Namely, they get a wrist-mounted combo rocket launcher and flamethrower, making them uniquely suited for dealing with the large groups of enemies who foolishly stand too close together. “On top of the seven redesigned soldier classes from the Perk Pack, Long War 2 also introduces the Technical class, which incorporates some of the heavy weapons from XCOM 2’s EXO Suits into your starting lineup. To fill all those slots, you can expect to find much more loot – I’ve seen as many as six drops in a single mission.
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Likewise, you start with the benefits of the Lock and Load and Quid Pro Quo continental bonuses, so every gun gets three mod slots and mods can be swapped out without destroying them.
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Each soldier also gets an armor vest by default that absorbs the first few points of damage without counting as a wound, and they’re much less likely to be killed outright, so you’ll often have a chance to save them without having to buy the “Stay With Me” upgrade in the Guerilla Tactics School. Right off the bat, you can take up to 12 soldiers on most missions, which represents a doubling of your potential available firepower per turn. Long War 2 is extremely tough, but the deck’s not completely stacked against us in that XCOM gets quite a few upgrades.
That’s created a lot of moments for me that make XCOM 2 feel a lot more like an insurgency against a vastly superior force – and I find I can’t complain about the change because it feels much more realistic than having a Skyranger constantly overhead, ready to extract me at any moment. If you need to haul your wounded soldiers back to the Avenger before they bleed out, or complete your objective by stealthing past patrols instead of killing everything in your path, getting out alive can become a harrowing last stand as a timer to extraction ticks down.
Oh, and when you get into trouble like that, calling for extraction is no longer instant. I’ve lost several squads to being unexpectedly surrounded. You still have a heads up for when they’ll deploy, but you have no indication as to where – though it’s generally right behind you at the worst possible time, and with some pretty heavy units. Meanwhile, enemy reinforcements have gotten much, much meaner. That’s a problem with the main game, too, but it’s often more pronounced here. Rushing in to get a clean shot can just as easily bring another five or six enemies down on your head before you’re ready for them. In my experience this balance change has been a good one in individual firefights because it reduces the dependency on explosives as a one-size-fits-all solution, though the increased number and size of enemy pods on the map tends to make flanking extremely risky. And with some often-aggressive turn timers on many of the mission types (including several new ones, like jailbreaks), getting bogged down in a firefight can be the difference between success and failure. That makes it much more difficult to push through entrenched enemies because you have to either bring up some heavier weaponry (such as a Grenadier with an anti-cover upgrade) to blast them out or flank them. Most standard-issue grenades will only damage the enemy hiding behind the object, so they’re still good for bombarding a position, but nowhere near as effective at quickly ending a fight. “The biggest shock to the system in moment-to-moment combat – on top of the much greater variety of Advent troop variants and their heavier weaponry – is no longer being able to depend on regular grenades to destroy enemy cover.