XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Derelict Mecs


HP: 3/3/3/4
Armor: 2/3/3/3
Defense: 0/0/0/6
Dodge: 0
Aim: 55/60/65/65
Mobility: 12/12/12/14 (8/16 on most difficulties, 9/18 on Legendary)
Damage: 2-3 (+1)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0
Will: 50
Tech: 35/50/50/60

Mechanical Chassis
This unit is a robot, rendering it immune to Poison, Fire, and Chryssalid Poison as well as most psionic or mental effects (Including that it will never Panic or be rendered Unconscious), but susceptible to anti-robot effects and impossible to heal with Medikits.

Conveniently, you have lady Shen along for the ride, and she's a super-powered Specialist with anti-robot tools. Notably, her Combat Protocol and Capacitor Discharge reload instead of having a limited number of charges: you don't need to carefully conserve them for Just The Right Moment.

Too bad Lost Towers is intended to be done so early you're not going to have Bluescreen Rounds or EMP Grenades. Admittedly, it's also so early their protection from Fire and Poison probably doesn't matter, either....

Still, an offensive Specialist can be worth taking into Lost Towers, especially if you're up on Legendary where 4 HP backed by 3 Armor is genuinely difficult to kill in 1-2 soldier actions. Combat Protocol can easily be a lifesaver if you're getting overwhelmed, which is a legitimate concern.

Also, Shen can take control of them quite readily with Haywire Protocol, and this can be really helpful in the first part when you need to buy time. Hacking one to distract the others can be a lifesaver, particularly due to a key ability I'll be getting to in a minute.

Leap
Can travel Z-levels freely as part of normal movement.

This is very relevant, as Lost Towers' three maps all have drastic Z-level differences, and the Derelict Mecs getting to just chase you straight up without bothering to find ladders or run up ramps gives them a big edge. In the final part of Lost Towers, it also means they're sometimes taking shots with effectively 20 more Aim than the above numbers imply, making their bad Aim less of a failing than you might expect, potentially giving them better accuracy than an Andromedon could reasonably expect to hit in broadly similar situations.

In the second part of Lost Towers, this is a secondary pressure to get out of and stay out of the low ground sections of the map. It's technically a little slower to stick to high ground -the high ground is all around the room's edges in the second part- but whatever. Or maybe I should call it a tertiary pressure, given the Derelict Mecs keep spawning into low ground, and Lost Towers is meant to be done early enough your troops can struggle to hit things so you want them having the high ground?

Regardless, don't treat being up behind Cover and on high ground as an adequate protection. Derelict Mecs can get the flank fairly easily.

Hardened
Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.

This isn't exactly a surprise given that Derelict Mecs are literally ADVENT Mecs, but rusted prototypes.

You're expected to do Lost Towers early enough this is actually a striking quality for them to have, though. Only Turrets, out of regular enemies, are intended to be plausibly encountered this early while not using Cover. It makes Lost Towers more distinct of an experience than you might expect, especially in conjunction with their Armor, which is absolutely bonkers by early-game standards.

It's also important to SPARK-001 performing as well as it does, since you don't need to worry about Cover. This is especially important since SPARK-001 is, of course, starting out at the lowest possible SPARK level, and so its base Aim is... bad.

Suppression
A single enemy target in range becomes Suppressed until the start of the user's next turn. A Suppressed target suffers -35 to Aim, and if it moves the Suppressor will immediately take a reaction fire shot at the target for free. Additionally, if the target was on Overwatch, its Overwatch is permanently removed, even if the Suppression ends prematurely. Suppression ends if the reaction shot is triggered of if the Suppressor takes damage. Consumes 2 ammo to initiate. No cooldown.

Like with regular Mecs, this is generally a relief to see a Derelict Mec initiate.

Well... mostly, but we'll get to that.

Overload
Spends one action point without necessarily ending the turn. Once activated, the Derelict Mec will explode if killed. Alternatively, it can manually perform a move-and-detonate action to anywhere within its movement range. Either way, this does 3-4 damage with 2 Shred in a 3-tile area.

The big distinguishing quality of Derelict Mecs, and the primary way they threaten you, given their firearm is horribly inaccurate and has even worse damage than it looks; they only have a 25% chance of rolling +1 damage with their primary weapon, not the usual 50%. (Overload, in spite of being an explosion, does have the usual 50% chance of +1)

It's also generally the preferred action of Derelict Mecs if they can see a member of your squad, making Derelict Mecs another example of XCOM 2 working with delayed threats, as AI-controlled Derelict Mecs have a shackle that prevents them from detonating themselves in the same turn they set up for detonation. If you hack one, you can absolutely detonate them in one turn by spending one action point arming the explosion and another on using it; it's specifically an AI limitation.

Anyway, it's a delayed threat thing because a Derelict Mec blowing up is 100% unavoidable damage in an area that in fact hits harder than their gun can ever hit unless they're getting a flank, but of course AI Derelict Mecs that elect to initiate Overload after moving aren't doing damage this turn. And like a number of other delayed threats, it's very possible to cut off the delayed threat before it delivers -indeed, in the case of Derelict Mecs, killing an Overloaded one can actually benefit you if any other enemies are in its blast radius. Say, a Suppressing Derelict Mec...

That said, Derelict Mecs actually don't tend to end up clumped. They have no real reason to cluster together and do, in fact, do the usual AI thing of trying to avoid clumping if they can, and you encounter nearly no pods of Derelict Mecs; the majority of them reinforce in from a variety of spawn points, with only one Derelict Mec arriving from a given point in a given turn. As such, it's pretty rare to actually get the chance to catch multiple Derelict Mecs with one exploding, surprisingly.

Overload is also surprisingly threatening if you do the intended thing of just going to Lost Towers right away, especially if you don't notice Shen can be pretty cavalier about tossing out her abilities, thanks to Derelict Mecs being fairly tough to kill with basic weapons.

That said, Derelict Mecs prefer to blow up on the nearest target, not the most targets, so they tend to do less damage than you might expect.

Though do keep in mind that, as is typical of AI-used area-of-effect abilities, the AI doesn't have much respect for line of sight when using Overload. Backing up to where literally no enemy can see you can still result in a Derelict Mec charging into and blowing up on your squad without any opportunity to get line of sight before committing to the boom. (Which is unusually egregious: an ADVENT Mec is happy to aim its Micromissiles to catch soldiers no enemy can see, but only if it can do so as part of hitting a soldier the enemies can see. Derelict Mecs don't care about line of sight at all with Overload) You should be prioritizing killing Overloaded Derelict Mecs whenever feasible.

Anyway, this is the ability that's why hacking a Derelict Mec can be a really helpful distraction: Derelict Mecs blowing themselves up on your hacked Derelict Mec instead of your troops is really nice.

Narratively, I like Overload in that it's clearly supposed to be the SPARK Overdrive ability (The visual effects and animation are nearly identical, just red visuals instead of blue/white), but Derelict Mecs are rusted hunk of junk prototypes, so them pushing their reactor to its limit just turns it into a bomb, it doesn't let them push their failing frame any harder. That makes a natural kind of sense.

Indeed, I actually like it mechanically, too, and am a bit sad you have to turn to mods if you want Derelict Mecs showing up outside Lost Towers. This element of Shen's Last Gift feels like wasted potential, and I'm surprised War of the Chosen didn't throw in a Sitrep related to them... or, well, I would be if War of the Chosen weren't so obviously rushed.

At least Chimera Squad brought the basic concept back, if in a less Armored form.

Derelict Mecs being so heavily Armored while so early is interesting to me as a very tentative experiment with early Armor, a clear precursor to War of the Chosen deciding that Purifiers being an early Armored threat was okay to risk. It seems likely XCOM 3 will be even more willing to have early Armor, which I'd love to see; Armor is an important component of XCOM 2's tactical depth, and even to an extent its strategic depth, and the rarity of Armor in the early game has long felt like a bit of a flaw to me. (eg Shredder is a Corporal skill on Grenadiers, even though there's nothing to Shred that early)

Also, a weird, usually-useful oddity of Derelict Mecs is that they're strangely prone to moving away from your squad upon activation, rather than advancing with their free move. I'm not sure if this is a particularly bizarre bug/oversight or intended behavior, but it's pretty strange regardless, and is a contributing factor to their self-destruct being a little less threatening than you might expect.

Anyway, Derelict Mecs of course can only be encountered if you have Shen's Last Gift, and more precisely can only be encountered in the Lost Towers mission you have to manually turn on for a given run at start. As Lost Towers is heavily scripted, this... makes it a bit silly to talk in general terms, as there's not a variety of situations to encounter them in.

So let's talk about Lost Towers, itself. (No, I don't know why it's called 'Lost Towers' when you can see it's just the one tower. I tend to misremember its name as 'The Tower' or just 'Tower' because it's more accurate, but it's not what the game calls it)

Lost Towers is broken up into three different maps, though it's all one continuous mission. Derelict Mecs are relevant to all three, though the details differ a bit.

In the first map, your squad actually starts Concealed. I'm... really not sure why this is the case, as Lost Towers is designed to minimize the utility of Concealment; no enemy in Lost Towers makes use of Cover, making it pointless to perform an Overwatch ambush. Indeed, there's an early pod of Derelict Mecs placed where it's literally impossible to sneak past them. This initial Concealment thus doesn't do anything except give you the opportunity to get everyone ready before activating that first pod.

Then there's a second pod placed to make absolutely sure you can't sneak past, up on the high ground. So yeah, a bit weird you start Concealed, especially as conceptually your squad isn't hidden: the enemy knows you've shown up, and knows where you had to have come from, and in fact is expecting you. Squad Concealment is supposed to represent local forces not realizing there's definitely a local threat to be on watch for: this is why it makes narrative sense for even an Overwatch ambush that leaves no survivors to break squad Concealment, because the other enemies will at minimum have heard the gunfire and whatnot and be on guard. So why do you start Lost Towers Concealed? It's weird.

In any event, those first two pods are relatively 'normal'. There's a third pod deeper in the facility, but it's special, made up of 4 Derelict Mecs (Instead of 3) and more importantly it activates once you get a bit past the second pod's starting location, even though this third pod is on the far side of the room and you probably didn't actually get sight on it. This pod is generally best handled by having Shen break out Capacitor Discharge, preferably having arranged for her to be close to the activation line but not past it, so she can immediately advance and blow them all up.

As Shen's offensive Gremlin abilities are all cooldown-based, instead of charge-based the way a regular Specialist's are, you should be pretty aggressive about using them in general. (Yes, this bears reiterating: use them aggressively) Everything in Lost Towers is susceptible, and Lost Towers is really fond of trying to overwhelm you with large numbers of tough enemies. Having Shen one-shot them, sometimes en mass, will make your job a lot easier.

Note that while the pod locations are fixed and predictable, the pod members are placed randomly within a range. This mostly isn't very important, but can lead to cases where eg you move Shen the same as a previous run and find that the first run could catch all four Derelict Mecs with Capacitor Discharge while the second run can only catch three of them. It also means you shouldn't, in the initial phase, just charge forward to where you remember the edge of the Derelict Mec detection radius was, because it might be a tile or two closer than last time you did Lost Towers. Don't blindly imitate video guides, for that matter.

Anyway, those first three pods are the only pods on the first map, and once you're done with them you're done with what I think of as the first part of the map, with zero time pressure so far. The game will direct you to hack a console to turn on an elevator at this point: you need to do this, but don't rush it out, as hacking the console...

...immediately causes a pair of Derelict Mecs to spawn. Furthermore, every turn after that will involve Derelict Mecs spawning in: as far as I'm aware, they never run out. And note that these spawned-in Derelict Mecs immediately activate, even if no member of your squad sees them arrive: this is true of all Lost Towers spawns, making pod activation mechanics surprisingly limited in their relevance.

Anyway, what you want to do is get your entire squad to the high ground that the hack point is in the back of, and don't Hack it until you're on a fresh turn with everybody ready for trouble. You should have Shen handle the Hack: any soldier can do it, but Shen's Hack score of 140 nearly guarantees you'll actually get one of the bonus Hack rewards, so there's really no reason to have someone else do it. She also has the advantage of being able to remotely Hack it while still in position to attack the incoming Derelict Mecs, though a regular Specialist has that advantage, too. But, you know, not 140 Hack. (I suppose you could put off Lost Towers until you have a Colonel with a Mk. III Gremlin.... but why would you?)

In addition to calling in the waves, Hacking the console activates the elevator, at which point it's time to play defense while evacing people to the next map: this actually works like a regular evac, including that a soldier can evac when out of action points, so ideally you should have people make attacks before they actually leave, if they can attack anything from that spot. The key difference is that the first soldier to evac renders the elevator unusable for the rest of the turn: as such, to evacuate the entire squad will take you 4, 5, or 6 turns, depending on how many GTS squad size upgrades you've bought. (The mission clearly expects you to have bought 1: there's 5 turns of dialogue)

Hence why you're playing defense instead of just vanishing the squad to the next floor in one turn.

There's a decent argument to be made for having Shen linger until last, leveraging her offensive Gremlin abilities to thin things out. Or maybe second-to last, since one of her advantages is being able to toss out damage without needing direct line of sight, letting her kill a Derelict Mec (Or a bunch of them) on her way out, helping the last soldier to get away safely.

On the topic of Shen herself, some curious points to note: she has two charges of Scanning Protocol... even though Lost Towers is designed so Scanning Protocol is essentially worthless. You're also forbidden from messing with her armor slot or her secondary weapon slot (So you can't take ROV-R away from her), and of course you're forbidden from checking her profile screen. (Among other points, this means you can't put a PCS into her. Not that you'd want to, but still) Her four charges of healing are also noteworthy for the fact that a Specialist needs a Medikit equipped to be able to reach 4 charges, but Shen is not actually considered to be carrying a Medikit. (Unless you give her one yourself, of course) Among other points, she doesn't have Poison immunity, which actually matters, though not on this map.

In any event, something to keep in mind is that the elevator itself constitutes an indestructible High Cover object, and therefore when you're down to the last soldier you can have them duck into the corner and Hunker Down. It's literally impossible for a Derelict Mec to land a shot unless they move to the exact straight line to flank such a soldier. (And while Derelict Mecs cheat on line of sight with Overload, they don't do so with regular movement, so this is unlikely to happen) Just keep in mind that any Derelict Mecs that have primed their self-destruct and are close enough will happily blow up on such a soldier, which the elevator is no protection against: this is part of why you should be killing Derelict Mecs as much as you can until the final turn, to avoid your last soldier just getting blown up repeatedly with nothing you can do about it at that point.

This is the first of two times it can actually be problematic for a Derelict Mec to remember it has Suppression: because a Derelict Mec can't land a hit on a soldier Hunkering Down in High Cover, but a Suppressing Derelict Mec can get lucky and land a shot on said soldier as they flee to the elevator, since of course Hunker Down's Defense boost is gone. Once you're down to just one soldier making a run for it, you probably can't do anything to avoid triggering the reaction shot; it's not like another soldier can hit the Suppressor to stop them...

So, you know, try to not have your last soldier to leave down to 3-4 HP by the time they're up.

On the plus side, Shen has 4 heal charges, so it's actually okay for your squad to take some damage. Among other points, the time pressure goes away when you transition to the second map: if you want to have Shen spend a full turn on healing at the start of the next map, you can do that without it being an actual problem.

As for that second map, we'll be covering that in the next post.

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Aesthetically, Derelict Mecs very much have a Terminator thing going on, which I personally enjoy. Even better is that you can actually visually connect them to basic SPARKs just fine: their design is very much a Conventional-tier SPARK that's had all its padding rot away and its metallic parts rusted over.

This probably goes over a lot of players' heads, actually, as Lost Towers' SPARK-001 has a fixed visual design. More precisely, while SPARKs have a head design that's just a less rusted version of the Derelict Mec Terminator-esque head, it's not the one used for SPARK-001 from Lost Towers. In conjunction with the padding changing the visual profile and the color scheme being so different, it's easy to overlook, and if you eg do Lost Towers once and never again, and only discover in a later run that SPARKs can get the Terminator-esque head design, you might not look back on your memories and realize Derelict Mecs are just rusted Conventional-tier SPARKs. (For one thing, they don't have BITs. For another, the name encourages you to draw mental comparisons to ADVENT Mecs, a point exacerbated by how many animations they share with ADVENT Mecs, such as the pod activation animation)

It's quite nicely-done, makes in-universe sense more or less, and as a bonus it actually pulls off color-coding of sides in a sensible way: it makes sense for rusted hunks of steel to end up dark in color while the more carefully-preserved SPARK-001 happened to be painted in light colors and so contrasts, so much so that up until a couple weeks before this post went up I actually hadn't noticed the good/evil color-coding being a thing at all! The only bit that's at all forced is the Evil Red Eyes, and there's a number of ways that could plausibly happen, so whatever.

It's also pretty neat how Shen's Last Gift manages to use this core physique and on one end manages to make SPARKs look reasonably friendly while on the other end Derelict Mecs look very imposing. That's a pretty impressive trick, especially given how the red eyes is the only bit to it I might call 'lazy' in pursuing such a result.

One interesting point is that the internal name for Derelict Mecs is actually 'Feral Mecs'. It's a very evocative name, and it makes me wonder if the early concept of Lost Towers was a bit different, as it calls to mind not simply poorly-maintained robots but ones that have gone... well, feral. It could just be a placeholder name with no deeper meaning, though, that happens.

In any event, it's a much cooler name than Derelict Mec, so I'm a little sad it didn't end up being their official name. Ah well.


Narratively, Derelict Mecs are weird to talk about.

The crux of the issue is the weird, clunky, not-properly-explained point of the Ethereals electing to coopt Raymond Shen's plans for a big fighty machine. Shen's Last Gift does at least address the 'Shen's Mec idea became a pure robot in ADVENT hands' issue -that now the intention is Shen always had a robot in mind, not cybernetic technology. (Which is, itself, one of the more direct examples of XCOM 2 walking back the transhumanist elements of Enemy Within, retconning away the idea that papa Shen ever had intentions to chop people up to make them better combat pieces)

But one is still left with confusion about why the Ethereals would care about a human-designed robot. They had plenty of fighty robots in the prior game, and XCOM 2 hasn't clearly retconned those away, and Shen's Last Gift feels no need to spell out an explanation. A lot of the obvious explanations are unavailable: the X-COM Project is a secret, so it's pretty difficult to believe the Ethereals would be using anything from it to convince the locals it's Home-Grown Terran Technology As Developed By ADVENT, or something of that sort, for example. It's similarly unbelievable that Shen's mid-development artificial intelligence and associated combat machine prototype would be better than anything the Ethereals came up with...

... but surprisingly, it's possible the explanation is more retcons that just didn't get properly explicated, and further got obscured by some manner of internal dev issue.

The intuitive thing to expect going from Enemy Within to XCOM 2 is, of course, to assume that all the robots are still canon: that the Ethereals arrived at Earth with Drones, Cyberdiscs, Seekers, and Sectopods as part of their arsenal, and as such would be extremely unlikely to get anything out of any Earthly robotics program. Lady Shen's intro speech for Sectopods would seem to confirm this, since she alludes to Sectopods being used to defeat tanks and whatnot in the original invasion...

... but I've already been over how the evidence is that the devs changed their mind and probably just overlooked that the intro speech needed to be rewritten, or ran out of time before they could get the actors to record new lines, or whatever. Shen's Last Gift, as we'll be delving into more later, points more in that direction, reinforcing the 'Sectopods were developed after the invasion' scenario as true.

With that removed, one is left to notice that Drones, Cyberdiscs,, and Seekers are all conspicuously absent and never get referred to. (Unless one counts a cinematic depicting in the background still images of assorted enemies, which goes completely unacknowledged by the characters and isn't actually relevant to the scene) Even in the Tactical Legacy Pack mini-campaigns, you don't get Bradford making allusions to these robots, or any other robots for that matter.

Meanwhile, all the robots that are in XCOM 2 are explicitly developed post-invasion (Mecs, Sectopods), or are not properly pure robots (Codices, Spectres, Archons if you want to count cyborgs), or are the never-clearly-addressed Turrets. (Which, by the way, get depicted in Lost  Towers, as we'll be covering next post. Hmmm)

It's distinctly possible that the intended explanation here is that XCOM 2 has retconned out all the proper alien-developed robots, and the Ethereals coopted papa Shen's projects because they never developed robotics on their own. This would honestly even make a lot of sense: you've got a species of psychic overlords who can grow and manipulate fleshy servants at will in a variety of forms as needed, and then control them psionically. If you want a perfectly loyal servant you can build from raw materials to perform any number of tasks... well, the Ethereals can do that without needing to turn to robots. It's very believable it didn't actually occur to them as a possibility until they were exposed to the idea externally, and it's very believable that none of their slave-species came up with such prior to being conquered, so that it makes fairly natural sense for humans to be the starting point.

This would actually be a very interesting and unusual scenario, given how often scifi takes it as a given any spacefaring civilization will develop robots before or not long after becoming a space power. It'd be quite cool if that is the intention, and actually take a bunch of aspects of XCOM 2 I've historically interpreted as flawed and make them intriguing.

If this is the intention, it's unfortunate XCOM 2 not only never communicates it but has missteps like the Sectopod intro speech pointing far away from it. This also makes me that bit more frustrated by the fact that War of the Chosen being rushed seems to have cost us a robot Resistance faction: if this was the plan, it likely would've been spelled out or at least heavily hinted at by such a faction.

Lost Towers' story, frustratingly, is too focused on the father-daughter relationship plot to spend time clarifying such topics.

Mind, even with all that, Derelict Mecs are honestly pretty eyebrow-raising if you want to take the setting seriously. The plot of Lost Towers being an R&D center for ADVENT robots where an AI takes over and ADVENT abandons it is... questionable. You'd think Lost Towers would've been wiped out in such an event, not left standing so X-COM can find it.

Shen's Last Gift probably should've gone for a different explanation for Lost Towers being abandoned, really.

Though to be fair, with the War of the Chosen characterization of Ethereals, it's actually very believable that they'd just abandon the facility and not bother with a more permanent solution. Their response to Lost as a problem is barely more proactive, for one. So even though War of the Chosen doesn't change the Lost Towers mission directly, it reframes the context enough it... can actually function well enough, surprisingly.

I'm really hoping XCOM 3 actually does clearly confirm this type of angle to the setting, and it's not just blind chance that the pieces lined up to seem plausible for such. Or some other XCOM media, whatever.

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A couple points about the Lost Towers mission that are interesting: first of all, it's the only mission in the game that involves the Skyranger landed and visible within the mission. I'm a bit curious as to why this mission in particular has this quality. Just because Shen's Last Gift is broadly being nostalgic for Enemy Within, maybe?

The other point is that something weird and a bit frustrating is that Lost Towers actually has unique music. On the first map, anytime you're in combat or after you've activated the elevator, this tune plays. It's a bit frustrating, because this is actually a really nice tune, but in War of the Chosen you're really intended to play with Integrated DLC on and there's not much mechanical-play-to-win incentive to turn Lost Towers on. Even in the base game, I suspect a lot of players played Lost Towers once and never again. There's probably a ton of players who don't even realize Lost Towers has unique music -if you play it once as your first run and never again, you're probably not going to notice that this tune never played in any other situation.

There actually is a mod that adds it into the general pool, and indeed adds other Lost Towers tunes into the pool, but its default behavior is frustrating, throwing all the DLC tunes into rotation (Except the Alien Hunters tunes...) in a manner that overrides the in-game track selection option. This annoys me on principle, but more importantly the Tactical Legacy Pack's remixes are all loud compared to the rest of the soundtrack options, where it's difficult to hit a sound balance that's simultaneously good for the remixes and for the other tunes. It also only adds the combat tunes of Lost Towers, not the non-combat tune from the first map.

It does have a config file to let you edit the allowed tracks, but it's pretty tedious to do so (In addition to being a pain to find the correct folder: it's mod folder 1137361817, for reference) and I don't understand why 'throw everything together unavoidably' would be the default behavior in the first place.

Also, an interesting quirk of this tune is that there's only the one version of it. The vast majority of in-combat music in XCOM 2 has two versions: one that plays during your turn, and one that plays in other turns (I'd say 'during enemy turns', but Resistance soldier turns use the not-your-turn version), smoothly transitioning between the two as you switch turns. This is pretty easy to overlook, as a lot of tunes make relatively small changes -adding one more, relatively quiet instrument outside your turn, for example- but it is a thing and some tunes are quite dramatic about it, such as the Avenger Defense tune. (Annoyingly, if you have the OST, it only has one version of any given tune, and it's usually the version that plays in your turn -which is usually the weaker version, in my opinion. The OST also doesn't include any DLC music, just base game and War of the Chosen, which is a bit aggravating)

Anyway, this tune doesn't do that, which is one of those subtle things that probably gives Lost Towers a different 'feel' without players being able to put their finger on what feels different.

This first map technically also has a unique non-combat tune. I say 'technically' because you're not going to hear it for very long, and it's quiet enough it's pretty easy to completely overlook it over all the dialogue, sound effects, ambient noises, etc -I honestly spent more than a year under the impression Lost Towers' idea of non-combat music was to have no music playing and let the ambient sounds carry things, that's how easy it is to overlook it. Which is too bad, as clearly effort was put into the tune, and you can tell how the combat tune is meant to be related if you listen to both, but I suspect it's pretty normal to completely miss the non-combat music being a thing.

Seriously, give these a listen. They're good tunes, and it's a shame the game is designed to minimize exposure to them.

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Next time, we cover the Decaying Turret.

See you then.

Comments

  1. Worry not, the TLE version of Soundtrack Restoration (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1137361817) has LostTowerA in the random pool for tactical. The only caveat I could think of is the mod being TLE exclusive means it's not available for vanilla XCOM 2.

    Nice read as always. Not particularly excited for the next unit, but extremely curious on your take.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Ah! I'll have to give that a try, and probably update this post appropriately.

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