the entire expansion, The Chosen. The three unique champions of the ADVENT forces spend the entire game trying to track down the player and blow the Avenger out of the sky (which is a thing that can absolutely happen), and have a tendency to show up during difficult missions and make things twice as difficult. If players are in a pickle trying to survive a particularly tedious mission, imagine how things go if a Chosen arrives and starts spawning down more enemies and taking powerful sniper shots from across the

To combat the new threat, XCOM can recruit 3 new player-friendly factions into the fray: The Skirmishers are direct combat units with multiple actions, The Reapers are stealthier than anyone else in the game, and The Templars' unique melee and ranged psionic attacks can make a world of difference. As players perform certain covert missions on behalf of these factions, they'll earn the trust of their respective leaders and be able to activate monthly bonuses, like starting a mission with a turncoat ADVENT on the player's side, or have enemies drop more loot. As can be expected, learning how to use each Faction to its fullest potential is quite a learning process, and it's likely some bodies will drop during the proc

The final nail in the coffin for story upgrades that this game needs is a better balancing act. One would think Square Enix would be more interested in showing off its gameplay rather than its text for a demo. It seems someone was thinking the opposite because the few battles in here are about an hour apart each. Hopefully the final game won’t burden players so much with too much story all at o

However, perhaps most interesting in Civ 6 is that it can make 4X simple to understand. Thanks to its cartoonish animations and easy-to-grasp interface, anyone new to the genre can easily become a 4X fan in no t

There is some town exploration in the demo. However, it is truncated. Most of the time it seems players will click on a map icon in order to in initiate a battle, or a cutscene. In-between some battles or story beats intel can be gathered but these exploration moments are very brief. This lack of full exploration is common for tactical RPGs so it understandable why the full game would not add this feat

Make no mistake: you will lose fighters in this game, and the developers make sure you're aware of it from the very start. And knowing now that each fighter is one of a dying breed, every death - every death - carries an extra sting of defeat and desperation (not to mention the always-looming threat of ADVENT launching a surprise attack on your base - potentially ending the campaign in one fell swoop). But as players learn to use surprise, squad tactics, and smart, not hesitant aggression, the reasons for Firaxis' changes make perfect se

The core thrill of seeing a squad erupt from 'Overwatch' to let barrages loose on an unsuspecting enemy is augmented by the new tweaks to Squaddie classes. The standards remain (Sniper, Grenadier, Specialist), but the 'Assault' class has been replaced with the fearless and furious Rangers. And before player assume the name means these fighters are ranged characters, realize that sprinting across a battlefield to unleash a sword attack point-blank has a distinct melee feel. The turn-based gameplay remains the same (although clearly increased in difficulty), leaving the fiction to inform the meaning of the mechanics - scrounging alien technology, attacking research centers and extracting assets - and in turn, letting the desperation of the campaign amplify the story ramificati

While the Dragon Quest series had long since established itself as a great JRPG series in its own right, one has to admit that the series hadn't really taken off in the west. Dragon Quest VIII was perhaps the last SLG Game events in the series that had witnessed some level of success in the West, with the fanfare of later entries being rather muted in compari