X-COM 2: The Next Punishing Installment

Have you ever played a game that makes you want to tear your hair out? A game that is so hard that you may spend an hour just trying to accomplish one task? The game series I’m talking about is X-COM. The story of X-COM revolves around aliens arriving at Earth to invade and the countries of the world uniting to form a secret organization to fight back against the aliens.

The player commands the organization known as “X-COM,” or the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, and leads soldiers on missions to fight aliens attacking cities and take over crashed UFOs. The first X-COM game was released in 1994 to critical praise and has became a cult classic among gamers. It was brutal, unrelenting, and tested the patience and will of countless gamers. Then, after years without a new game, X-COM: Enemy Unknown was released in 2012. Enemy Unknown brought the difficulty of the original X-COM game to a new generation of gamers with updated graphics and a whole lot of aliens too. And now a new game is on the horizon that changes up everything X-COM players have known.

Firaxis, the developer of X-COM, made a bold move that no one expected when the story for X-COM 2 was released. The true ending of Enemy Unknown was that X-COM loses and humanity is taken over by the aliens. This twist probably upset many longtime X-COM fans, but change is a part of every game series. In X-COM 2 the player will be given the task of leading the underground X-COM in a guerilla war against the government of Earth and their alien masters. Players will have to scrounge for equipment, use stealth as their ally and be swift if they want any chance of winning. This new X-COM looks to be a great new take on a classic game series and I hope that it lives up to expectations when it comes out. X-COM 2 will coming out on February 5th, 2016 for the PC.