First Impressions: XCOM 2 out on switch! (but no multiplayer or daily challenges)
4My dreams have come true and XCOM 2 is finally out on the Nintendo Switch. Here are some of my first impressions and initial thoughts:
- The official game page (https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/xcom-2-collection-switch) says the file size is 6.5 GB. That's a lie. After downloading the whole game it's actually 24.3 GB. That's understandable and still impressive as the War of the Chosen expansion alone on PS4 is 32.15 GB. They should update the game page though so no one gets confused.
- There's no multiplayer. This is disappointing but still not unexpected since Firaxis has shown little to zero interest in supporting XCOM multiplayer in the past. The Borderlands Collection supports multiplayer up to 4 players, so it's hard to imagine that they would be able to easily port over an FPS's multiplayer but not a turn-based game's? It's a shame though since multiplayer XCOM is a blast when it works and if you can get past the bugs. My hope is that they're going to release multiplayer in a future update. If I know XCOM, my gut reaction says there's a "95% chance" of this happening, as in you're standing right in front of the guy with a 95% chance to hit and this should be easy, but no, you miss and the rest of the mission goes to hell. They still haven't added multiplayer for Civ 6, so that doesn't give much hope for a multiplayer through a software update.
- No daily challenges. The daily challenges were something added in war of the chosen where there were randomized daily missions and you could compare your score to everyone else in the world who completed the mission. While it wasn't perfect, encouraged luck of skill sometimes and occasionally had impossible conditions for victory, it was something fun that extended the life of the game beyond the single player campaign.
- The game seems to run smoothly (note that I'm playing in handheld mode all of the time) so far and the graphics look great. I didn't really notice any big differences between the graphics here and the PS4 version so far. The controls seem to work well for the switch and hopefully will result in less accidental actions that you didn't mean to take. This was kind of a problem with XCOM on Android and IOS with the touch screen interface. Also note that touchscreen controls aren't available in handheld mode, but I don't really miss it.
- The tutorial was kinda buggy. There were points were it seemed like the tutorial would get stuck and I couldn't take any more actions. Eventually by pressing a bunch of buttons and trying all sorts of combinations and random presses I was able to finish the tutorial. Hopefully it's just the tutorial and not the rest of the game.
- The Switch's built-in video capture feature doesn't work that lets you save the last 30 seconds of gameplay to a video clip. I'm sure they had to cut this feature to keep the game running smoothly so this is understandable. It's a shame though as it would have been fun to easily share XCOM 2 clips from my Switch.
- No tactical legacy pack. To be fair this DLC never came out for the other consoles either, but would have been nice to have.
- load times SUCCKKKKKKK
Anyway, despite my nitpicking, I'm very much looking forward to playing through the XCOM 2 campaign again!
UPDATE: the game does freeze occasionally but autosave lets me pick up again without losing too much progress. However, like on PS4, I am reluctant to start an ironman campaign because of the crashes and the possibility of losing an entire campaign to a bug and having starting over (which happened to me with War of the Chosen on PS4).
#xcom2 #switch
Other Videos By booben
Other Statistics
XCOM 2 Statistics For booben
There are 7,806 views in 39 videos for XCOM 2. There's close to 19 hours worth of content for XCOM 2 published on his channel, roughly 54.70% of the content that booben has uploaded to YouTube.