10 years after its released, is XCOM 2 still a good game or not?

Released in 2016, XCOM 2 quickly established itself as one of the most recognizable modern turn-based strategy games. As the sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it pushed tactical gameplay into a more cinematic and high-stakes direction, combining squad management, base building, permadeath, and procedural encounters into a tightly interconnected system.

At the time, few strategy games delivered such an intense sense of consequence. Every decision—from positioning a soldier to deciding which technology to research—felt meaningful and often irreversible. The game excelled at creating emergent narratives: heroic last stands, disastrous ambushes, and miraculous comebacks all unfolded naturally through its systems. For many players and designers, XCOM2 became a defining reference point for modern tactical design and a benchmark for tension-driven gameplay.

However, beneath its innovation lies one of the game's most controversial aspects: its randomness and probability system. The RNG mechanics in XCOM2 have long been criticized for feeling inconsistent or even deceptive. When the game presents a 50% chance to hit, players intuitively interpret that as a coin flip. In theory, half of those shots should land. Yet in practice, many players experience repeated misses at crucial moments, creating the impression that the displayed probabilities cannot be trusted.

This disconnect between expectation and outcome is where frustration begins. When players miss several high-percentage shots in a row, it doesn’t feel like statistical variance—it feels like the system itself is flawed. In game design, one of the worst possible outcomes is making the player feel foolish or misled. If the interface communicates a clear probability but the results repeatedly contradict player intuition, trust in the system erodes quickly. Combined with the game’s harsh early difficulty and permanent character loss, these misses can feel devastating rather than dramatic. Losing multiple soldiers due to a chain of unlucky outcomes may leave players feeling that failure came not from poor strategy, but from an unfair system.

So why do these misses happen so often? The answer lies less in broken probability and more in how humans perceive randomness. True randomness does not distribute results evenly in the short term. A 50% chance does not guarantee one hit for every miss; it simply means that over a very large number of attempts, results will average out. In smaller sample sizes—like a single mission—streaks of bad luck are statistically normal. However, players rarely experience randomness over thousands of trials. Instead, they remember clusters of failure, especially when those failures carry heavy consequences. So, from the developers' perspective, yes, you are doing the right thing; there's nothing wrong with using an RNG in the game's combat randomness system. However, from the players' perspective, that is a big NO! It makes the player feel like a fool. No matter how good you get in this game, your attacks still can miss and hit the dirt behind your enemies. This can seriously damage the willingness of the players to continue playing this game.

To be fair, many strategy games handle failure probability in ways that feel clearer and more respectful to the player. Into the Breach almost completely removes hit-chance randomness and instead focuses on deterministic outcomes, letting players see exactly what will happen each turn. Failure comes from planning mistakes rather than invisible dice, which makes losses feel fair and educational. Meanwhile, Fire Emblem: Three Houses uses a “true hit” system where displayed hit rates are slightly adjusted behind the scenes to match player expectations, reducing the frustration of repeated low-probability misses. Even Darkest Dungeon, a game built on brutal randomness, communicates risk through consistent systems like stress and afflictions, ensuring that when things go wrong, players understand why. Compared to these approaches, XCOM2’s strict adherence to visible percentages without expectation management often makes its randomness feel harsher than it actually is.

However, looking back nearly a decade later, XCOM2 stands as a bold and influential experiment in tactical design. Its willingness to embrace uncertainty, emotional stakes, and systemic storytelling has inspired countless strategy and roguelike titles that followed. While its RNG system remains debated, its ambition and innovation helped redefine what modern turn-based strategy games could be. XCOM2 is frustrating, it may feel unfair, and it may occasionally test the player’s patience—but as a forward-thinking design that shaped the genre and influenced a generation of developers.

I wouldn't say it is a perfect game, but its resource management, squad customization, and the HQ development system still amazed me after a decade. These designs were such a pioneer 10 years ago, making this game important, but still have a lot to improve on.