Part 35: Operation Club Face

Operation Club Face

Today we get back to hitting the plot. The codex's brain research points us to a sites where we find some sort of gateway. Bradford and the others all think it's super important but given that it's barely large enough to fit a single alien through at a time it leaves me kind of wondering how important it could be. Logistically speaking its not going to move a lot of infrastructure for the invasion. At best it could be a quick hub to hub transporter for squads of ADVENT to move and respond to threats, but then what the hell is it doing out in the middle of nowhere and not in a guarded facility? For right now the details surrounding the gateway are confusing and hazy at best, when we properly research it maybe it will shed some light on it.

Some new equipment gets picked up before the mission, exciting new stuff at that. The Archon suit is amazing, giving the wearer greatly enhanced mobility. They can run farther, jump up the sides of buildings or other obstacles, and twice per mission they can launch themselves anywhere not in the shroud in a move that looks right out of the Floater's skill set from the first game. In short the Archon suit is the last word in mobility enhancing armor. How to best put it to use is variable however. I put it on my sniper as Guava suggested, letting the sniper get to high places quickly and easily and letting them launch themselves forward to a new sniping perch if the battle moves forward and they need to advance to keep up with the rest of the team. Another way of thinking is putting it on an assault ranger and going straight into things with them. The added movement, the ability to leap over things in your way, and so on leads to a lot of problems being easily solvable with a sword to the face or with Rapid Fire. Either plan of action is going to work out really, and there isn't really anything bad you can do with the archon suit except not to utilize it in some way.

The proximity mine is an interesting addition to the explosive roster in Xcom2. It has a huge blast radius and is so powerful they had to nerf it a little, reducing its damage from 10 down to 8. Mines work about how you'd expect, shoot them somewhere and if an alien moves inside of its blast radius then it explodes. Whats not immediately obvious about this and I demonstrate in the video is that they are super useful for the initial ambushes on a map. The mine doesn't explode until the aliens turn meaning that when it does go off the aliens activate on their turn, rather than the players turn. What this means is that if anything lives through the ambush they only get the scramble to cover activation turn instead of getting a full turn to fight back. This can effectivly give you two turns versus the aliens, a real bonus if you find a particularly tough pod to ambush.

Also built but not getting a chance to be shown off was the Blaster Launcher which is exactly what you think it is. A homing ball of explosions that will hit the target you designate no matter what. It will avoid all obstacles in its path and strike right where you need it to, and it will seriously hurt everything it hits. As long as you have a line of sight to where you want it, it will go there. Always a great tool to bring to any mission, there's just nothing bad that can be said about it.