“When we made XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we wanted to establish that we weren’t watering the series’ challenge down. While the modern XCOM games let you save before and after every decision, the real way to play is to make a decision and commit to the reaction of your choices,” says Garth DeAngelis, the Senior Producer on XCOM 2. XCOM is a game about making tough decisions and extreme consequence. “The basic ideas behind Ironman are a core part of the XCOM series history. They can spend hours levelling up and kitting out their XCOM soldiers, only to see them wiped out in minutes due to lousy tactical planning on the player’s part – and there’s nothing they can do to save them.įiraxis on its love letter to the original game This means if they put a foot wrong – by, say, moving through the fog of war too quickly and finding their squad surrounded – there’s no earlier save file they can go back to. This file, incidentally, will be overwritten with every action the player takes in a mission. Not only are enemies faster, nastier and far more vicious, but players only have access to one save file.

The hardest of the hardcore believe this is the way XCOM is meant to be played and the mode requires total commitment before one starts it. Even the greenest XCOM player knows they have to take their time, exercise caution and above all else, save their game as often as possible.īut even the most battle-hardened XCOM players think twice before they tackle any of these games on Ironman mode. On lower difficulty levels, the game’s challenging enough players who rush into battle without guarding every corner and planning out their attack soon find their soldiers turned into paint. In the pantheon of difficult games, 2K’s XCOM series is something of a rite of passage for players. Continuing our new PS Blog series looking at the best examples of harder difficulties in PlayStation games – and to mark the recent release of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen – we talk to Firaxis about its franchise’s toughest difficulty.

Xcom 2 save scumming