There's new XCOM 2 DLC out, and you can probably guess what that means we've got the itch. The itch to kill more Sectoids. To rage at RNG. To feel our hearts pound as we line up a do-or-die shot. It's time for a new run. And why should we play vanilla XCOM since there are now more than 1800 mods on the Steam workshop?

You can browse through the Workshop s thousand-plus mods from start to finish and find all sorts of tweaks and enhancements you never knew you needed. If you don t have that kind of time, however, here s a short list of excellent mods to get you started on your next world-rescuing campaign, broken down into four specific categories:

Optimizing XCOM 2: small changes and tweaks like an improved line-of-sight indicator. Quality of life improvements that make XCOM 2 a better game without dramatically changing it.Adding more content: More map packs, custom soldier classes, and customization options.Difficulty mods: Fun ways to make XCOM 2 easier or more challenging by changing AI behavior, grenades, and more.Gameplay overhauls: Big changes to how XCOM 2 plays, including new mission types and reworks of the mission timer and overwatch.

Optimizing XCOM 2

To keep XCOM 2 s basic play and difficulty the same with some upgrades and enhancements, there are plenty of mods that fit the bill.

Reliable Smoke deals with how unreliable XCOM s smoke grenade indicator can be, ensuring that all smokes provide exactly as much defense coverage as they claim to. Flamethrower Panic Fix allows your flamers to properly panic enemies as intended (no, ADVENT is not so brave that they laugh in the face of hellfire). Patrol when Revealed rounds out this set of unofficial patches, removing an issue that caused enemy patrols to annoyingly camp on top of you when you spotted them while concealed.

Gotcha (Flank Preview Evolved) is essential it upgrades X2 s line of sight indicator to properly reflect whether you ll flank an enemy from your new position or, even more importantly, if you ll be able to hack/shoot objective items and even if your sniper will have a squadsight angle on distant targets.

In a similar vein is LOS Preview Ability, granting an ability that you can place on top of enemies and positions to preview exactly what they can see no more being surprised when a Muton draws a bead on you through two separate windows and over a car hood.

Show Health Values is another great choice for people who value perfect information, summing up friendly and enemy healthbars into numeric form for easy reading.

Stop Wasting My Time is a much-loved mod that speeds up many unnecessarily slow elements in XCOM such as moving the Avenger, without messing up anything important or ruining the game s atmosphere and animations.

EVAC All is another excellent timesaver that allows you to extract your entire squad with one button instead of roping them up one soldier at a time, which not only speeds up your evacuations but also looks brilliant in action.

Stabilize Me! is a nice upgrade to the game s medical system, allowing you to use the medkit of a downed trooper to stop them from bleeding out it s a sensible tweak you re likely to appreciate when your only medic goes down.

Better Shieldwall gives a similarly reasonable boost to an otherwise ignored ability, allowing the lategame WAR Suit ability to provide cover to its wearer, not just allies around them.

PanicMod_AlwaysHunker is another voice of reason, ensuring panicked soldiers will always go to ground on the spot instead of shooting or running in a random direction. While it can initially be amusing to watch cowardly troops run into the line of fire instead of away from it, this Commander tired of such unnecessary deaths a long time ago.

As our final entry for optimizations and enhancements, EU Aim Rolls is a brilliant piece of work that fixes a host of issues you likely weren t even aware of. Long story short: in vanilla XCOM 2, the chance to hit and chance to crit shares a single roll, meaning if you have a 10% to hit and a 10% to crit, you can only crit or miss. This mod separates the rolls as it should be, while also removing a bunch of other problems you ll be happy to avoid. Ever seen an on-target grenade decide to miss an Archon? Install this mod and you ll never have to experience such nightmares.

With all of the above fixes and upgrades working together, you can jump straight into a new campaign with all manner of UI luxuries and comfort. That s just the tip of the modding iceberg, though on the next page, read on for some top choices to add more content and options to your game.

Adding more content

There are piles of cosmetic mods and voicepacks on the Workshop, ranging thematically from serious tactical accessories to a mod that adds wizard hats and clown noses. For this article, I ll leave those mods up to your personal taste and instead recommend some extra gameplay content that anyone can appreciate.

First off, more map diversity is a no brainer.

More Maps Pack, World Expansion Project: ADVENT and Maps by Vozati all share the same goal add more options for XCOM 2 s map generator to use. Conveniently enough, they all work nicely together, so subscribe to all three for a huge boost to your random battlefield variety.

Speaking of diversity, there s also a huge range of custom soldier classes for you to choose from on the Workshop. While again your own taste is what matters, my personal recommendations are Lucubration s Infantry, Sniper and Escalation (Scout, Rocketeer and Gunner) classes if you ve heard of XCOM 1 s Long War mod, these soldier types reprise many of its popular roles. Of course, I designed the Escalation classes myself, so it d be hard to say I m not biased; be sure to check out all the classes available on the workshop and try out the ones that draw your interest.

Finally, while I won t tell you what cosmetic add-ons or accessories to download, I will give you some ways to organise them once you ve picked some yourself.

Uniforms Manager is a wonderful mod that gives you all sorts of options for quickly creating, saving and applying customisation presets to single soldiers or your entire squad all at once. As someone who insists on dressing their troopers up in the right type of camo for snow, desert and woodland maps, take it from me - this mod will save you a lot of precious time if you re at all interested in staying colour co-ordinated.

Free the Hood allows you to mix and match more headgears with upper and lower face props, removing limitations that prevent you from, say, chewing on a cigar while wearing a leather hood, or wearing sunglasses underneath your full face helmet. Is wearing aviators underneath a full helmet stupid? Yes. Should you be allowed to do it? Hell yes.

Full Character Customization From Start unshackles you even further, allowing complete control over soldier cosmetic choices even if they re a lowly rookie. While the desire to prevent players from spending an hour customizing a low-ranked trooper only to have them die on the very next mission is commendable, the optimists among us prefer to get attached to our rookies now and cry inconsolably over their deaths later.

And while you re customizing those rookies, make use of these Military Camoflauge Patterns an extensive and detailed mod that adds more than fifty new camo types for your soldiers and their weapons, each an accurate recreation of real patterns used by armed forces around the world. If the words MARPAT, EMR or Flecktarn mean anything to you, this is the mod you ve been looking for. On the other hand, if your knowledge of camouflage extends as far as painting your Deagle with Golden Tiger Stripe, please download and learn from this mod immediately before alien UFOs spot you from orbit.

That sums up our look at adding new content to your game without significantly altering the difficulty but if you re interested in a bit more of a challenge, read on as we look at some mods to improve our difficulty.

Difficulty mods

So you ve been around the ADVENT-controlled block a few times and you re ready to take things up a notch. Or perhaps you found a ridiculously overpowered class you like using and you want to balance things out so your enemies are good for more than just filling up your body storage. Either way, I ve got two easy-to-install suggestions that ll make you work up a bit more of a sweat.

First and foremost is Grenades Damage Falloff. One of the easiest ways to solve XCOM 2 s problems (and honestly, any problems) is with an overwhelming number of explosives. With this mod, the power of your unstoppable Grenadiers is reigned in now grenades deal less and less damage towards the edges of their blast zone, meaning you can t just blanket entire groups of enemies with grenades and expect them to all die at once. Having to target and prioritize specific enemies and cover with your grenades rather than just killing everything will bring back the fear and frustration of XCOM faster than you can say I hugely regret installing this mod! Thank me later.

You might also like Explosions Destroy Corpses, which fits in perfectly by yep, you guessed it destroying the corpse of enemies you kill with explosives, cutting down on your research resources and black market moneymaking immensely. Maybe now you ll think twice about rocketing those Sectoids for kicks. I mean, I use the mod and I still do it, but some things are more important than money.

It s not enough to just make killing your enemies harder, though you need to make them kill you harder, too.

A Better AI is the perfect mod for the job, increasing the decision making and ruthless killer instinct of every enemy in the game. While you may have experienced the AI granting you small acts of mercy in vanilla acts such as ignoring a low HP trooper to fire at a healthier one, or using an ability on you instead of taking an easy flank shot this mod ensures such friendly sportsmanship is long over. Enemies will ruthlessly prioritize killshots and flank opportunities, overwatch only when the situation makes it tactically favourable, and rarely spam their various abilities if it s better to just shoot you in your face instead. Another excellent set of changes is how the AI will pick and choose from many more options at any given moment, making enemies far less predictable than their vanilla brains allowed. Be warned: now that Stun Lancers remember they have guns, they are easily fifteen times as hateable.

There s other mods focused on increasing difficulty, but for general purpose, the above three are the main I d recommend that don t require too much configuration or re-learning of the game to appreciate. I d recommend experimenting with increased enemy squad sizes as part of your efforts to increase XCOM 2 s challenge if you missed it, my previous article on XCOM 2 modding has a section on how to add more bad guys, among other things you can do to up the difficulty of your campaign. Even just one extra enemy per patrol will make you work much harder to bring your troops home alive.

While we re messing around with difficulty, there s a few good tweaks and upgrades I didn t include earlier because they tend to be beneficial for the player; though, coupled with the above difficulty increasing mods, you won t have to worry about things being easy.

BleedOutMod overhauls the chances your troopers have to start bleeding out when critically wounded instead of flat out dying. I think every soldier should have some chance to survive a knockout regardless of rank or experience, so this mod is one of my favourites.

Advanced Modular Weapons takes the Armed to the Teeth bonus from the vanilla game that s the continent bonus that grants an extra weapon upgrade slot for all your primary weapons and turns it into an expensive Proving Grounds project instead. Considering how this essential bonus only shows up based on chance, I think having it as a mid-game upgrade for every campaign makes much more sense.

Heavy Weapon Tweaks both buffs and nerfs the player s arsenal. In short, if you felt like the only heavies worth using were the Shredder and the Rocket/Blaster Launcher, this mod evens things out so that Flamers and Plasma Blasters are more competitive as choices for your EXO troops.

Its Just A Scratch is another in a series of sensible tweaks for the XCOM player. When your troops come home in vanilla, they re assigned wounded time based on how much damage they took, period. With this mod, they re only given wounds based on how much damage they took to their basic health value. In layman's terms, that means if you re wearing armor that gives you an extra four health and you only take four damage or less, you re not wounded, and taking five would be a light injury with a quick recovery. It s a reasonable tweak that allows your better-armored troops to put their plating to use without worrying about instant wound time. Your doctors will appreciate treating less bruised wrists and hurt feelings.

That covers most of my favourite choices from the Workshop for messing with our game s balance, though there is one more set of mods that s well worth a look. Read on as we wrap things up with a look at mods that overhaul our gameplay and provide entirely new ways to play.

 Gameplay overhauls  

We ll start small and save the best for last if you re interested in totally changing the way your XCOM 2 plays, this section has some suggestions you ll enjoy.

Suppressable Targeting Abilities revamps the Suppression ability to reduce the range of many area-of-effect abilities, like launching a grenade or spitting a cloud of poison. If you ve ever suppressed a Muton only to watch him happily blow up your squad, rejoice you can properly keep his head down now in all offensive aspects. The mod also unlocks the targeting for abilities, allowing you to place grenades and other skills with pinpoint precision, which is a much needed tweak if you re using Grenades Damage Falloff to lower your overall damage.

Overwatch Ignores Concealment is a little change with a huge effect, allowing your overwatch to fire off normally even while your troops are concealed. You no longer gain the bonus chance to hit that vanilla concealed Overwatch enjoys, but in return, you don t have to jump through hoops to get your stealthed troops to react anymore. As an XCOM:EU vet, this mod is one I really enjoy I prefer starting fights on the alien s turn instead of starting ambushes during mine. It s a definite boost to the player s lethality from concealment, so consider increasing your game s difficulty to balance things out.

Additional Mission Types is a fantastic mod that introduces several new sorts of missions to your campaigns, focusing on defensive scenarios that provide some alternatives to vanilla s more offensive missions. Defending a resistance shanty town from waves of ADVENT, neutralizing a VIP and holding for an extract, and executing a jailbreak as reinforcements drop in to cut you off are all excellent additions this mod adds to your campaign.

Guerilla War: Okay, here's the big one. My favourite XCOM 2 overhaul, which happens to combine perfectly with Additional Mission Types. Instead of wiping out all enemies and rolling in the rewards, campaigns played with this mod require you only to accomplish your mission objectives and extract before being overwhelmed. You will want to extract, because ADVENT calls in reinforcements once they go on alert at first just small pairs of soldiers, ramping up to full squads of enemies airdropping in to cut you down. The reinforcements provide a great alternative to mission timers as a result; instead of racing a literal clock, you re racing a metaphorical clock, represented by dropships full of very angry soldiers who will swarm all over you if you don t move fast enough. Couple that with only keeping what you can carry to the Skyranger, and your tactical decision making will be put to the test far more commonly than in vanilla. Should you bail out immediately after accomplishing your objective, or stick around a few more turns to grab bodies for research? In Supply Raids, how greedy will you be happy to head home after snatching a few boxes full of goods, or risking it all to grab all six? While the reinforcements certainly provide a difficulty hike, the fact that they replace timers allows you more options and flexibility, and encourages you to be greedy as you overstay your welcome to grab loot and corpses. There s something to be said for racing to the Skyranger with a butt-naked Sectoid slung over your shoulder. Guerilla War s still in development, but it s entirely playable now, so if using a Fulton Harness to extract a Sectopod wreck while you hold your LZ sounds like the kind of gameplay you re interested in, it s well worth checking out.

Speaking of total overhauls, Wave COM is a mod dear to my heart. As someone who loves tower and wave defense games, this mod is my dream come true start with a small squad of rookies and fight off increasingly harder and more numerous waves of enemies on random maps. Your soldiers level up from kills as they would in a real campaign, and as you earn resources from surviving enemy waves, you can hire new troops, unlock new research, and buy new equipment and upgrades. With troop customization and savegame support and even optional boss waves featuring the new Alien Hunters Ruler aliens, WaveCOM takes all of the fun and progression of a real campaign and sums it up in one huge and endless defense mission with the nice side effect being that when you eventually lose your entire squad, it s more inevitable and fun than frustrating.

Finally, while the above mods all pull off some fairly big changes to XCOM, Recovery Turn System takes the cake for absolutely changing the game. Players of other tactics games or more traditional tabletop RPGs will be familiar with the idea instead of moving your entire squad at once, and then all the aliens moving next, this mod has each individual unit act in order based on their mobility score, making it more similar to an initiative based system like Dungeons and Dragons. This completely changes how the game is played; no longer can you use your entire squad s strength to wipe out the enemy before they can act, with combat instead becoming a constant exchange of shots and abilities for each engagement. Whether it makes the game more fun or not is up to you - at the very least, it s well worth a look for how radically it mixes up the XCOM formula.

And that s that! The true madness of XCOM 2 s modding is that despite the length of this article, it only scratches the surface of what s available for you to download and use, let alone the new mods being created every day on the Workshop. There s hundreds of other worthwhile additions and changes to your game, and even the mods themselves are modifiable with many of them featuring their own config files for tweaking, but that goes beyond the scope of this article. When in doubt, refer to each mod s Workshop page for instructions on how to use and configure your downloads.

I hope this article has helped in improving and modifying your game, and provided some good ideas for your next playthrough. Good luck in your future campaigns, and when in doubt, ask for help! XCOM s community is by and large a great group of people, and many of them will be more than happy to help as you start modding your game or start dealing with the consequences of how much harder you made everything.

The third and final addition to the XCOM 2 Reinforcement Pack DLC bundle, called Shen's Last Gift, is now available on Steam. The expansion sees a team of XCOM soldiers headed by Avenger Chief Engineer Lily Shen infiltrate a hidden Advent facility containing powerful weapons and technology, including a brand-new type of soldier.

Intel which is to say, the XCOM website indicates that the Advent facility is spread across multiple skyscrapers linked by enclosed bridges, and that the MECs defending it are all based on a single prototype which is believed to be housed somewhere inside. And of course it is, because it's literally the first thing you see in the launch trailer. Once you've got it, you'll have access to a unique new soldier class complete with powerful new combat abilities, strategy mechanics, and customization options.

A more relevant bit of information to be aware of is that you should not purchase this DLC pack which, by the way, sells for $10/ 8 if you've already bought the Reinforcement Pack, because you will be charged for it even though you already own it. (Unless you're buying it for someone else, I suppose.) The Mac and Linux versions of Shen's Last Gift are coming soon.

Shen s Last Gift, a new chunk of XCOM 2 DLC landed today. It kicks off when the commander and co. receive a transmission from an abandoned Advent research facility. You and Chief Engineer Shen investigate, take on a bunch of robots, and find a mech prototype presumably her father s Last Gift .The mech prototype isn t just a new character, but an entirely new soldier class with unique abilities. Gamespot s hands-on with the DLC digs into what makes the mechs, called Sparks, different: they're essentially hero units, with more health, maneuverability, and firepower than the normal human soldier. They're also taller and more noticeable targets for enemy Advent forces. So the mechs are harder, better, faster, and stronger than the average soldier, but they re also unable to take cover. That said, they can function as cover for human units, which sounds like a fun way to deepen the pool of available strategic decisions without (as far as we know) breaking the established formula.The DLC is priced at $10 on its own, but can also be purchased as part of the Reinforcement pack, which includes Anarchy s Children and Alien Hunters too. It s normally $20, but as part of the Steam Summer Sale, it s a breezy $13.40.

You've driven the aliens back, stolen their technology, hacked their mechs and autopsied them, but you've yet to wear their skin into battle. This oversight is fixed by the new Alien Hunters DLC, which adds a story mission, three new boss monsters and three new pieces of elite armour, which all bear a slightly horrifying resemblance to the boss creature they came from. Unsurprisingly, the very sight of this armour freaks out the alien race you happen to be mimicking. You don't see XCOM 2's vipers wearing mens' faces for hats. In this respect, humanity may have gone too far this time.

The DLC seamlessly integrates into your campaign, picking up the trail of XCOM 1's Dr. Vahlen in a decent new mission with a fresh tileset. Without spoiling too much, science has gone wrong again, and now three 'ruler' aliens are on the loose. They will invade your missions randomly until they're dead, or you are. Their huge healthbars and tendency to teleport out make them tough to catch, but that's the idea of Alien Hunters. The aliens aren't just a threat anymore, they're sport to be hunted, skinned and worn. A new room in the Avenger even mounts heads of captured aliens on the wall.

I haven't had a chance to see how the bosses operate in a live campaign environment, but thanks to some Firaxis savegames I've had a chance to fight them. I won't spoil what they can do, because that nasty element of surprise is part of the fun, but they're both tough and very fast. Instead of waiting for your entire team to move before taking another action, they move between each soldier's movement. That means they can do a lot of damage in a single turn, and can portal away in moments.

Movement restriction abilities are useful, then, along with high-damage weapons. The DLC happens to add both in the form of new prototype weapons and a frost grenade that can freeze an enemy still for a few turns. Prototypes are hard to come by, and are be lost in battle if you fail to recover them.

The guns are worth the risk. In contrast to the high-tech weaponry your scientists produce, they look ornate and antiquated. The bolt caster does huge damage but must be reloaded after every shot. The new handcannon boasts a polished wooden casing and grip, and comes with an ability that puts your soldier into concealment if they land a killing pistol blow.

The new items are nice prizes, and the new bosses ought to provide a interesting disruptive element to your campaign, but they won't necessarily encourage you to play differently. Weapons such as the Shadowcannon pistol synergise nicely with the sharpshooter's gunslinger skill track without changing too much about the class. The bosses have some new abilities and behaviours, but are exaggerated versions of enemies regular players will be familiar with by now.

Alien Hunters is on the right track, however, and it shows how tricky it is to expand XCOM 2. New scripted missions are only interesting once, and new gadgets and enemies alone don't necessarily make launching a new campaign worthwhile. I'm more excited about XCOM 2's next piece of DLC: Shen's Last Gift. That adds a new class with unique upgradeable weapons, armour and customisation features and is due out this summer. I'd be more tempted to wait, install both DLC packs and then start anew with a richer suite of new toys to play with.

Alien Hunters is the second piece of DLC for XCOM 2, following in the light and jaunty footsteps of Anarchy's Children.

Alien Hunters means open season for your squad, unleashing three new 'Ruler' aliens to hunt: the Archon King, Viper King and Berserker Queen. They arrive alongside a narrative mission, new weapons and armour, and a 'Hunter's Lodge' update to the Avenger's Armory.

Once the new mission has been beaten, the big game will show up at random in campaign missions and employ unique tactics to make your life miserable. If you fail to bring them down in time, they'll flee and come back to haunt you later. A breakdown of all the new firepower is up on the XCOM blog.

Alien Hunters will be out May 12, and if you don't own the Reinforcement Pack, it'll cost 8/$10.

Long War Studios, the team responsible for one of the most cherished XCOM: Enemy Unknown mods, has more tricks up its sleeves for XCOM 2. Not satisfied with the distinction of releasing the first XCOM 2 mod back on release date, the studio has a total of five more mods coming, publisher 2K announced today.

The first of those releases today, in the form of the Toolbox mod, which adds a bunch of useful toggles to the game s menu. Here s the list of what it does:

Configurable camera rotation in tactical missions

Damage variation

Random stats for new soldiers

Random stats on level-ups

UI that shows soldier stats in various menus

UI and other support for up to 12-soldier squads

Red Fog (injuries affect stats)

The other four mods are expected to roll out over the coming months . A soldier class construction kit is confirmed in the form of the Perk Pack mod, while the Laser Pack mod will add a new weapon tier, and is expected to release on the same day. Meanwhile, the Alien Pack mod will add ten new alien enemies, while the details on the fifth and final mod are yet to be revealed.

This follows the launch day mods, which included submachine guns and a new set of leadership perks, among other things. For a convenient list of all the best XCOM 2 mods released thus far both useful and ridiculous Chris Livingston has you sorted.

Earlier in March, PC Gamer hosted the PC Gamer Weekender; a weekend of PC games from... PC Gamer. Look, the title was pretty self-explanatory.

During the event a number of gaming luminaries were around to host talks and generally delight us all with their insight — like, for example, a few folks from the Star Citizen team.

Also present was creator of X-Com, Chaos and all-round strategy mastermind, Julian Gollop, who took to the stage to chat about the past, present and future of X-Com/XCOM. It is, as they say, very interesting.

Fashion is among the most important aspects of XCOM 2. There are definitely other major points of interest the fight to save humankind, the fight to keep your marksman (who is your mum) alive but making sure everyone looks good is arguably more important.

The new DLC pack, Anarchy's Children, is all about making your soldiers look better. It introduces over 100 new exotic customization options in the form of new hair styles, face paints, armor, decals, helmets, masks and more. The pack costs US$4.99 on its own, but also comes as part of the previously released Reinforcement Pack. It's out right now.

Meanwhile, a patch has been released to coincide with the DLC. In addition to making way for the Anarchy's Children garb, a new Zip Mode gameplay option has been introduced which increases the speed of certain animations for the impatient among us. There are also some other minor fixes, listed below. Check out the exhaustive patch notes here.

Players will now be able to press Load Anyways when loading a save when the mods used are not present

Fixed the sort order of available targets in shot HUD

Corrected an issue causing Grenadier s demolition to fail to update the target s cover status

Adds Zip Mode description text

The long-awaited XCOM 2 performance patch, which incorporates numerous fixes, balance changes, some much-needed optimizations, and the new Zip Mode gameplay option, is now live.

Zip Mode, as the name implies, will create a faster paced experience by speeding up animations and shortening some delays. The patch also fixes a problem with shadow rendering causing slowdowns, adds support for SLI and Crossfire, enables triple buffering to fix Vsync issues, and does all sort of other sexy-sounding things, like Removed MSAA options from default presets and adjusted autodetect to target 40FPS instead of 30FPS. That sounds important, right? (Seriously, it probably is.) Slow communications during online multiplayer that resulted in delays between actions, turns, and the end-game screen have also been taken care of.

The patch should install automatically, but you may need to restart Steam to make it happen. You'll also have to take a couple of extra steps if you're using any mods: Launch XCOM 2, then exit, then launch it again, to ensure it has internalized the patch to work with mods. Most mods should play nicely with the patch as-is, but Firaxis warned that some of them may need to be updated. 

Firaxis also recommended that players hit up the Auto Detect Graphics Settings option, because the patch won't automatically make any changes to the graphics settings.

A full breakdown of everything that's changed in the patch is available on Steam or at xcom.com.

We love XCOM 2's character creator. Not a day goes by that some intrepid sculptor doesn't press a tenuous representation of a minor celebrity or fictional character into service of the Earth—here's our gallery of attempts, somewhat outshone by Rowan Kaiser's entire cast of X-Men. Firaxis is quite happy to indulge our creative impulse, it seems, because the Anarchy's Children DLC, coming March 17, is all about taking these masterpieces and making them a little more... wasteland.

Personally, I like my global defence force to look smart while on the job—making keen sartorial choices under pressure is the mark of a true superhero—but the post-apocalypse is in vogue, I get it. Anarchy's Children contains 100 new thematic customisations, including hair styles, face paints, armor, lower face props, decals, helmets and masks.

It's the first of three pieces of DLC included in the Reinforcement Pack. The other two, Alien Hunters and Shen's Last Gift, are set to be rather more substantial, but if you just want to play dress up, you'll be able to buy Anarchy's Children separately for $5.