Then, in the final mission, after decimating three pods of aliens with the Hunter’s rifle and a devastating ability that gives another shot with each successful kill, she secured the campaign’s final, winning shot-a cross-map demolition of the last key enemy as an insurmountable force was bearing down on her squad. But here, against that aggravating (but well-written) edgelord of a character, it felt so good. In another context, that might sound dishonorable. As a Colonel-the highest rank of XCOM 2 fighter-she killed the Hunter for good, with an Overwatch shot as he tried to run away from a fight. On another, she met the Chosen Hunter again and dueled him eye-to-eye, sharpshooter against sharpshooter, coming out on top. On one, an op that forced me to take a severely underleveled squad out into the field, she watched two rookies bite the dust in the face of a particularly brutal robot, and saved three others that have become a kind of “Next Generation” to my set of overleveled original characters. I sent her out on covert actions with a rookie medic, slowly leveling them up together until they bonded (another personalizing mechanic added in War of the Chosen), and occasionally sending her out on missions. The rest of Brigitte’s story is probably fairly predictable, but that’s what made it so enjoyable for me to play through. So when she leveled up again, I expected to have to spend a few minutes thinking of a good one-the one this clutch sniper deserved.īut then War of the Chosen decided on Brigitte “The Truth” Martine, and I was forced to consider the fact that we may be closer to sentient AI than we think. These nicknames are sometimes decent, sometimes mediocre, and sometimes just nonsensical. Now, in XCOM, when soldiers rank up to Sergeant, they get nicknamed. She’d faced the Hunter and come out on top this was her destiny. After that mission, when Brigitte Martine ranked up from rookie to squaddie and became a sharpshooter, it felt fitting. ![]() He set up shop in the back of a long tunnel map, forcing me to reposition every turn with tracking shots, and while this particular Chosen is probably the least challenging of the three to handle, he still added to the mission’s overriding theme. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mission either-the Chosen Hunter, one of the expansion’s three special boss aliens, modeled after the game’s sharpshooter class-showed up a few turns after my squad broke concealment. In a series notorious for disastrous misses on 99% chances, she barely missed a shot. So I tried again, and again, and again, taking progressively riskier shots instead of putting her into Overwatch. But she hit her first shot-a thing rookies, pre-leveling up, pre-weapon mods, pre-upgrades-never seem to do. As the only rookie on a squad of, at that point, relative aces, I expected her to be the weak link. ![]() I’d engaged with the one system that still keeps me so preternaturally invested in War of the Chosen: its massive array of character-customization options, and the way it uses those to bring sets of proc-gen, randomly-generated characters to life.Īfter giving Brigitte her bandana, which meshed with the mostly-black color scheme she’d come in with, we set out on the mission. But she wasn’t one, so I spent a couple of minutes deciding on alternate headgear-giving her a hood and a bandanna that showed only her eyes-and, in doing so, I got a bit attached. I recruited her as a rookie, the lowest rank of XCOM soldier, with no abilities and just a basic rifle, and, before adding her to her first mission, saw that her loadout included one of the masks worn by an in-game faction known as the Reapers. Even Into the Breach, which I sunk fifty hours into this spring and love dearly as an engine of beautifully choreographed battles, couldn’t persuade me to give strategy games another try.īut now I’m in the position of having lost weeks of my life to the modern XCOM series: first to XCOM: Enemy Unknown in May, and now to XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. And to explain why, first, I need to tell you about Brigitte “The Truth” Martine.īrigitte Martine is a member of my now-massive roster of soldiers in War of the Chosen: a deadeye sharpshooter who joined my resistance about halfway through my current campaign. I’ll occasionally play an hour of Fire Emblem: Awakening and mildly enjoy myself, but not enough to dust off my 3DS with any regularity, and nowhere near enough to persuade myself that I’ve come around on the genre. I’m not usually a fan of tactics games I bounced off of Civ a long time ago, couldn’t make it past the tutorial of Frozen Synapse, and have largely avoided the genre as a unit since.
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