That's XCOM (II) Baby!

I don’t remember the expansion being easier or harder, just more complicated. Fatigue means you have to have a wider bench of soldiers, but that’s fine.

They announced that XCOM2 is coming to Switch. I’m pretty psyched for 2 reasons: first, xcom is a great game for playing on the go, so this will be awesome for flights or road trips. Second: I will finally get my wife to play XCOM! She actually loved Mario Vs Rabbids but she’s not a PC gamer and XCOM2 with a controller didn’t work that well on PC. Hopefully if the UI gets smoothed out for console play, that will be what she’s missing to actually enjoy XCOM.

Do you mean on a tactical or strategic level? I think they’re about the same difficulty on a tactical level, with more variety in WOTC. On the strategic level, the ability to locate facilities and undertake resistance ring missions makes it easier to keep the Avatar project from going out of control, which always felt like a cheap lose condition to me. The fact that you have to manage tiredness means that you have more difficult roster management, which is an interesting problem to me.

If you haven’t tried it download & play the Long War2 mod.

I liked XCom 2 but Long War 2 turned a good game into my favorite game of all time. Gameplay is not just longer but also much more varied. I ended up focusing on running two teams: an assault team of 6-8 soldiers and a stealth team of 3-4. The assault team was fun but the stealth team was another level. I’d sneak the 4 past the enemy unseen then setup 3 to defend the extraction point while one crazy bastard does a smash & grab and books it back. Some of my favorite gaming moments of all time were spent getting those guys back safely while 30-40 enemies closed in.

I’m not sure if the Xbox version can be modded. Personally I thought the campaign was long enough as it was, although maybe that’s because I had a number of false starts on top of it.

I finished playing a campaign (Commander difficulty) with the separate Alien Hunters storyline. It was definitely much less stressful fighting the Rulers once my soldiers had all their bells and whistles available.

I finally got around to playing a vanilla XCOM 2 campaign, without the War of the Chosen stuff. The biggest difference I noticed (besides the obvious stuff like The Chosen and The Lost) is that there was noticeably less variety in combat maps. I didn’t particularly miss all of the little semi-random boosts you get in WOTC like scientific breakthroughs and resistance orders (although the randomness probably makes it more replayable) and I appreciated the fact that there were just fewer fights overall over the course of the campaign.