Have you ever stopped to wonder what life is really all about? To get to the bottom of why we exist, what our purpose is, where this is all heading?

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More XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen is such an exciting prospect to some that our Alec, despite being away on months-long sabbatical, appeared wanting to write about the new DLC released today (Brendan shooed him away with a broom). Tactical Legacy Pack is its name, and adding loads of new missions and maps and items and modes is its game. It’s free for keepsies right now too (though it does require the WOTC expansion), then in December Sally-come-latelys will start needing to pay a couple quid for it. Eat it, Meer. Enjoy not doing work ha ha, sucker.

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Six years ago, Firaxis pulled off the impossible with XCOM, re-envisioning a DOS classic – next week, they’re celebrating this feat with the Tactical Legacy pack for XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen. It’s pure fan-service of the less-sexy kind (unless Carapace armour turns you on, in which case fly your freak flag high), featuring old favourite equipment and environments used in a new series of tactical mini-campaigns. Better still, it’ll be initially free to owners of War Of The Chosen. It’s out next week, October 9th. Check the reveal trailer below.

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The calendar’s doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer – we’ve reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017. (more…)

Back in the summer, I boldly declared that ‘I will play XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen’s daily challenge mode every day.’ Er. Whoops. I’ve only played a handful since then, and I’m not alone there. Though the mode still pumps out a new challenge every day, it hasn’t blossomed into a new religion in the same way The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky’s daily random-o-map scoreboard challenges have for those communities.

So, what happened?

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We already knew that Pavonis Interactive, the team behind the RPS-approved, game-changing Long War mods for XCOM and XCOM 2, were working on a complete new game of their own, but seeing as Long War 2 has been in the wild for a while now, I thought I’d catch up with ’em about Terra Invicta. This takes the essential XCOM concept – humans fending off an alien invasion – then expands it to a grand strategy scale.

“It’s a little like what you might imagine the XCOM spokesman’s job to be,” Pavonis head John Lumpkin tells me, “trying to unify Earth’s nations against an alien threat.” And then> it moves to cover the entire solar system.

Long War? More like longest war. (more…)

This week we finally learn who the killer is, but will the answer provide more questions than solutions? Read on for this week’s hair-raising installment of… The Steam Charts. (more…)

Now that the new, humungous XCOM 2 expansion pack has had a couple of weeks to bed in, the game’s mod community has been steadily fixing up their tweaks to work with War of the Chosen [official site]. Over time, there’ll be more Steam Workshop offerings which take specific advantage of the onslaught of changes WOTC introduces, but right now what I’m interested in is assorted quality of life improvements that remove pointless dead time from the game, offer more tactical detail and generally make the whole shebang slicker and quicker to use.

These, then, are the XCOM 2 War Of The Chosen mods that I just don’t think I could do without. (Well, I could, but I’d be complaining the whole damn time).

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Come one, come all, but not all at once or you’ll break our caching, and see the Steam Charts in all their glory! Which game will have reached the coveted #2 position this week?! (more…)

Though it suffers from having as many different tones as the last thirty years of Dulux catalogues sellotaped together, I found in my XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen review that the latest expansion for Firaxis’ game is an extremely effective remix of, basically, everything. But there’s one very small change in WOTC that I didn’t mention – a tiny thing with massive, massive repercussions for XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [official site]’s replayability.

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