Making things better is the new photobooth mode, that allows you to take a squad pic after you finished the mission. Those new units range from slight reskins to bonafide new archetypes, which offer an exciting variety in an already quite sizeable enemy roster. The aliens also had their tactical arsenal expanded, with several units like the flamethrower-wielding Purifier or the psionically inclined Priest bolstering the ADVENT ranks. The faction operatives possess their own special class, giving you skills and abilities that differ from regular XCOM agents and further expand your tactical options. As your relationship improves, the factions start to send those soldiers to aid the war effort, providing you with an invaluable weapon when confronting the Chosen. The new factions feature extremely capable and powerful individuals, who have been fighting the alien regime for 20 years. Regardless if the Chosen comes to XCOM or XCOM goes to the Chosen, you will need to take them out at some point, and that’s another way your new clandestine friends can be put to good use. Which is a bad idea, since being attacked is the opposite of what you should be doing. Given the classified nature of the Resistance operations, the longer a soldier is imprisoned, the higher the chance of a Chosen finding out your location and launching an assault on the Avenger. War of the Chosen, however, takes it one step further, and the eponymous alien hunters go out of their way to kidnap and interrogate XCOM’s soldiers. When things really went south and a soldier got left behind during extraction in the base game, there was a chance they would be kidnapped, resulting in a rescue mission to bring back the imprisoned operative. Those covert operations take place as staff assignments or two man ops that play mostly offscreen, but it the mission goes south, you are given control of the squad and must fight them out of their predicament. You’ll need to run covert actions with the help of the aforementioned factions in order to accrue intel on the Chosen and locate their base of operations, and it often takes dozens of hours before you get the chance to storm their hidden stronghold.

Those guys make an exceptional job of making you hate them within the first 20 seconds.įinding them, however, is a fight into and unto itself.

Xcom 2 covert actions