So here we are at long last, it's been almost a month since it came out, and I'll tell another reason later why is that significant, but only now was I able to finish it. And not because of a lack of interest, it simply became a long game, which is good. But the more important question is: Did it become a better game? Well, Yes and No.
If you're not familiar with the base game this review might seem incoherent or even unintelligible, so I assume a prerequisite knowledge of the game. You may want to refer back to my original review of the game from page 2.
I apologize in advance but I'll have to spoil some aspects of the game in order to properly review it, but these are not story elements, these are things that are revealed in the first 20 minutes of the game when you start playing it.
So let's examine the Yes part:
While the DLC doesn't give you a completely new campaign, it significantly augments the original one, They added a lot of new mechanics, new environments, new missions, new soldier classes, and a completely new subplot, or rather three new subplots.
The first new subplot/mechanic are the Chosen, who are according to the vague backstory they're given are some elite human-elder hybrid soldiers, who have been chosen to re-capture you, and whichever of them succeeds in that task is promised to become the ruler of Earth. So in essence they are enemies of each other as well as XCOM. Spoiler alert: You never actually get to see them fight each other, because only one of them can be present in a mission at a time. They can randomly appear on any mission, and are a pain in the ass generally. They all have infinite concealment, and can move half the map in one turn back and forth. Basically it goes like this: Chosen comes out of concealment attacks one or more of your soldiers (every chosen attack automatically knocks down soldiers) then goes back into concealment and disappears beyond the edges of your vision. There are three chosen and each have their own weaknesses and strengths, and as time progresses they start to become more powerful and gain new abilities. Before going deeper into the mechanics of how you can fight them I have to mention another new mechanic which is integral part of the war against the chosen.
These are three new resistance factions, you establish contact with two of them early on in the story, the third is completely optional, and you can contact them trough covert ops manually later. Covert ops is the new mechanic tied to the factions. These are basically missions, you don't control directly, only assign which soldiers should go on them, and sometimes they need extra support like you need to allocate intel, supplies, or even engineers or scientists to some ops. Except in some cases covert ops can be ambushed, if that happens you assume direct control of the last leg of the op as if it was a standard mission. This is the part where you curse if you assigned rookies to the op, if there is no ambush they can finish these no problem, but if there is, well you get the just of it. And since these missions only have 2-3 soldiers tops, you don't have much to work with. So the ops in many aspects replace the proving grounds facility from the base game, as many of the tactical advantages you could purchase trough there now you can only gain trough covert ops. There are just too many types of operations to list them all, so I'm only going to mention the most important one. Hunting the chosen. You need to finish a series of three covert missions with a particular faction and that reveals the location of the base of that particular chosen. Each chosen is assigned to a different faction. So in order to defeat all three chosen you need to contact all three factions and do their respective "hunting the chosen" ops. Then and only then you get the option to ambush the chosen at their lair, where you can actually kill them. During normal missions they just teleport away when their HP reaches zero. And here comes the first thing that I didn't like about the DLC. While the chosen are wildly different, their mission to take them out are exactly the same. You basically have to do the same mission three times on an almost completely identical map each time. Even the banter from the Avenger crew is the same on each mission. Which is weird since some of the comments make no sense at all when you do the mission the second or third time. They basically marvel at every aspect of the mission like it is the first one.
But the resistance factions are not just about covert ops, they each delegate one soldier to XCOM that you can send on missions. They are each a completely new class and have unique talents and abilities, and their level up is also different from regular soldiers. You don't just choose from two abilities, they have many unlockable skills, that you can buy using skill points gained on the field. (Skill points are awarded for flanking kills, height kills, and ambushes, as far as I could tell. And this is the point where I mention that the advanced warfare centre is also superseeded by this skill tree method. Your soldeirs no longer get random abilities after building the warfare centre, but you can choose their skills. If you have enough skill points that is. One mechanic I liked is that there are two types of skill points. global and individual. Global skills can be used on any soldier regardless of the kills of that soldier, individual skill points are awarded to specific soldiers and can only be used on that one soldier.
Unfortunately you can't really recruit faction soldiers until very late in the game, but there is a good reason for that, they are very effective and having more than one at a time could make the game too easy. For example one of the classes has an ability which if used (1 charge / mission) means the soldiers starts shooting off their guns until the ammo runs out, or all visible enemies are dead. You can basically kill an andromedon with one action, including the shell! On the last mission using this ability the soldier took down a sectopod an andromedon and a muton with one single action! Granted they already been weakened by an explosion but still.
So where was I, yes, new subplots. The third and final one are the Lost. These are basically zombies. They are present on missions that take place in abandoned cities (one of the new environments in the game more about that later) . And sometimes randomly appear on normal missons. They only have a weak melee attack, but they always travel in large groups. And their health is very random you can see ones with 2 hp, up to as much as 8. There can be so many lost in play at times that it literally makes the game crawl. No kidding, 10-20 easily. There is a fun but annoying mechanic attached to the lost. Each kill on a lost is a free action, but if you miss you lost your turn. This makes missed 80+% shots all the more annoying. But if you're lucky you can kill 6-8 lost with a single soldier even early on in the campaign.
We don't really get any information about why the lost are there, how did they become "lost", the game is even more vague about them as the chosen. They sometimes attack advent as well, but most of the time they advance on you, and they're attracted to explosions. Which means if you detonate something on a mission where there is lost presence that means you just spawned about a dozen of them.
So that's all about subplots. But that's not the end of new mechanics in the game. There are also new mission types, and as mentioned new environments. The new mission types include rescue missions in abandoned cities, where there is always lost presence. You basically need to get to stranded VIP with an unconscious soldier, and rescue them, by leading them back to the ingress point. And there is a new type of retaliation mission, where you don't have to collect individual civilians but help out the resistance who are actively fighting the aliens. They have their own turns. So you basically have a friendly AI controlled faction. And the third new mission type is very similar to the destroy the relay missions except in this case you need to destroy a psionic relay. The difference in mechanics here, is that there are smaller relays scattered around the map that if you destroy the turn limit goes up by one. The fourth type is resource gathering missions where you have to race against advent to tag supply crates for collection. And there was one more mission type that only appeared once for me: an assassination. The game is really fucked up balance wise, the same way as the hit/miss mechanics are fucked up. So the missions are not well balanced out, you don't get a specific mission type even once for months, while you get lots of another type of mission. Or you get lost presence for 10 straight missions, then nothing for ages. Even the avatar progress is random. Sometimes it refuses to change for months. Just sitting there. But we're crossing over into the negatives territory deeply here.
Before we do that let's mention that advent also got some new units. But they're not as exciting as yours. One is the priest, who is a psionic soldier, that has three attacks, usually it puts one of your soldiers into stasis, or makes another advent unit a "holy warrior" which means it gets shields basically. Or the worst attack it has is mind control, which succeeds much more often than when a sectoid does it.
The second new unit is the purifier, which is supposedly an anti-lost unit. Basically it's a flamethrower wielding trooper. It's not very dangerous, it's attacks usually only ignite the environment and don't even hit your soldier. It only presents a danger when it explodes, as sometimes they do when they expire. And the third is the spectre which is weird nano robotic enemy, that insists on looking like a soldier. But it's only significant attack is that it can clone your soldiers, making an enemy copy of them, and the process makes your soldier unconscious. But when you kill the spectre the clone automatically expires, and your soldier is revived. So not as dangerous as it seemed first, when I though the cloning actually killed my soldier. It's annoying that you still get the same banter when your soldier is knocked out as when they die.
The new environments include an underground layout with subways and sewers, the aforementioned abandoned cities, which offer balconies and tall buildings. And there is a new inner advent city environment where there are multiple levels. And there is a new outdoor environment where alien flora is dominating, much like the psionic gate mission in the original game.
So as you can see, there are a lot of stuff added to the game. With that in mind the $30 price for the DLC is not a bad deal. However, let's examine why I also mentioned No.
Apart from the issues with balancing the mission types, there are numerous other problems with the game, smaller and larger bugs, game breaking ones, and non-game breaking ones, but nonetheless bugs that weren't present in the original game.
- For example try lobbing a grenade on top of the building in the advent blacksite mission, you're guaranteed to experience a crash. I could reproduce this crash with almost perfect consistency even in different campaigns.
- The cause and effect relationship is almost always reversed, meaning things happen in the wrong order during turns, or are entirely omitted. For example an andromedon shell walks to a new position, the trail of acid appears before it even starts moving!
- When hacking the soldier only says it starts hacking after the fact!
- Overwatch shoots are triggered after the enemy stopped moving and already in cover.
- Overwatch shots are completely non existent you only see that the enemy lost some health, but you didn't even see your units take shoots. This often happens when more than one unit is on overwatch.
- Retaliation actions trigger before the attack that would cause them.
- Explosions magically avoid some units that are in the centre of the radius.
- Status effects refuse to affect enemy units, it says it's on fire, it's visible it's on fire, but it doesn't loose hp at the end of turns.
- Invisible cover / see trough walls. These are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes the enemy will be able to attack you even when there is a full wall in front of your unit, and it shouldn't even be seen. Or sometimes there seems to be no cover in front of an enemy but still you get hit chances as if it's behind at least one full cover.
- Superior stock randomly only causes 1 or 2 damage on missed shots.
- Inability to pick up the body of your unconscious soldier
And I'm sure there were more bugs that I can't remember at this very moment.
But there are issues that aren't affecting the missions directly. For example some facility upgrades don't work. Like upgrading the resistance ring doesn't give a second slot for assigning covert ops as it is supposed to. In the base game during loading of a mission you could see the transport sequence and the briefing by central. Now during loading all you can see is a spinning xcom logo, and the transport sequence only appears after the loading is finished, so you can immediately skip.
Apart from bugs, they removed some mechanics from the game, like you can no longer recruit new staff at resistance HQ, there is not even a resistance HQ anymore. But the fly back to HQ button still appears after collecting the monthly supply drop, but now it's pointless. This change also means you can only gain scientists / engineers if you happen to get a mission where the reward is a scientist, this means you have significantly less staff. This is especially apparent on research projects, the whole game takes much longer this way. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the consistency of the game suffers, it's only up to luck how quickly you get enough staff to pursue certain projects. And since there is no resistance HQ you can't use it to generate intel either. So you get significantly less intel resources than before, meaning you can't really recruit soldiers/staff from the black market. Also with the new facility types, the construction area is too small, you run out of space before you build every facility, you always have to make compromises.
All in all, the campaign in the base game felt very consistent, the missions themselves were highly dependent on luck, but not the campaign itself, it was fairly certain what mission types and rewards you were given at a certain stage in the campaign, there was very little variance there. Now however the whole campaign feels like a random mess. No consistency to it at all. There isn't any consistency even to the types of enemies encountered. The base game introduced new advent units gradually the stronger ones appearing one by one on missions. Now you can encounter 3 new powerful enemy types on the same mission, way earlier than in the original game.
And they haven't released a single patch since it came out, with the amount of bugs and balance issues I encountered that seems strange to me. There isn't even official word about a patch yet.
Oh I almost forget, there is also a new game mode called challenge. It's basically fixed missions where you're scored based on your performance, and you can compare your e-peen to worldwide leaderboards. Pretty pointless in a game where the biggest factor in your success is luck. But at least you get to control random advent units in this mode.
+
- Same game, it didn't get any worse
- New environments
- New mechanics
- New units / factions
- Longer campaign, with more mission types.
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- Mission types are too random, you don't get a balanced dose of each type. There are brilliant new mission types that you get only once or twice in an entire campaign, which is a shame.
- Rescue missions are great, too bad the chosen are so impotent that they never really able to kidnap your soldiers.
- Campaign is too random, there is no consistency, which can make the game extremely easy or extremely hard based on nothing but luck. (I've experienced both in separate campaigns started on the same difficulty)
- Tons of bugs, so many, that it's actually uncountable, this should count as 5 negatives at least
Scoring card:
graphics : 6/10
realization: 8/10
story: 5/10
atmosphere:8/10
gameplay: 10/10
controls: 8/10
Overall: 7/10
It could've been great, all it needed was a little more polish. Still if you liked the game, this DLC is a must have.