TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
While the learning curve might be steep at first, Xenonauts 2 offers incredibly rewarding tactical action for those willing to ascend it.
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Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.
What is it? Old school X-COM refined and reimagined.
Release date: January 5, 2026
Expect to pay: $40/£45
Developer: Goldhawk Interactive
Publisher: Hooded Horse
Reviewed on: Ryzen 7 3700X, RTX 4070 Super, 32 GB RAM
Steam Deck: Playable
Link: Official site
I'll be honest with you right up front: I loved the Firaxis XCOM games, but I never played the '90s originals. I know, I know. For years, people told me how good they were, and how the newer ones lost some of the magic. And while I may have bounced off of the first Xenonauts, Xenonauts 2 has finally revealed the truth to me. You guys were right all along. This rules.
There's something almost indescribably awesome about that moment in an alien invasion scenario where your scrappy little fighter shoots down a UFO for the first time and everyone cheers. It's like when the cavalry arrives at first light on the third day. We're up against a vastly superior foe, but with this small victory, it feels like maybe we can win this. Maybe there's hope.
Don't pop the champagne just yet, though. This is when Xenonauts 2 likes to take you down a peg, like the time it completely instagibbed my star sniper from halfway across the map even though she was in cover and wearing the most advanced armor my research teams have developed.
The quickload button has never looked so tempting. But what the underlying design understands so well is that the victories never taste as sweet if they're not built on the graves of fallen heroes. Hope can only come shining through when the clouds are dark.
The bones of Xenonauts 2 don't differ much from any other XCOM or X-hyphen-COM or X-COM-like you might have played. You're in charge of a secretive organization of scientists, engineers, and soldiers trying to stop an invasion by technologically advanced aliens—building and defending secret bases, dissecting captured foes, learning to use their technology, and stopping the six major regions of Earth from devolving into panic.
I completely failed to do that about 180 days into my first campaign and had to start over. This is a very difficult game, both tactically and strategically. I did not take to most of its systems intuitively at first. But that forced me to take a step back and think. It forced me to learn and adapt. And I really ended up enjoying that process after getting over the initial frustration. Contemplating what I could have done differently over a pile of dead soldiers is how I eventually won.
Xenonauts 2 is chock full of skill expression. Mastering the 'time units' you use to move, fire, and even rotate the vision cones of your soldiers, and learning how to deal with each of its deadly alien variants—dozens of them—can give you an edge on a tactical level. But that's not enough on its own.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Securing supporters and eliminating infiltrators on the strategic map is a whole minigame that requires you to prioritize reducing panic, gaining more funding, or controlling an entire region to get a unique bonus, like increased passive experience gain. The prices of different supporters change over time, so you can't really rely on a set build order.
Despite this, I was able to stay a step ahead of the aliens almost the entire time by reacting to juicy opportunities intelligently. But this interstellar menace doesn't go down without a brutal fight, and the lessons that contributed towards my victory were hard-won.
The one area where I felt really shot down by the difficulty curve, literally, was knowing which techs are must-haves by certain points in the esca...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
PC Gamer's got your back
Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.
What is it? Old school X-COM refined and reimagined.
Release date: January 5, 2026
Expect to pay: $40/£45
Developer: Goldhawk Interactive
Publisher: Hooded Horse
Reviewed on: Ryzen 7 3700X, RTX 4070 Super, 32 GB RAM
Steam Deck: Playable
Link: Official site
I'll be honest with you right up front: I loved the Firaxis XCOM games, but I never played the '90s originals. I know, I know. For years, people told me how good they were, and how the newer ones lost some of the magic. And while I may have bounced off of the first Xenonauts, Xenonauts 2 has finally revealed the truth to me. You guys were right all along. This rules.
There's something almost indescribably awesome about that moment in an alien invasion scenario where your scrappy little fighter shoots down a UFO for the first time and everyone cheers. It's like when the cavalry arrives at first light on the third day. We're up against a vastly superior foe, but with this small victory, it feels like maybe we can win this. Maybe there's hope.
Don't pop the champagne just yet, though. This is when Xenonauts 2 likes to take you down a peg, like the time it completely instagibbed my star sniper from halfway across the map even though she was in cover and wearing the most advanced armor my research teams have developed.
The quickload button has never looked so tempting. But what the underlying design understands so well is that the victories never taste as sweet if they're not built on the graves of fallen heroes. Hope can only come shining through when the clouds are dark.
The bones of Xenonauts 2 don't differ much from any other XCOM or X-hyphen-COM or X-COM-like you might have played. You're in charge of a secretive organization of scientists, engineers, and soldiers trying to stop an invasion by technologically advanced aliens—building and defending secret bases, dissecting captured foes, learning to use their technology, and stopping the six major regions of Earth from devolving into panic.
I completely failed to do that about 180 days into my first campaign and had to start over. This is a very difficult game, both tactically and strategically. I did not take to most of its systems intuitively at first. But that forced me to take a step back and think. It forced me to learn and adapt. And I really ended up enjoying that process after getting over the initial frustration. Contemplating what I could have done differently over a pile of dead soldiers is how I eventually won.
Xenonauts 2 is chock full of skill expression. Mastering the 'time units' you use to move, fire, and even rotate the vision cones of your soldiers, and learning how to deal with each of its deadly alien variants—dozens of them—can give you an edge on a tactical level. But that's not enough on its own.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Securing supporters and eliminating infiltrators on the strategic map is a whole minigame that requires you to prioritize reducing panic, gaining more funding, or controlling an entire region to get a unique bonus, like increased passive experience gain. The prices of different supporters change over time, so you can't really rely on a set build order.
Despite this, I was able to stay a step ahead of the aliens almost the entire time by reacting to juicy opportunities intelligently. But this interstellar menace doesn't go down without a brutal fight, and the lessons that contributed towards my victory were hard-won.
The one area where I felt really shot down by the difficulty curve, literally, was knowing which techs are must-haves by certain points in the esca...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?