

XCOM® 2
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyPrices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.






01About XCOM® 2
Lead XCOM’s mobile resistance across an Earth ruled by aliens. Build squads from five soldier classes, develop their skills, and use concealment to ambush enemy patrols. Between missions, configure the Avenger and direct research, weapons, and armor toward your tactical approach. Steam players rate it 84% across 80,292 reviews. Supported interface languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian. Released February 4, 2016.
Credits
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$2.292023-08-24 · IndieGala StoreBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 8 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| German | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Mode and language
The Steam PC version supports single-player and lists English interface text, full audio, and subtitles.
Squad and base planning
Five soldier classes have separate skill trees. You can configure rooms aboard the Avenger and research, develop, and upgrade weapons and armor.
03Frequently asked questions
What is the Avenger?
The Avenger is an alien supply craft converted into XCOM’s mobile headquarters.
Where do missions take place?
Missions span locations around the world, from wildlands and alien-controlled megacities to alien installations.
What can soldiers do in combat?
You can use concealment to ambush patrols, loot enemies, rescue VIPs, and carry fallen comrades to extraction.
“Timed missions and the Avatar clock strangle the turtle, turning turn-based tactics into a guerrilla war you can't afford to lose”
Our Verdict
It turned turn-based tactics into a war with real consequences
Plant it back on its 2016 coordinates and XCOM 2 was the undisputed benchmark for turn-based tactics that year — an 88 on Metacritic, an 87 on OpenCritic, 126 outlets folding it into the top "Mighty" tier, an Essential badge from Eurogamer, and a nomination at The Game Awards 2016. Years on, its place in the genre has barely budged an inch. What it is worth most for is the sheer precision of how its systems interlock and pull against one another. Fight well on the ground and the base hums along; let the supply chain back at the Avenger slip even slightly and the front line turns lethal in a heartbeat. Story, setting, mechanics, and sheer volume of content all cinch around one single core — the counterattack after occupation — into one taut, unbroken rope. Nothing in it feels bolted on as an afterthought; every subsystem exists because some other subsystem leans on it, and that economy of design is rarer than it sounds in a genre that loves to bury players in menus.

The single hardest thing for any rival to copy
You do not spend your time in one isolated mode here. You run a war that leaves real, lingering consequences on your roster and your map. And the design that pulls tactical depth and mounting pressure upward at the very same time — the timed missions and the doomsday clock working in tandem — is precisely the thing no peer has managed to replicate in the years since. Look back at Enemy Unknown and the patient, turtle-and-grind safety it quietly allowed: this sequel strangles that comfort cleanly and completely, and refuses to ever hand it back to you. That is the irreplaceable point, and it still holds. Plenty of later tactics games have borrowed the silhouette — the cover, the percentages, the concealed opening — but almost none have dared to keep the leash this short, because a leash this short is uncomfortable, and discomfort does not test well in focus groups. XCOM 2 leans into that discomfort on purpose, refusing to file off the sharp edge that defines it, and that is exactly why it still endures today while so many of its more comfortable imitators quietly blur together in memory.
Who should buy it, and who should walk on by
So who is it really for? If you want the genuine weight of every decision, relish the emergent stories your own soldiers write in the field, and can take a steep, punishing difficulty curve squarely on the chin, it will pull you under fast and lodge you in that "one more run, I have to claw this campaign back" grip — and it is honestly very hard to shake loose. Who should give it a wide berth, then? If what you are after is relaxed puzzle-solving, if you bristle at a countdown herding you forward, and if you weigh a cutscene-dense, plot-driven narrative above all else, the sting this game hands you will likely outrun the fun. As for editions, go straight for the build that includes War of the Chosen, because that is what this game truly looks like at full strength. Worth the few dozen hours? Yes — on the one firm condition that you never once expect the road to be a smooth or an easy one, because the difficulty is not a flaw to be patched out but the entire point of the exercise.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
Play it normally, beat it. Take a break, play witcher 3 or something for a while. Come back, install Long War 2 mod, fall in love again.Show moreShow less
About sums it up? From the EULA. Ouch... (iii) the sharing of your gameplay data with hardware manufacturers, platform hosts, and Licensor's marketing partners; and (iv) other uses and disclosures of your personal information or other information as specified in the above-referenced Privacy Policy, as amended from time to time. If you do not want your information used or shared in this manner, then you should not use the Software.Show moreShow less
I missed my first shot and I'm on normal difficulty with a 89% chance to hit, plus flanking. WELCOME BACK TO XCOM BABY!! --------EDITS&ADDONS---------- 20hrs of XCOM BABY later, and I've just dismissed my "Sharpshooter" for several other ragequit misses, including no less than a 97%. I heard he has since been employed on an Imperial Star Destroyer as a Stormtrooper. To make this review "more helpful", I feel I should add that this IS a game worth buying, though missing often (and often you will) can become a real frustration - you find yourself grinning in sweet revenge when the same RNG happens to the Aliens and they miss you from from point blank range. Shooting mechanics aside, the only other issues I've come across since playing are:- *Mission timers (which mods can fix already). Plus, this is a personal preference, it's not a fact that this makes the game worse. I actually enjoyed some of the missions when realising I had 3 turns remaining to act out the impossible. You really think about what skills you have remaining and use every resource possible to inflict the greatest amount of damage while moving forward as fast as you can. All normally works out well... Assuming you hit the target, that is! *ahem* *The occasional bug / framerate drop (which will no doubt be patched very soon). Again, this is computer specific and really, I hardly noticed it once I tweaked my settings. I had to lower a few things, but no biggie! That's it. I see no real reason not to buy this game, especially if you liked Enemy Unknown/Within. I'm currently finding myself pinned down at times on Normal. Yes, NORMAL, and I have no Ironman, and I still finish some missions thinking "Wow... How did I get outta that one?!" I can't wait to (hopefully) survive this playthrough and crank up the difficulty to make it even more of a challenge. Good luck fellow Commanders! May your aim be true. And if you miss, channel all that anger, know it happens to the best of us, and tell yourself "That's XCOM BABY!"Show moreShow less
Thumbs down, the inclusion of an awful always-online launcher just so they can gather data on users and advertise other games is extremely unsatisfactory. I should not have to install that crap to play the game I purchased, which at the time did not have this type of launcher. This sucks, I will not be buying more games from 2KShow moreShow less
1 like for every miss on 99% shot :D (Bonus points if you're another unlucky sucker that's missed a 100% chance to hit! Took 3 years for me but I finally got it!)Show moreShow less
Yes, I know, I know I haven't played the game for two centuries, so I'm not allowed to talk about it in public yet. Much less write a review. I'm giving it a negative review, because all the issues that were raised in reviews haven't been addressed for the launch copy: * The frame rates drops constantly (my pc is more than good enough to run it) almost constantly from the start of a mission to the end. So much so that it is sometimes impossible to keep up with. * The camera angles are awful at times, grenades explode off screen before they are due to, walls block the sight entirely, sometimes the alien's move is just a black screen so you have no idea what is going on. You can literally lose a soldier and have no way of knowing how. * There are excessive short pauses for no reason after actions and during some actions (seemingly at random). * Sometimes a person's body will be facing the exact opposite direction to where they are shooting. As well as that, a large number of missions have arbitrary turn limits, which are punishingly short. They only give you enough time to complete a mission comfortably if you rush most of the time. And rely on purely run and gun tactics. It removes any chance or opportunity to actually use strategy and tactics. Most of these issues will hopefully be addressed with hotfix patches, and working with the graphics card companies to get out some optimised drivers ASAP. But that doesn't excuse the game being released in this state. If this is the standard quality of a game at launch then this is the last game I'll ever pre-order. We need to make sure companies know this isn't acceptable or tolerated, or it will just keep happening *Looks at Bethesda*. I HIGHLY recommend waiting until the performance issues and bugs have been patched before purchasing. Once all the performance problems and bugs have been resolved, and there are plenty of mods to allow people to tweat the turn limit system, this will be an absolutely superb and very worthy sequel to X-Com. P.S. Fan(atic) boys please get your tongues out of the arse of Firaxis Games (more like Fixathis Game). Having it in there makes it harder for the aliens to probe them! P.P.S. the bug testing and QA for this game must have been hilarious: "Are the snakes supposed to be able to grab people through walls?" "Why do my soldiers keep dropping through the floor as they move?" "Is it normal for everyone to be shooting through walls with bullets, when the wall is right in front of them?" "Why did my character appear on a different part of the map when the snake grabbed me?" "Are there supposed to be constant pauses before and after every action?" "Why does this game run like Crysis 2 on a Gameboy?" "Is it normal for the screen to go black during the enemy moves time?" "Why are the voices telling me important things constantly cut off?" "Is it normal for a soldier to have their body face the opposite direction when they shoot?" "Why are there such long pauses when the enemy does something?" "Is it normal for a soldier who has been knocked unconscious to die instantly for no reason?" "Are units supposed to have melee combat against each other from two different floors of a building?" "Why are you releasing the game when it clearly needs at least another month of work?" "What are you doing!? Where are you taking me!? no, No, NOOOOO" P.P.P.S The one thing I do have to give them credit for is creating a game that has both an 'anti-addiction' and 'anti-piracy' mechanism built into the game. The 'anti-addiction' works by having levels that are so hilariously impossible - due to objectives being destroyed before you can secure the area, or having to take on a whole army whilst getting from A to B in 12 moves' that you'll find yourself literally saying "oh f*** this s***" or "oh f*** off" or my current favourite "stupid f***ing game!" that you'll rage quit from a single player game, and not want to go anywhere near it for at least a day. It's impossible for even the most perverse and self hating sadist to be addicted to. As for the 'anti-piracy', all it takes is for a would-be pirate to read just a few honest reviews of this game (so none of the mainsteam ones then), or to watch someone play it for five minutes, and they'll realise they don't want anything to do with it, and wouldn't even take it for free.Show moreShow less
One of my all time favourites, my safe space, my old friend, my XCOM. Almost endlessly replayable and a joy for anyone that loves, as I do, getting far too emotionally attached to imaginary soldiers then feeling very real pain when they die. They will die. It will probably be your fault.Show moreShow less
Short Version - XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within are vastly superior to this game. Go buy them instead, or if you have them and want more Firaxis XCOM, install and play the Long War mod. I wanted to like this game so bad. Hundreds of hours into Enemy Unknown and I was ready and raring to go for the next step. And there are certainly next steps in XCOM 2, the Starting concealment, the changes to Psionics, different enemy types, those were all really good ideas. On the other hand, there's simply too many things that can make your game go sideways through literally no fault of your own. In EU, I usually knew when I made a mistake. Sometimes things go poorly one turn, and that's the way it is, and it usually doesn't happen too often unless you're just committed to riding the bullet train of bad decisions. XCOM 2 just is the bullet train of failure, and there's no brakes on that train. Barring the DLC, the art is slick and totally on point, a really good iteration of Enemy Unknown's style. Tygen is cool, but lacks the personality and interest of Vahlen. He's 24/7 cool as a cucumber, and is just constantly aloof, where Vahlen had a proper forward face, but there were plenty of hints through dialogue that at any given time she was basically 2 seconds away from dissecting the nearest thing to her, living or dead, while singing opera. Lily Shen's interest basically drops right after her introduction, she never develops even though she's got the most opportunity to do so. On top of that, she looks EXACTLY like Jackie Ma from Sleeping Dogs, right down to the hairdo and freckles, so that's wierd. The soldier base models are all basically flat, they have zero silhouette and really wierd proportions. Even though there's more customization, somehow it feels more constrained, and I think it's due to there just being less interesting faces and hairdos available. And, once again (see: Batman: Arkham Knight), XCOM 2 has massive performance issues by trying to ship a "next-gen" game on a decade-old engine. Like Rocksteady, they bolted too many custom tools and rendering software onto Unreal Engine 3, and while Unreal is a fantastic engine, they both were trying to do rendering that the engine was just not meant to do. So, came the litany of "I have a top-end machine and I get 20 FPS" and "Game crashes at launch" on forums, and while I only had catastrophic issues once or twice, the load times and frame chug just inside the Skyranger are simply unforgivable. The story of XCOM losing was a bitter pill to swallow, but it gave a good start to why there's more aliens in the future. But beyond that, the presentation just lacks the same punch as Enemy Unknown. It lacks tension and a sense of urgency, even though that's what XCOM 2 is supposed to be completely centered around. I'll go watch the intro cinematic to Enemy Unknown just to watch it, because it gets me totally jazzed up to save the world. Michael McCann kills it with the music, and that stutter cut with the Skyranger gets me giddier than a schoolgirl to go shoot some aliens. On the other hand,the intro to XCOM 2 has scenes that should arguably be even more intense, but the lackluster directing, the totally midtone soundwork, it all made it feel so.... ordinary. Like blowing up ADVENT checkpoints is just what you do on a Tuesday afternoon. Though, Bradford jumping through a window was pretty sweet. The sense of tedium never goes away, as you're constantly shifting back and forth across zones because everything takes too long. You'll rarely finish one activity before you have to go do a guerilla op, oh did you happen to notice, ADVENT's putting the boots to some hippies in a commune that happen to be our friends, hey you should go look at this wierd spot we found, oh by the way, you need to go pick up your monthly cheque from this spot because we couldn't be arsed to mail it to you direct, and there's a 3 day processing wait, did you want to sell stuff, well you gotta go fly there too, because apparently there's only ONE Black Market bazaar on the planet. There's a nice balance that Enemy Unknown struck between the Strategy and Tactical layers of their game, The Tactical portion was an overt stress-fest of playing hide-and-seek with bullets, doing Hail Marys behind the tiny log that is your only available cover, and hoping to Sweet Baby Ray's that the Meld canister you're after isn't just a total pod-fest of X-rays. The Strategy layer was much more subtle, and the contrast makes the game actually playable. The Strategy layer gives you time to think, to manage your resources and marshal your thoughts on your game plan. It can be a good 10 minutes before another mission crops up, which is good downtime for the player so they aren't keyed up for too long. XCOM 2 learned nothing from its predecessor. The constantly running around, the Doom Ticker front and center, everything takes too long, and missions pop up with an annoying frequency to how much you can actually get done in the Strategy layer before "Hey, you gotta pop half-way round the world to go save those dirty hippies again" There's really never time to rest in XCOM 2 and it's frankly exhausting even thinking about booting the game up. The last sticking point, and really the final straw for me, is really how screwed the game balance was, and continues to be. Instead of say, fixing the fact that missions play like a round of "Whose Line is it Anyway?", where the shot percentages are made up and the aiming angles don't matter, they decide a good idea is to heavily nerf one of the only options for consistent damage, and taking away the biggest reason you pick Volatile Mix (increased grenade radius). Not even mentioning removing the only means of stopping "Run-n-Gun" Chrysallids and Stun Lancers. And there was obviously decisions that were made akin to those bouts of insanity throughout its development. Tons of enemies have armour (DR in EU) and Shieldbearers can give anyone in a huge radius armour, fine. But they took out Shredder rounds, so the only ways are, Psyhic attacks on non-robotic enemies (which bypasses armour, so the rest of your squad is still stuck in DR hell), an extremely high-level perk for Rangers, and the aforementioned nerfed grenades. Thin Men made a new appearance as the Vipers, and they can strangle you from a distance, great! But, (up until a patch a couple weeks ago, where they can't dodge 100% shots anymore), they have a high chance to straight-up ignore half of incoming damage from any weapon that rolls to hit. Your squad starts most missions Concealed, which allows you to try and get the jump on your enemy by (potentially) setting up kill zones to obliterate a pod before they can shoot back, Awesome! But why is there a 10, or even better, a FIVE (yes, five) turn timer on the mission? It completely nullifies the concept of Concealment and geurilla warfare if your only option to succeed in the mission is to dash forward non-stop until you reach the objective, because you WILL run into a pod, you WILL lose Concealment, and after that, you can't hope to just keep running and expect to win. There's things to like in XCOM 2, but it's just such an unfun, buggy mess.Show moreShow less
My entire squad was wiped out in the very first mission. 10/10Show moreShow less
Used to be my favourite game, however once Firaxis started packaging their games with spyware (this one included) I've been forced to wipe my hands of the companyShow moreShow less
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/14/2026.