A sequel to 2014's Xenonauts, Xenonauts 2 continues your adventure as the commander of an elite military force that is trying to fend off an alien invasion.
Although the name might make you think this is a sequel, Xenonauts 2 is something more akin to a side story set in a similar universe. Decades of interference from aliens have stopped the Cold War from ending when it should have. War between the United States and the Soviet Union seems all but inevitable — and you've got to deal with some aliens, to boot.
From the Xenonauts 2 Steam Store page:
Xenonauts 2 is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organization defending our planet from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic layer allows you to coordinate the defense of the planet, using your interceptors to shoot down UFOs and researching captured artifacts to learn about your foes and unlock new combat equipment to use on your missions.
Xenonauts 2 is the sequel to the acclaimed Xenonauts: Strategic Planetary Defence Simulator, and like its predecessor it draws heavy inspiration from the classic X-Com strategy games from the 1990s. It is not a chronological successor to first Xenonauts, but rather an updated portrayal of similar events - the action takes place in an alternate timeline where decades of alien interference has prevented the end of the Cold War, leaving NATO and the Soviet Bloc teetering on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war. Can you hold humanity together long enough to end the alien threat forever?
Key Features
- TACTICAL COMBAT: Xenonauts 2 delivers tense turn-based combat across realistic, varied and fully-destructible 3d battlefields. The combat is just as deep as it was in the first Xenonauts - but now you have a wider variety of missions to tackle, a larger selection of equipment to do it with, and more deadly enemies to face in battle!
- STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: The strategic layer of Xenonauts 2 will be remixed and rebalanced, giving the player more interesting decisions to make. New concepts such as regional infiltration levels and strategic operations that allow your organization to intervene directly in funding regions have been introduced - but we're still experimenting with these. One of the major goals of our Early Access period is to work with our community to figure out how we can integrate them into the existing Geoscape mechanics to give the player the best gameplay experience, so don't be shy with your feedback!
- RESEARCH TREE: Xenonauts 2 has an even more extensive research tree than its predecessor, allowing the player to unlock new battlefield equipment and aircraft whilst slowly revealing the intentions and origins of the invaders. There is now more varied and exotic equipment for you to play with, and players now have the ability to further develop technology and equipment they have already researched - provided they can spare the scientists!
- PERSISTENT SOLDIERS: Soldiers in Xenonauts 2 are persistent from mission to mission, improving their stats and gaining ranks with combat experience - but their deaths are always only a single bad move away. You will grow to care about the brave men and women under your command as they slowly grow from green rookies into hardened veterans, but that only makes it more painful when their heroic tale is cruelly cut short by a burst of plasma fire...
