To help counter them, Alien Hunters straight-up hands us some new firepower right near the beginning of a new game, basically for free. Especially when fighting them alongside a pod of conventional aliens, these are by far the nastiest enemies XCOM has ever faced. I was able to take down the first Ruler without much of an issue, but the second put me back on my heels and made me glad I didn’t try this on Iron Man mode. “The edge is taken off a little because Rulers have will often knock soldiers unconscious rather than kill them outright, but they’re still absolutely vicious to fight and will very likely inflict casualties. That makes them survivable, but learning to fight them is like learning to walk all over again. That’d be absurdly damage-spongy, except these aliens are cleverly built as multi-stage battles: they’ll retreat off the map when you knock off a certain amount of their health (which doesn’t regenerate) to return at random in a later mission. These three beefed-up variations on the Viper, the Berserker, and the Archon have terrifyingly powerful abilities and multi-row health bars that dwarf even the Sectopod. Fighting them takes some entirely new tactical thinking, and some new weaponry, which makes this DLC a net positive even though it creates some balance and replayability questions.Īfter being triggered by a tense story mission that both partially answered a lingering question about XCOM lore and presented a surprising type of fight that hadn’t been seen yet in XCOM 2, Ruler aliens crash the party in random missions (even those with timed objectives) to make XCOM’s job much more difficult. This DLC pack brings in three new major enemies that don’t just soak up more damage, they tilt fundamental concepts of combat in their favor enough to threaten even experienced commanders.

Just when I felt I’d gotten a handle on using the complex rules of XCOM 2’s combat to my advantage, XCOM 2: Alien Hunters has gone and turned them against me.

Xcom 2 save scumming