If you hurl yourself over to the Epic Games Store right now, you’ve a strong selection of freebies to choose from in the form of Rogue Legacy and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but if your lust for a bargain remains unsated, Epic has more to come, with developer Firaxis’ XCOM 2 now confirmed as next week’s free game.
XCOM 2 is, of course, a bit of a winner, refining the base-building, alien-annihilating turn-based tactics of its 2012 predecessor (itself a refinement of Julian Gollop’s classic X-COM series) to create a prettier, tougher, richer game of extraterrestrial slaughter.
As Chris Bratt put it in his 2016 review, “XCOM 2 isn’t a reworking of the original game…it’s a genuine response to it… Moment to moment, the thing that makes this astonishing game truly sing is the way in which it’s managed to respond to the bad habits we picked up last time around. Move faster, it urges. Take more risks. Become a more interesting player.”
