It’s inevitable that as quickly as you make an inventory of your most anticipated games for the 12 months, extra wonderful games begin getting introduced the second you hit publish. Case in level: Goldhawk Interactive’s long-awaited Xenonauts 2 has simply been confirmed to be heading to Steam early entry later this 12 months. Huzzah! The unique Xenonauts was a superb homage to the hyphenated faculty of X-COMs / UFO: Enemy Unknowns of previous, so I’m feeling fairly pumped to learn how its sequel builds on its traditional, squad-based techniques.
Much like Xenonauts 1, Xenonauts 2 will see you are taking management of a multi-national navy organisation with the intention to defend Earth from an alien invasion, which you may be doing in good ol’ turn-based trend. On prime of some spruced up visuals, Goldhawk have stated they will be including extra maps to Xenonauts 2, a bigger tech tree, a extra detailed and immersive strategic layer in its GeoScape, and loads of new aliens this time spherical as properly, a lot of which you’ll be able to glimpse in its shiny new gameplay trailer above.
Xenonauts 2 was first introduced six years in the past – the week Firaxis’ XCOM 2 got here out, no much less. Back then, it was slated to launch someday in 2017 on the earliest, and for a time there was a free, early model folks may play over on GOG. Goldhawk ultimately determined to lift extra improvement funds through a Kickstarter marketing campaign in 2018, releasing one other free demo to coincide with it (which remains to be out there to play at present on GOG should you fancy seeing what’s what).
It took all of 12 hours for the Kickstarter to get efficiently funded, and a closed beta then adopted for backers, with an meant early entry launch slated for March 2019. However, because the scope of the game grew, Goldhawk determined to increase the closed beta and delay the soar to early entry, stating that they did not really feel it was prepared again then. And as you may see from Goldhawk’s extensive update log on their Kickstarter web page, the technique game appears to have grown fairly a bit within the intervening years! There’s now dynamic maps, new biomes, and revamped air fight within the combine, to call only a few.
I’m excited, and with an early entry launch on Steam scheduled for someday between April and June, I’ll be retaining my eyes peeled for a extra exact early entry date within the coming months.