10 years later and with no XCOM 3 in sight, I'm in love with XCOM 2 now more than ever

Can you believe that XCOM 2 is 10 years old? I certainly can't. Firaxis' boundary-pushing strategy game still looks and plays like it could have been released yesterday. It's a testament to the developer's ingenuity and the brilliance of XCOM's core premise, covertly repelling an alien invasion with finite manpower and limited funding.

With 2012's series revival XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Firaxis established itself as a more-than-capable custodian of Julian Gollop's original vision. Yet four years later, XCOM 2 saw the studio return to the alien-embattled universe not with plans to build upon Enemy Unknown's foundations, but with the ambition and confidence to rock them, risking it all on one chilling question: what if humanity lost?

Down but not out

XCOM 2 was one of the last games I ever preordered, and I vividly remember my excitement in the run-up to launch. It was a jolting sensation, a turbulent restlessness – I wanted nothing more than to tear through the long months between me and February 5. How could I not? After spending well over 100 hours in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the idea of building a resistance and waging guerilla warfare, along with new features like a stealth phase and different classes, were tantalizing. Even XCOM 2's key artwork – an alien head made up of human skulls – crystalized the series' core, of the dynamic stories built upon life and loss. A decade of actually playing XCOM 2 has done nothing to dilute these passions, and I feel the same now as I did then.

Much of XCOM 2's enduring strength comes from its fascinating reframing. What if all the resources we had available in Enemy Unknown weren't enough? Is our faith in humanity's resilience naive, even arrogant? With XCOM 2 set two decades after the aliens have already occupied Earth, the resources available to us in the original game are gone. All that remains is hope – hope that mankind can overcome once more, or at least go down fighting.

It's a brilliant narrative, nourished by XCOM 2's strategic layer. Rather than Enemy Unknown's kill 'em all approach, XCOM 2's missions are narrower in scope: assassinating a collaborator, for example, or a hit-and-run raid to steal resources or information. Most of these missions have turn limits in which you not only have to complete said objective, but reach an extraction point to escape. The tables are turned, and you no longer have the home field advantage – miss your ride out, and those soldiers are captured or killed. I'm a very methodical player in strategy games, so the added time pressure hasn't always been my cup of tea. But XCOM 2's underdog tone would fall flat if the player was in control from start to finish, and I respect Firaxis for committing to that vision entirely – a remarkable risk, given how divisive time-sensitivity can be in any genre.

While I begrudge timed missions as a necessary evil, I unreservedly adore XCOM 2's stealth mechanic. Your soldiers begin guerilla missions concealed for as long as they can stay out of sight, offering an opportunity to set up one-sided ambushes, sneak past patrols, or smash-and-grab an objective before the enemy has time to clog your exit route. Wiping out a squad of ADVENT soldiers before they can fight back is a sublime high, but, as is often the case in XCOM, it's the failures you remember the most. I once tried to ambush a weapons convoy with a grenade, sparking a comically serendipitous chain reaction of explosions that blew up the roof my squad was perched on. In another mission, cover was blown by my sniper auto-pathing through a plate-glass window. It's the dynamism at XCOM 2's heart: you're given all of the tools to stay one step ahead, just so long as you can keep your feet out of Firaxis' bear traps.

That philosophy was taken further in 2017's War of the Chosen expansion, which introduced elite Chosen aliens who could turn up in any mission and adapted their strategies based on their previous encounters with you. Likewise, the Lost – hordes of zombified humans drawn to noise – made battlefields more fluid than ever; forcing you to consider every gunshot to remain one step ahead of their overwhelming numbers.

I could spend the rest of my days waxing lyrical about War of the Chosen, but ultimately it all feeds back into XCOM 2's guiding light: reactivity. By experimenting with XCOM's relationship to the player and doubling down on the sequel's scrappy guerilla premise, Firaxis found a way to share its own authorship with players. The same story can have a thousand endings, and vice versa – for as many times as I've rolled credits on XCOM 2, I've never reached them the same way twice.

In 2026, XCOM's future is unclear. We've heard nothing from the series since the 2020 spin-off XCOM: Chimera Squad, although Marvel's Midnight Suns carried many of its ideas forward with its deck-building elements in 2022. And while I desperately hope that Firaxis is working on XCOM 3 alongside its "expansion-level" update for Civilization 7, XCOM 2's spirit lives on in the next generation of strategy games. Complex Games' excellent Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters leaned on environmental carnage for that reactive flavor in combat. You can see traces of its Geoscape map in Menace's choice-heavy planetary campaigns, while Star Wars Zero Company is being made by veteran XCOM developers and shares its DNA in all but lightsabers.

Ten years on, perhaps that's the most fitting legacy XCOM 2 could have: not a direct continuation, which it rebuffed in the first place, but an unpredictable spread of successors, all born of the same seeds.

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