2691

I seem to recall there’s a setting when you start the game that doubles it or something. Not sure if that can be set once you’re in campaign.

My suggestion would be to sort of ignore all the nagging if you can because opportunities to turn back the clock will come up that make it so it’s not nearly as problematic as it’s made out to be by the constant alerts.

By mid-late campaign I’ve managed to get the clock back to zero.

2692

I just beat the game on normal. Which is a big deal to me because I never beat games anymore! I always get bored or frustrated in my old age. On normal difficulty it was difficult enough, but never to the point I wanted to quit (I did save scum though). The first Chosen mission was rough, the last was incredibly easy.

I loved the tactical part of the game, but I can’t say much for the strategic map. On my first attempt at the game the map was confusing, and I never did really figure it out in my second play-through either. I understood it just enough to get through it. Of course I never really tried either, it really didn’t seem very interesting. I seem to remember the original games map being much more interesting and important. This game you can fumble through it on normal.

I never did like the timed missions, but it was never really a problem either. Only in the very early missions.

I kind of want to start a new game, but I really need to move on to something else in my backlog.

2693

Ok. I got this on sale and it’s quickly grabbed all my gaming time. Not a fan of the game’s cheap tricks to artificially inflate challenge (already discussed by many of you) but it’s XCOM so of course I love it and I’ll keep playing.

19 hours into my first campaign I could see I was falling too quickly behind the power curve so I started a new one that’s going much better.

Question: in the older games I recall being able to target anything I wanted, even a blank area or a building. Does XCOM2 have this forced fire feature? I could not find it, and it is something that could be useful.

2694

Some abilities (rocket fire etc) can be freely aimed, but rifle fire is limited to specific targets .

2695

Thanks for confirming. Once again the old games show up the younger siblings.

2696

Indeed. Don’t forget that you can play the old games in openxcom, which fixes all the bugs and provides many quality-of-life enhancements, mods for new maps and balance improvements etc.

2697

Why would you want to though? There is no point in shooting at random. They don’t clear obstacles.

2698

Most of the time I wouldn’t need to, and I can see how the interface restricting direct fire targeting to only actual enemies might have eliminated instances where a player could fat finger a shoot command.

But I’ll come across occasions where a couple targets will be taking cover around an explosive object like a car, and being able to shoot the car would have been nice, to trigger an explosion and damage the enemies.

As @Bateau noted, I have seen that grenades and rockets can do such things and there is actually an achievement for blowing up a roof or destructible platform where an alien is standing and dropping him to his death. That’s actually pretty satisfying.

2699

You actually can target many exploding objects (gas pumps, propane tanks, etc), which will explode immediately when shot. Cars behave differently because they usually delay a turn before exploding. They can receive a little damage and do nothing, a little more and they smoke and spark (these will explode next turn), or more and they will explode immediately. Can’t target them with ordinary shots, though.

If you play with War of the Chosen, there is a particular skill available that amplifies damage from environmental explosions, and units with that skill are able to directly target cars with it. There is also a heavy skill (Demolition) that lets you destroy cover, and it can be used to detonate cars enemies are hiding behind.

2700

Cool, so can you target those objects with a direct fire weapon like pistol or rifle? I couldn’t figure out how to do that.

2701

Yeah, you select the shoot action, and then you can tab through available targets, which will include the propane tanks, etc.

2702

Thanks… too bad about targeting the cars. I’ll pay closer attention next time I’m in a battle with gas tanks and such.

2703

That is the Reaper and it is called Remote Start. They also can get another ability that increases the Remote Start damage. Also, the Reaper’s remote start does not reveal them, so I will run my Reaper around the map looking for enemy pods near vehicles and blowing them up.

Another fun thing to do is have a Psi soldier with the ability to remote detonate grenades and rockets on enemy troops. It is very satisfying to do that to MEKs since they are always dropping rockets on me.

2704

Apparently this is making its way to the Nintendo Switch.

2705

That’s unexpected. I’ve not heard good things about the console versions so far and didn’t think the switch had the juice to run XCOM 2. I’ll still probably buy it.

2706

I’m trying to have hope but yeah… the Xbox One and PS4 versions had some real issues by all accounts. I don’t know how cleaned up they are now. Apparently the weak CPU’s on consoles really caused issues.

I guess my only hope is that the dust has settled on the product and they can apply some lessons learned.

2707

Couldn’t say what it was like on release, but xcom 2 runs fine now on non-pro PS4. Better than on my geriatric PC anyway.

2708

XCOM 2 performance has also improved massively on PC. It was terrible at release. The GOG version (at least) runs smooth as butter on my older system.

2709

The expansion largely fixed the issues, so assuming the Switch version is based on that it should be fine, although I have a hard time imagining playing it in handheld mode.

2710

How are the load times on PS4?