Xenonauts 2’s Kickstarter campaign has concluded with over £190k raised, achieving just under 400% of its £50,000 goal. Xenonauts 2, from Goldhawk Interactive, is a reimagining of the 2014 original, with lots of new features, improved mechanics and a slightly different story.
Xenonauts 2 is borrowing from it’s contemporary cousin, XCOM 2, in that the story offers a twist on the original game. The new start of this game begins with a travesty. The original commander and the main operations base from the first Xenonauts has been wiped out by an alien first strike, and now you’re playing a new commander who has to lead the war effort from an ancillary base.
Along with the new start, there’s a bunch of new potential ends. Xenonauts 2 features a brand new DEFCON system as a consequence of the desperation of humanity to stop the aliens. If you let the war get too out of control, a nuclear apocalypse might be in your future with a new potential game over state.
It’s not just new beginning and ends either, there’s plenty more new content coming to the sequel, including overhauled equipment and tech trees, you can read all about that in Goldhawk’s concise features document, here.
The developers also used lessons from the development and play style of the original to inform development on the sequel. In their extensive update notes, Goldhawk Interactive explained that most players of the first game maintained a core base and simply built forward bases for aircraft and radar. So the decision has been made to streamline base-building to make the choices of what to build at your main base matter a bit more. Secondary RADAR and airbase sites still needed to be build away from ATLAS, your main base in the sequel.
Speaking of ATLAS, the process for managing your base has been made more complex as well, with food and power now needed to be taken into account when building and maintaining your overall base and its inhabitants.
All of this and so much more is due in the new game when Xenonauts 2 launches on GOG and Steam before the end of the year.
