Recent reviews by Cyber Bully

Fantastic rough gem. Bathe in the real life pleasures of finishing a roll of film, looking at your shots, and realizing you only took one that's worthwhile. I have some minor complaints about the polish, but I understand the limitations of a small team. I'd love for the developer to revisit the systems here with a larger budget.

Quick wishlist patch:
Make the sliders permanent between shots so I don't have to reapply them for each frame.

If you're a fan of XCOM you should play the Tactical Legacy Pack. It's the basis for this game in that it's a more streamlined XCOM experience. However, it has much better writing and gameplay. If you're new to the series, but interested, you should buy XCOM 2 and the Tactical Legacy Pack. Then play the main game when you're done.

Stop here unless you want to read all of my complaints and suggestions with the game

My issue with this game is -not- because I wanted XCOM 3. I understand that this is meant to be a smaller game and I can respect that. A better game than Chimera Squad is absolutely within reach but the choices they made when making it are frustrating. Breaching isn't fun, tactically involved, or interesting. You pick a buff or a debuff and attempt to kill everyone in the room. If you succeed you do it again, if you fail you are sometimes punished by recieving shots on characters who assumed poor cover because you don't get to pick where they go. The story is lame (i'll rant about this at the bottom if you care to read). The characters are written poorly (why does everyone have to make a joke constantly?). Lastly I don't feel it added anything novel or interesting to the series.

It says a lot about this game that two very basic and popular mods from XCOM 2 (make utility items available and turn the reticule icon above enemies heads yellow if you're moving to flank them) didn't make it into this game. Why even bother making a new game if you're not going to attempt an improvement over the last one?

*Story gripes:
All XCOM games contain themes of overcoming adversity. Beating insurmountable odds not due to better gear or tons of support, but by outplaying enemies with tactical skill. In CS you play as a mildly underfunded sector of XCOM working as *not cops* for a diverse city with lots of aliens. There is no extreme adversity. The fear in this game is that if you let criminals ravage a neighbourhood then the occupants wont like the XCOPS. How about social tension? It's only been 5 years since a war with aliens and you have a team full of them? Nah generally everyone's cool by now. They do throw in some minor allusions to racial tensions that are overplayed and have been done better elsewhere. Ok well how about the tensions between characters with a chance for character development? Each of the different species were being controlled by the elders right? well not that I encountered at least. Everyone seems cool with one another. This concept was started with the reapers and the skirmishers and I would have liked to have seen it expanded here.

A stronger story could have been this: The chief (YOU) police officer of the diverse city 31 has to form a team to deal with the rising crime an tensions between the different factions in the city. They were all left behind after the elders departed and the war ended. Humans still view them warily and there is common infighting among those trapped in the city. If you fail to enact order the city might tear itself apart and the survivors might start a new war with the rest of the planet. You do not have XCOM behind you. You are underfunded. If you cannot prove your worth to the mayor you will lose funding. Over time the soldiers, representing different species, will form bonds with each other.

That is what I would have liked to see. Perhaps I can look forward to such things in another possible spinoff or for XCOM 3.
Thanks for reading my text wall. Feel free to comment if you think i'm dumb or if the story became more interesting later on.

A surprising challenge with hectic gameplay involving facing increasingly insurmountable odds.

Shotgun OP

It adds very little in both quality and quantity.
Mod support should have been a free update and locking it behind this paywall is wrong.

Buy it on sale if at all.

Like any VN you get to wallow in the pointless conversations of imaginary people.

However, for the low low price of $19.99 you can help some venezuelan weebs not starve.

5/5 I like it

XCOM 2 improves on EU in almost every way. The core gameplay is of course very simmilar but all of the changes lead to a much fresher feeling game. The classes each feel uniquely powerful and, for better or for worse, almost all of the enemies from EU have been buffed. Things like the buffs from hacking (speed boosts, invulnerability, etc.) add an enjoyable amount of manuverability in basic combat.

However,

This game runs like utter trash. It's an absolute slideshow while navigating between the ship and the map. Load times are sluggish and painful. Bugs are very frequent and as a result anyone who wants to play iron man with the chance that their campaign could break at any moment is a crazy person.

When they finally whip out the carnuba wax and finish polishing their game I can reccomend it. Until then hands off.

EDIT
-Specs-
OS: Win 10
CPU: i5 4570 3.2 GHz
Ram: 8 GB DDR3
GPU: GTX 770

The in game settings were a custom set somewhere below medium. Ambient Occlusion, AA and the extras were all disabled. From that alone transitions would occasionally slow to <1FPS while generally being <7FPS.

For anyone still interested I would highly reccomend following this guide. http://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=616682629
With an emphasis on adjusting poolsize (my VRAM cache was a useless default value of 10MB) and threadedshadercompilethreshold to values that actually reflect your system.

FPS is now generally 60 while dipping down to 25 for some transitions.

If you enjoyed Tomb Raider 2013, then for better or worse this is more of the same. It does feel a bit short, although the added endurance mode helps. For me, the high score trials have no appeal and the whole card system feels very unnecessary. Other than that it's still pretty fun. Try to buy the game + all the DLC on sale. It's good, but not $100 CDN good.

Rating:
9 tombs out of why couldn't there be more tombs

The cut together remains of what could have been the game of the year, of all years.
5/5
Pray DD2 gets made/well funded.

The platforming is beyond unnoteworthy, but the combination of the combat, artstyle, soundtrack and above all atmosphere more than make up for it. If you are interested in a truly intriguing story, with a fairly satisfying end, and a variety of plesaing visuals then this game is for you, as long as you can stomach some fairly boring platforming.

PS: There are ways to not only unlock all DLC content, but also play the first Alice game through this one.