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The edge is taken off a little because Rulers have will often knock soldiers unconscious rather than kill them outright, but they’re still absolutely vicious to fight and will very likely inflict casualties. These are by far the nastiest enemies XCOM has ever faced. The Berserker Queen gave me the most trouble. You have to think about which soldier to move first, because whoever’s closest to the monster is probably going to have a bad time. Overwatch isn’t useful because it’s immediately triggered, and usually invokes an aim penalty. Outflanking them is impossible, because you moving means they move immediately afterward.
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As someone who’s beaten the campaign on Commander difficulty with Iron Man enabled, these Ruler aliens had me resorting to save-scumming again to figure out how to counter an enemy who can kill my soldiers in the middle of my turn.
#XCOM 2 ALIENS FOR FREE#
Suddenly time isn’t frozen while you perform actions like reloading or moving to cover - every time you do anything (except for free actions like Lightning Hands) the Ruler has a chance to wreck you. When a Ruler shows up, I feel like I’m playing a separate turn-based tactics game within every turn of this. That makes them survivable, but learning to fight them is like learning to walk all over again.Įvery time you do anything, the Ruler has a chance to wreck you. That’d be absurdly damage-spongy, except these aliens are cleverly built as multi-stage battles: they’ll retreat off the map when you knock off a certain amount of their health (which doesn’t regenerate) to return at random in a later mission.
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These three beefed-up variations on the Viper, the Berserker, and the Archon have terrifyingly powerful abilities and multi-row health bars that dwarf even the Sectopod. Fighting them takes some entirely new tactical thinking, and some new weaponry, which makes this DLC a net positive even though it creates some balance and replayability questions.Īfter being triggered by a tense story mission that both partially answered a lingering question about XCOM lore and presented a surprising type of fight that hadn’t been seen yet in XCOM 2, Ruler aliens crash the party in random missions (even those with timed objectives) to make XCOM’s job much more difficult. This DLC pack brings in three new major enemies that don’t just soak up more damage, they tilt fundamental concepts of combat in their favor enough to threaten even experienced commanders. Just when I felt I’d gotten a handle on using the complex rules of XCOM 2’s combat to my advantage, XCOM 2: Alien Hunters has gone and turned them against me.
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