The Let's Play Archive

XCOM 2

by Jade Star

Part 36: Operation [REDACTED] Pants Wrestling



Operation [REDACTED] Pants Wrestling

Today Guava and I set upon an old and reused map. I really think we saw this one before exactly like this, which is disappointing since until now while it was possible to recognize individual building blocks of maps, I had never seen an exact repeat of a previous map. Well several hundred hours of play into the game and I saw a map twice for the first time ever isn't so bad really.

More critically Guava and I run into possibly the last of the Unexpected Troubles. Turns out Skulljacking plot important things always leads to something bad happening. Just like before this results in a new alien type appearing. This is labeled as the titular Avatar, but something seems a little off about it. In any case the Avatar is a dangerous foe with strong Psi abilities, 5 HP a turn regeneration, and most annoyingly the tendency to teleport around whenever you shoot the damn things. This got mitigated during this particular mission due to possibly the best use of a flashbang by me to date; cutting off mind control and making the Avatar unable to teleport away from danger as I poured explosive fire upon it. Avatars can be nasty when supported by other things to divide your attention, like most other high value or high plot significance enemies when they first appear. Mind Control is of course the biggest problem. Mind shields or flashbangs can really save you with that, or your own Psi soldier with Solace to break the control. Bunching up may get you a Psi Rift. The Avatars also posses great mobility and may simply be able to flank you when you might expect to be safe from such a thing. They're always a high priority target, but their regeneration and teleport-on-damage ability they can be tough to bring down. Either you need good concentrated fire while they teleport around, a way to get them to walk into a wall of overwatch so they can't teleport and don't get time to regenerate, or you need a way to stop them from doing that all together. All said, they're not quite the pants shittingly scary monster of the battle field you might expect from the titular alien, but they are very hard to kill and are very capable of turning the battle field against you as struggle to counter and kill them.