Squad tactics is a niche genre. One that somehow keeps coming back every few years just to go back into hibernation for a long time. It’s one of my favorite types of strategy games. Handpicking soldiers, navigating strained resources, fighting back against a global conspiracy, and missing point-blank shots all contribute to stressful but worthwhile campaigns that feel incredibly earned. With the apparent death of XCOM at Firaxis, there haven't been many contenders that try to reach that level of quality.
One attempt was the 2014-released Xenonauts by Goldhawk Interactive, an indie take on the matter inspired by the hardcore 90s classics. I never got my hands on that, especially because of my favor towards having a little less suffering. However, its sequel, Xenonauts 2 by the same developer, is hitting version 1.0 after almost three years of early access, allowing me to find out if it satisfies my hunger for a good turn-based strategy action game.
Xenonauts 2 is very much built on the bones of those classics, favoring fragile soldiers over hero-like secret agents. There are multiple bases to manage across the world while barely scraping by. All of it is mixed with quality-of-life changes to smooth out the rough edges and hopefully make this a modern experience. But is that enough to make this a must-play strategy game? Read on and find out in my full review of Xenonauts 2.
War of the Worlds
The alternate history timeline of Xenonauts 2 takes place in 2009, but it's wildly different from our own. Some sort of powerful party is forcing the entire world to be under tension, slowly pulling it towards a world war. For once, the conspiracies are true. It’s definitely aliens doing it. Dimension-hopping beings from alternate earths, to be specific. The only force fighting back happens to be the Xenonauts, a secret organization that’s tasked with taking down aliens, co-conspirators, and their bases.
Being this force’s commander is no simple task. From the start, it’s a never-ending uphill battle against a foe that has a massive technological lead on humans. While bleak, the trick is that there are plenty of humans to throw at the problem. Outnumbering the aliens until scientific advancements slowly come through becomes the only viable tactic. If this initial stage of the game passes without everything breaking into chaos and annihilating the world, the aliens give up the charade and go public with their intentions to conquer it. This stage unites the world’s regions against the common enemy, finally offering funding and assistance to the Xenonauts program. There’s now some leeway for expansion, leading to more bases, additional scientists, engineers, and maybe even reverse-engineered alien tech.
However, if the commander (in this case, the player) doesn't do enough to calm down the panicked states over the ongoing alien attacks, they can pull funding and go dark. After a couple of those, it’s game over. The constant state of panicked reactions is strangely fun.
Considering this is a sequel, I expected this to be a second war of some sort set after the series’ first entry. But Xenonauts 2 turned out to be a new starting point without any baggage, treating this as yet another version of the invasion story. This makes the game a valid jumping-off point for anyone looking for a turn-based strategy experience without prior knowledge. If you’re looking for a story with cutscenes or cinematic moments, though, there is almost nothing here on that front. The campaign story moves forward with missions in special maps like alien bases and spacecrafts or by doing simple research tasks. I did miss having a fun story campaign like the ones seen in XCOM 2 or Gears Tactics.
The Uphill Battle
Like I said, even the most well-armored soldiers may as well be made out of paper mache if they simply run out into the open. Aliens have extraordinarily powerful weapons, and they have hit reaction shots that I can only dream of my soldiers accomplishing. Every single action, from turning and reloading to preparing a reaction shot, takes Time Units to accomplish. It’s a pool that only replenishes after every turn for each combatant in the field, and each action has a specific cost.
Want to run forward and shoot an alien? Go ahead, but don’t expect to get to cover afterwards. Want to pick up a downed ally and run away? Just picking the body up may have spent all the points already. Want to make sure the entire team doesn’t get blown up from a random corner next turn? Better make sure to leave enough action points on the soldiers to take automatic reaction shots during the alien’s turn. Thankfully, Xenonauts 2 offers an easy-to-use preview system to make sure that every move and action afterward does exactly what I want to do. For instance, holding shift after scheduling a move shows the chance of hitting a shot from that new position and just how much Time Units the soldier would have left. It’s an immensely helpful system.
One thing to remember is that enemy units go by the same rules. So, making them waste their Time Units on moving past my smoke grenades or run into the line of sight of my perfectly positioned snipers is quite satisfying. The types of aliens that come to fight advances as the war progresses. I thought I had it bad when the mind control units started appearing, but it’s the robotic heavy hitters that can blow up entire countrysides (including my troops) in one shot.
The battles can take place in open environments with barely any cover, busy convenience stores with multiple floors, crashed spacecrafts with maze-like innards, and so many more variants. Once I got used to slowing my pace and checking every corner with paranoia, the methodical gameplay started to make sense. Even on missions with time limits or critical objectives, hurrying up is an easy way to bring a death sentence to everyone. On higher difficulties, it sometimes just makes sense to let an entire region go dark rather than lose the war. Outside of some pain points I will get to later, the turn-based ground gameplay brings a lot of entertainment thanks to the high stakes.
It’s not all about ground missions though. To keep the world safe, a well-stocked base or two is a necessity. It’s all about money and resource management, which adds another layer of stress. I focused on increasing the amount of funding I receive every month as my primary goal at first, then working on faster research and weapon building. It feels earned when the first laser shotgun I made after over a dozen missions manages to wipe out an alien.
Each piece of new armor means one more hit a soldier can survive later, and producing a better airplane means I can deploy a small army into a battlefield to increase my chances of winning. Even the recruitment and training of new forces to replace the recovering ones (or the ones I’ve lost) needs to be properly maintained. I once had to go back hours’ worth of gameplay with a past save point because I simply ran out of uninjured people to deploy on a critical mission. All in all, both in the ground combat and the base management, it’s all about taking the right kinds of risks at the right times.
Pain Points
One mechanic I appreciated, at least at first, was the UFO Delegation system. It works by offering a skip option for missions that appear more than a couple of times in a month of in-game time. At first, I was pleasantly surprised to see this skip button being offered with a much-needed monetary reward by the government that will be handling the alien whacking duties instead of my soldiers. There's a catch though. Opting to go for these missions anyway will also give a heavy penalty to an incredibly valuable resource (Operation Points) that is only given once a day in the global view. Taking that decision meant weeks of built-up resources wiping out in an instant just because I simply wanted to play a mission that looked interesting.
The option to skip battles is valuable and a much-needed feature for these types of games. It’s easy to burn out from campaigns by going on back-to-back heavy fights. However, the attached downside of losing one of the most important resources in the game for taking these battles is an odd mechanic to say the least. Why not simply offer skipping as an option without a downside? The resources hit, especially when I need materials and alien loot to power my projects, feels harsh and unnecessary. Alongside all the difficulties, I love the feeling of closing in on the technology gap and getting breathing room thanks to hard-won battles. While there could be a balance problem here, there could have been other ways to reduce players from grinding resources and powering up too quickly. One thing to note is that while this UFO Delegation system is enabled by default on all difficulty modes, it can be disabled by making a custom difficulty when starting a campaign. But this cannot be done mid-playthrough.
There were some other issues I had during my time with Xenonauts 2 too. One of these was what I can only describe as a bug with the grenades system, which would show a 100% chance of hitting with a valid trajectory but would routinely bounce back and blow up on my soldier’s face instead. I am pretty used to 99% chance shots missing, thanks to my past experiences with the genre, but 100% hit chances being misses are not what I signed up for.
Moreover, almost every mission ends up being ‘kill every enemy’ experience. Outside of the occasional ‘capture enemy alive’ or ‘rescue civilians’ missions, everything boils down to tactical exterminations. I think the classics were like this, but why not give some variety all these years later? I also wish the art style had a direction rather than looking so sterile and generic. Even the 90s classics had their charm with the 2D sprites. But here, every unit and prop ends up looking the same. I’m glad the UI is clear and simple to understand, and it’s hard to miss where every unit is positioned, but a little more personality in the art direction would have made me more attached to my forces like in rival games.
Conclusion
Xenonauts 2 succeeds in its mission to bring the hardcore squad tactics experience to more modern standards while also giving its own small spins on tactical and strategy mechanics. The resource management and turn-based combat here may be at the most brutal I have seen in a long time, where even the easiest difficulty playthroughs can run aground quickly and easily with a small amount of mismanagement. The aliens are a terrifying presence in battlegrounds. These are supposed to be dimensional hopping mega-brained conquerors after all. Thanks to this, all the research, looting, and barrel scraping for funds that need to be done to go up against these monsters is very satisfying, where even the smallest wins in a corner of the world can feel like a great accomplishment for humanity.
There is a distinction to be made here though. There's the usual unfairness seen in these types of games, where an uphill battle against highly advanced aliens is to be expected. However, there are also weird design decisions and buggy behavior that bring out the bad kind of unfairness. I can see the merits behind the UFO Delegation system and allowing players to skip battles, but its downsides for actually playing the game seem very heavy-handed. Things like the uninteresting art style, wonky grenade functionality, and lack of mission variety further drag down the experience that has been in development for so long.
In the end, Xenonauts 2 gets a tentative recommendation from me. There’s plenty of tough strategy gameplay here for fans of the genre if they can look past its rough edges. Brand-new players may want to use the custom difficulty option to smooth out that difficulty curve. Also, once official modding support rolls through, who knows what the community will turn the game into.
Xenonauts 2 is releasing on April 2, 2026, on PC via Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store for $39.99.
This review was conducted on a pre-release PC copy of the game provided by Hooded Horse.
0 Comments
Load the comments and join the conversation!
Read the comments, ask the editors questions, show respect and join the conversation.