XCOM® 2
Fair · Strategy · 2016
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 33.2h
- Value
- $0.60/hr
- Reviews
- 85% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770, 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or better, 45 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
XCOM 2 is the sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the 2012 award-winning strategy game of the year. Earth has changed and is now under alien rule. Facing impossible odds you must rebuild XCOM, and ignite a global resistance to reclaim our world and save humanity.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $2.99, set in February 2024. 98 discounts in the 11 years on record. They run about 83 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 5 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 88 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint ($29.99, scores 66) beats it on value, while it beats Wasteland 3 ($39.99, scores 64).
Steam's global achievement data says about 3 percent of players ever finish it. On a 33.2-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 4 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written November 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 38 percent of the 2,453 reviews written there were positive, against 85 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic, finite spend); the score docks it lightly for that.
Finishing takes 33.2 hours; clearing it takes 90, which is 2.7 times the campaign.
Still 3.1K concurrent players, 10 years in.
The drop-off
80% start to 3% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 33.2-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
3,123 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I don't know what's worse. Streaming the game for your friends while playing an ironman run with a squad of custom characters named after yourself and said friends, only to see them slowly and heroically get wiped out one by one across the game Or being forced to make a second 'suicide squad' made up of Israeli tech-specialist Jeffrey Epstein, American shotgun patriot Charlie Kirk, heavy gunner P Diddy, and psyionic...
10 years later and this game is still one of the best turn based games of all time. The gameplay is fun and doesn't feel outdated.
Played with war of the chosen DLC. Really liked it. I especially liked how the tactical combat evolves as your soldiers get new abilities. On your first missions, you'll be rushing and flanking. By the last missions, you can pull enemies from cover, take multiple shots per round, mind control, and teleport/switch an ally or enemy, opening up a huge variety of playing styles. On the down side, the RNG mechanics...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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XCOM® 2 scores 65/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/268500/xcom-2The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.