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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Who owns those odd voices? It’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show and guess what – we’re all in the same room, with our actual bodies>. Unprecedented. And> there’s a special guest this week too. Chris Bratt of Eurogamer joins us to talk about the alien-murdering of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It’s a Brattcast! While Pip has been playing teen angst drama-llama Life Is Strange: Before the Storm and I’m still trying to discover an impossibly powerful attack in Absolver. Come listen.

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I’d long suspected it, but it’s nice to have tangible evidence: I am the best in the world at XCOM.

For one moment of one day, on one of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [official site]’s daily challenge maps. It could happen again another day, and, yeah, I guess this is going to be my life now. (more…)

As predicted, I spent most of the weekend playing XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [official site]. It’s good to be back, fighting against the faux-benevolent burger-making overlords of future Earth, but I haven’t actually made a great deal of progress in my new campaign. That’s because there have been several new campaigns, and that’s because I’m an idiot who can’t resist the lure of an Ironman mode, while secretly hating the reality of an Ironman mode.

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The Steam Charts aren’t, as you may have been led to expect, large sprawling maps depicting the locations of all the world’s known steam. They were, but due to government pressure we’ve altered them to list the top ten selling games on Steam, in reverse order, like a rocket taking off. (more…)

Hark, it’s the sweet vocal vibrations of the humble RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. The lads (lads lads) are back from the bright lights of Gamescom and ready to chat hard about the games they saw. But Pip is only giving us a maximum of three words about each one. Madness. Never mind, we can talk more verbosely about the alien-shooting of the Destiny 2 beta, or the otherworldly kickboxing of Absolver, or the other-alien-shooting of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It’s been quite a good week. (more…)