Thought that I might as well chip in my two cents, since I'm one vanilla campaign down and a third of a Long War 2 in.

Many Steam positive reviews tell you to discredit the negative reviews in some strange attempt at creating an in-group with you, the reader. That's not fair to the consumer, though, and I'd prefer to tell you to listen to the negative reviews. If you aren't open to the idea of timed missions in a turn-based strategy, where you're looking at 8 turns to defuse a bomb, you may want to skip this title. Because there's a lot of that in vanilla. Long War 2 alleviates this a bit by extending timers to 10-24 turns most of the time, but then that is offset by other timers introduced by Long War 2, such as how long it'll take to infiltrate and exfiltrate a mission.

I'd also say the "recommended reading" for this game would be at least watching a playthrough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within if you're not interested in actually completing it on your own. Some of the elements may be more sci-fi B-movie than "Jesus Christ, that's a giant naked mole rat on twelve lines of cocaine", but the gameplay is very similar and knowing what each enemy can throw at you is second to none in keeping your guys alive. After all, Sun Tzu once said, "It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."

So now you're thinking, "Gee whiz, headache, you dashing individual, you. First you're saying I may outright not like the game if I don't like a certain mechanic, and now you're saying I need to play other games to fully understand it? What gives? Where's the good part?"

Here's the good part.

What you get with XCOM 2 is a highly modular, streamlined experience. Despite my eldritch-possessed laptop being easily half a decade old, I can tell through the 10-30 frames per second I'm getting that the controls are tight and the gameplay fluid. Classes have synergy in both vanilla and Long War 2, abilities feel potent, and our lord and savior Overwatch still has its use (though it's been relegated to more of a supportive role than an all-in role). Weapon modification feels purposeful and can be tailored to each individual role of your troops. Being able to pick the class your rookie gets gives you a sense of autonomy over what used to be a largely in-the-air affair.

Oh right, I said modular, too.

XCOM 2 has both Steam Workshop and Nexus support, meaning you can get a slew of mods for all your needs. Want a harder game? A Better Advent and Long War 2 are there for you. Want an easier game? There's stuff for that, too! Want to look like your soldiers walked straight out of Metal Gear Solid 5? Titanfall? Fallout: New Vegas? XCOM: Enemy Unknown? Gears of War? An unholy mixture of all five? You do you, Commander. There's also various tweaks and fixes available, such as the one that shows whether your move will put an enemy in range or flank them (Gotcha!). I'm running somethhing like ninety mods that range from giving me the sultry tones of Sergeant Johnson from Halo as a voice for my boots on the ground to entirely changing the strategic gameplay.

If I were to rate things with numbers, I'd probably take into consideration the situational entertainment value of XCOM 2 weighed against its capable content and player-driven narrative. But I'm not good at numbers, so all you get is that.

EDIT: Now I'm halfway through that Long War 2 playthrough, and I realized a lot of these reviews (including mine) mention, but do not describe or review, Long War 2. Since it's strategically a different game, I'd say it's worth its own mini-review. If you're not interested in Long War 2, you can skip this last bit.

At six points in the base game, you are given a uniform upgrade to your most widely-used matériel. Either your weapons or your armor are upgraded, and while you can still choose to use previous tiers, there's no reason not to: you have an infinite amount of these new items at your disposal. Less-used items like grenades and specialty ammo still need to be produced randomly, but you often have the supplies necessary at your disposal.

Long War 2 removes these gamey stratifications and forces you to face the music of logistics. Each gun, each set of armor, and each utility need to be produced individually (with the exception of starter gear), and you will often not have the supplies to equip all your soldiers with your best items. This means you often have to weigh the difficulty of the mission against the skill of your troops to determine who gets the new guns and who gets the old model.

There’s also far more missions in Long War 2 – not just overall, but at a single time. This is managed by the infiltration system, which (flavor-wise) involves deploying your soldiers to a location where they observe enemy movements and wait for the ideal time to strike. This can take days on the strategic map (passed, as usual, by scanning) and is almost unavoidably necessary to avoid a complete squad wipe.

With each deployed squad requiring the equipment and infiltration time to accomplish their mission, you can begin to see the appeal (or lack thereof) for Long War 2. There’s a lot of changes, and not all of them are explained thoroughly. For example, I spend about as much time on the deployment menu as I do on the mission. You’ll need trial, error, and time to really get the feel for it, and if you can’t spend the hours and stay cool when things go up in flames, it may not be for you. However, if you’re looking for something more akin to a reversed Total War (i.e.: turn-based battles and real-time overworld) about a global insurgency, this is your mod.

I've had friends ask me before, "So standardheadache, you've logged quite a few hours in LOTRO, what do you think of it?" I'd ask the same: for an MMO that's been going for nearly 15 years, it's worth finding out whether it's a sunk-cost fallacy for the remaining 100k active players or whether there's still ample opportunity to hop on as a new player and have fun. With the advent of most of the game going F2P, it's worth taking the opportunity to review LOTRO to hopefully convince more people to try out this throwback to the golden age of MMOs.

And what a throwback it is. LOTRO was competing with Burning Crusade when it came out, and its first expansion was pitted against Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online on the market. Much of its gameplay reflects this, and it has been less modernized than WoW. However, it still fits the bill of what used to be called a “WoW clone”: racial traits that matter, class trait specs that change how you play the game, one class per character, and an emphasis on side quests alongside the main story. The leveling experience has been streamlined where the open world is no longer as dangerous as it used to be, but the story remains a solid way to level in the expansions.

How is the story? It's definitely not as monolithic as, say, FFXIV's, but it also doesn't suffer from making you the most important person in the world, either. Your importance peaks at “incredibly helpful stranger”; you aren't a chosen one or capable of more than the average person, you've just built a lot of trust with important people by starting at the bottom with disparate factions. Ultimately, you become a trusted hired hand, capable of doing things an insider can't or won't do. You are still subject to the cold, the shadow, and dread, all of which are mechanically reflected in gameplay.

Gameplay spans a lot. There's the metagaming aspect, where you customize your trait specs to best fit your desired solo and group roles (which may be different), and the actual hotkey-mashing, rotation-completing you know and love from these sorts of titles. Rotations are fairly concise; key abilities are unlocked via the trait tree for each spec, and there aren't many abilities that you actually use in combat. I usually have two hotbars dedicated to in-combat abilities; for my level 130, two and a half. Each class gets utility skills that are rarely used in combat, and therefore can be relegated to a non-hotkeyed hotbar without much issue.

The classes themselves are par for the course for a WoW clone, with some exceptions like Captain and Minstrel. As previously mentioned, all classes are capable of filling multiple roles, and often have a sustained dps role suitable for soloing as well as a more group-oriented role. Main dps classes may have an ability to lose aggro, while even offtanks have ways to pull aggro. It's recommended to pick a race that complements your class; elves, for example, have a trait that increases bow damage, so it's best to have an elf as a hunter rather than a dwarf for group content. However, picking offmeta can open up unique opportunities for open-world content; hobbits aren't the best for group content ever since hope consumables were introduced, but free stealth and playing possum on any class can get you out of sticky situations and save on repair bills if you aren't a VIP (or if you're a lazy VIP like me and don't pick up your bonus in major towns every couple of days when the VIP consumable resets).

As for the community, it's something that hasn't changed much over time. When I started playing as a wee lad, given the lifetime subscription to keep me quiet and out of trouble, I was never bullied for being a child and never had predators make moves on me. My guild's coleaders were married, and many of them were in their twenties to forties. Now, the average player is between 30 and 60, and my current guild's coleaders are also married, and likely in their fifties. World chat has some definite dad energy.

tl;dr: do I think it's worth it? At risk of sounding biased since I've been with it since year one, yeah, I'd say so. At the very least, it's far more free content than most MMOs these days, and the “grind” to get microtransaction currency has been substantially reduced in importance, so you can spend more time actually playing the game. If you find you can't launch the game through Steam, try downloading the missing DirectX files manually. If that doesn't work, you can always try downloading the launcher through the main website; most LOTRO players don't use the Steam version.