XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Muton Berserker
HP: 15/18/24/28
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 75
Mobility: 14/15/15/15 (9/18 on Rookie, 10/20 otherwise)
Damage: 5-8 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/15%/15%/15%
Will: 75
Hardened
Does not make use of Cover, but does not suffer penalties from being in the open.
Just like the Berserkers of the prior game.
Unlike the Berserkers of the prior game, this actually makes intuitive sense: Berserkers in the prior game were just regular Mutons in a red suit that inexplicably took wristblades to your soldiers instead of carrying a firearm, where it didn't make a lot of sense that regular Mutons were able to and needed to make use of Cover yet Berserkers couldn't and didn't mind the lack. Whereas XCOM 2 Berserkers are huge, far too huge for standard Low Cover objects to offer any kind of meaningful protection.
Speaking of, XCOM 2 also does a much better job of selling the idea that they wouldn't think to try. In the prior game, Muton Berserkers seemed to just be... Mutons, just I guess with a specific battlefield role. They wore clothing, armor even, used weaponry, and just generally were presented as indistinguishable from regular Mutons when it comes to all the things that would factor into tactical acumen and susceptibility to being shot to death when away from Cover.
XCOM 2 Berserkers, meanwhile, are completely without gear of any kind, relying entirely on their massive muscled form to both kill their enemies and to survive being shot at, and elements like the Autopsy report further indicate Berserkers are Mutons heavily modified into being basically living weapons. It's considerably more believable that they struggle to remember that being behind a solid object makes the hurty things less likely to sting them, and simply due to their sheer mass it's a lot more believable that they can tank more punishment than a regular Muton before finally giving up the ghost. It's also actually a thing that not knowing you're dead/dying can be precisely the reason you keep going when a more aware individual would've collapsed, both in the straightforward sense that being crippled by pain is a very solid reason to stop moving, and in the slightly more abstract sense that an individual who thinks they're dying might give up, play dead, or otherwise stop pushing to kill the enemy, so it's possible to interpret Berserker HP being so high as less representing durability in a mechanical sense and more representing that Berserkers keep pressing on when so injured most any other being would've collapsed because the Berserker isn't aware that it's going to die of blood loss in a couple minutes.
It's a bit abstract a representation if that's the thought, but HP tends to end up a silly concept if you try to take it too literally in most any game, so whatever.
Rage
Each time the Berserker takes damage, there is a 50% chance it will become Enraged. Enraging permanently increases the Berserker's Mobility by +50%, but this cannot stack. Additionally, the Berserker is allowed to target its own allies for attack, even if Rage's Mobility boost hasn't triggered.
The comments in the config files indicate Berserkers will specifically target allies if they can't reach any of your troops. My own experience is that this is semi-true, in that Berserkers that can't reach your troops seem more likely to target an ally than a Berserker that can reach one of your troops, but I've absolutely seen Berserkers target an ally even though they were standing literally right next to one of my soldiers, or more rarely run past one of my soldiers to attack an ally, but either way the point is I've seen cases where there was no possibility that the Berserker targeting an ally was a result of having no enemy to target. And on the flipside I've had cases where a Berserker spent both its moves on approaching my troops, unable to get close enough to attack, where it absolutely had buddies it could've punched instead.
Berserkers, by the way, are the melee pod leader aside Stun Lancers that tends to get itself separated from its podmates in Retaliation missions. As I noted with Stun Lancers it tends, for whatever reason, to be worse of an issue with Stun Lancers, a point where I'm honestly not sure what's happening to make it so, but Berserkers are pretty prone to activating by virtue of charging in to kill a civilian you can see, with their podmates often barely able to enter line of sight as part of the pod activation scramble.
Note that while the Berserker's model is quite large and XCOM 2 does include units that occupy more than 1 tile at a time, the Berserker is not one of those units. Similarly, you might expect it to be an adept climber or exceptional jumper, but no, it's a melee unit that's stuck climbing pipes/ladders/etc, and so getting to high ground is a fairly effective way to prevent it from attacking anyone. Just have someone physically block off the climb point, maybe with a SPARK, but it also works to just kill all ranged attackers and then park a soldier at the top of a climb point, unconcerned by their lack of Cover, and either way now the Berserker is helpless to attack your forces. This is especially useful to keep in mind in War of the Chosen, where Berserkers can readily show up in non-Retaliation missions via Chosen summoning, Savage Sitreps, and the fact that some of the new mission types just plain allow them to appear. (eg Chosen Strongholds)
I do actually think the Berserker's head is a neat, distinctive design, and the Berserker animations are actually some of my favorites.
Rage
Each time the Berserker takes damage, there is a 50% chance it will become Enraged. Enraging permanently increases the Berserker's Mobility by +50%, but this cannot stack. Additionally, the Berserker is allowed to target its own allies for attack, even if Rage's Mobility boost hasn't triggered.
The comments in the config files indicate Berserkers will specifically target allies if they can't reach any of your troops. My own experience is that this is semi-true, in that Berserkers that can't reach your troops seem more likely to target an ally than a Berserker that can reach one of your troops, but I've absolutely seen Berserkers target an ally even though they were standing literally right next to one of my soldiers, or more rarely run past one of my soldiers to attack an ally, but either way the point is I've seen cases where there was no possibility that the Berserker targeting an ally was a result of having no enemy to target. And on the flipside I've had cases where a Berserker spent both its moves on approaching my troops, unable to get close enough to attack, where it absolutely had buddies it could've punched instead.
From experience, it also seems like Berserkers are more prone to electing to attack allies after becoming Enraged, though I'm not completely sure this is an actual thing. It hasn't cropped up very often, and this could easily be confirmation bias on my end since it's something that seems logical to do. It's not like I've found a chunk of code clearly indicating such a thing existing, and even if I did I'd have concerns about the accuracy of such given the config files are wrong about the 'punches allies when no enemy can be reached' explanation, and several bits of code exist that are clearly intended to function but whoops don't actually.
Also, as far as I can tell this target-allies effect doesn't apply to Berserkers that are under player control. They don't randomly react to orders by attacking your own troops instead, or the like.
Enraged is, of course, a less wacky version of Berserker Intimidate mechanics from the previous game. Instead of getting a short free move every time you shoot them, they just have a chance of gaining a permanent (non-stacking) Mobility buff. In terms of 'representation', I approve of the mechanics being no longer so insane (Try to imagine a real-time representation of what can happen with the prior game's Berserker mechanics. Notice that it's impossible), but in terms of gameplay it's a bit disappointing as the new version is boring, just mildly discouraging putting damage on a Berserker if you're not confident in your ability to kill it the same turn you're doing damage to it.
It also has the mildly frustrating implication that Poisoning a Berserker is, on average, slightly less useful than you might hope. This is a bit of a recurring issue with XCOM 2, that melee enemies in theory make for great targets to Poison since hindering their Mobility can outright prevent them from attacking your troops, but then a lot of melee enemies are either immune to the Poison condition or are somehow prone to shrugging off the Mobility penalty. -4 Mobility is more than canceled out by Enraged's 50% Mobility boost; it doesn't even matter what the game's order of operations for stat modifiers there is. (That is, it doesn't matter whether the game subtracts 4 Mobility and then boosts the result by 50%, or boosts base Mobility by 50% and then subtracts 4 Mobility from the final result) Either way, Enraged is adding more than Poison is subtracting.
It at least still lowers their accuracy, unlike the assorted melee enemies straight-up immune to Poison...
Note that an Enraged Berserker can be identified by the fact that they breathe out a green mist once it's triggered. This is a sufficiently subtle effect after the initial activation that if you're not already aware of it you may completely overlook it, but relatively obvious if you do realize it's a thing: Berserkers breathe out regularly, after all, and the cloud is pretty large and the shade of green used is unusual in the game's overall palette.
This can be nice to know if a Berserker ends up at the edge of your squad's vision -maybe it decided to kill a civilian?- and you're not sure if that means it's too far away to reach your squad in one turn or not. Or if there's two Berserkers you've managed to injure, and you'd prefer to focus additional fire on the one that's already Enraged anyway, but don't know off the top of your head which one is Enraged. Maybe you had to step away from the computer for a few minutes, whatever.
I personally appreciate that the game didn't do the usual 'rage means red' thing. Even aside that it would've looked like they were breathing blood, that's one of those cultural memes I find frustrating in how widespread it is in pop culture. Deviations are nice to see.
Mighty Blow
The Berserker's attack is a move-and-melee action that can randomly inflict Disorientation, Stun, or even Unconsciousness.
The +1 chance on the Berserker's melee attack is only 25%, so their average damage is worse than it looks.
Mighty Blow
The Berserker's attack is a move-and-melee action that can randomly inflict Disorientation, Stun, or even Unconsciousness.
The +1 chance on the Berserker's melee attack is only 25%, so their average damage is worse than it looks.
The side effects on Mighty Blow are, of course, another variation on the Stun Lancer Will test, though Berserkers have 10 more Strength than any tier of Stun Lancer so they should get side effects more often and slant to nastier side effects as well.
While Berserkers are nowhere near as bad about this as Psi Zombies are, it's worth mentioning they'll sometimes spend both action points moving, end up adjacent to a target, and yet not attack. I'm honestly unsure if this is a glitch, oversight, or deliberate bit of coding. It's only these two enemies that do this: every other melee enemy either has an actual reason to be doing that (ie Lost melee isn't move-and-melee) or never does this oddness. (eg Stun Lancers never run next to a target and just kinda... stop) This makes me suspect it's a bug or oversight, rather than another cheating-for-the-player layer... but I can't actually be confident of that.
Especially weird is they don't have this problem when it comes to civilians; you'll never see a Berserker walk up next to a civilian and just stop. I'm genuinely curious what causes this behavioral quirk.
Curiously, in addition to their actual melee attack there's a weapon entry under Alien ranged weapons that's indicated to be attached to them. What's especially curious is that it's tagged as doing melee damage. It would do 6-7 damage (Only a 15% chance of rolling the +1 for 7 damage, though), with +3 on crits, if it actually existed. It has me wondering if Berserkers at one point were supposed to... I dunno, chuck rocks? Carry some kind of melee weapon(s) and be able to throw them like the player can with the Hunter's Axe? I'm very curious what that's about.
An additional curiosity is that they were apparently supposed to have melee resistance at some point, but the relevant config file line doesn't do anything as it stands. It's set to only -1 damage, admittedly, so it's not like it would've been that influential in the base game, but it's still strange...
... especially since it would've been very natural for Berserkers to share Counterattack with regular Mutons. They're huge, strong, and bits of the game seem to intend for their musculature to be essentially functional as a layer of armor as part of why they're as durable as they are, so it would've made intuitive sense, tied the two Muton types together better, and also focused your anti-Berserker strategy a bit. As-is, melee is bizarrely effective against Berserkers, since they obligingly get close enough for easy meleeing, with the primary caveat being that if shooting-type enemies are about going for a Slash might leave you in the open.
Admittedly, Berserkers having Counterattack would've been a bit annoying in the base game for some of the same reasons it's annoying with Mutons, like only mattering to the one class, but in War of the Chosen it would've been nice to have Counterattacking Berserkers literally slapping your soldiers down when they try to go toe-to-toe with an alien that's probably four or five times their mass. And in general it just feels weird that regular Mutons punish melee attacks but not their bigger, burlier cousins who are dedicated melee combatants.
Berserkers are handled weirdly all-around and I don't really get why.
Anyway...
Berserkers, by the way, are the melee pod leader aside Stun Lancers that tends to get itself separated from its podmates in Retaliation missions. As I noted with Stun Lancers it tends, for whatever reason, to be worse of an issue with Stun Lancers, a point where I'm honestly not sure what's happening to make it so, but Berserkers are pretty prone to activating by virtue of charging in to kill a civilian you can see, with their podmates often barely able to enter line of sight as part of the pod activation scramble.
On the plus side, Berserkers being present makes it more reliable to try to catch inactive pods with Overwatch in a Retaliation mission. Ranged pod leaders are perfectly happy to kill civilians in your line of sight without getting anywhere near your squad, whereas if eg you start the mission and in short order have 10 civilians in sight you can be confident melee pod leaders are going to have to charge into your Overwatch eventually. Berserkers tend to lead most or all the pods on the map the first time they show up, too, so it's not unusual for there to be no ranged pod leader to ruin such a plan.
Mind, this comes with the caveat that it's not unusual for you to have exactly one Retaliation mission Berserkers show up in. Your first clue that Berserkers are leading pods may be two of them charging into vision and activating, where you might never get the opportunity to put this knowledge to use.
Still nice to keep in mind just in case, though.
Note that while the Berserker's model is quite large and XCOM 2 does include units that occupy more than 1 tile at a time, the Berserker is not one of those units. Similarly, you might expect it to be an adept climber or exceptional jumper, but no, it's a melee unit that's stuck climbing pipes/ladders/etc, and so getting to high ground is a fairly effective way to prevent it from attacking anyone. Just have someone physically block off the climb point, maybe with a SPARK, but it also works to just kill all ranged attackers and then park a soldier at the top of a climb point, unconcerned by their lack of Cover, and either way now the Berserker is helpless to attack your forces. This is especially useful to keep in mind in War of the Chosen, where Berserkers can readily show up in non-Retaliation missions via Chosen summoning, Savage Sitreps, and the fact that some of the new mission types just plain allow them to appear. (eg Chosen Strongholds)
On a different note, Berserkers are unreliable choices for Domination. High enough Will you have to penalize it to assure Domination goes through, an attack that is a huge pain to arrange 100% hit odds with, and their only utilities are acting as distractions and trying to land their unreliable melee attack.
They're very good distractions, one of the best in the game, as they lack Defense, can't use Cover, and have a ton of HP, all of which means they tend to repeatedly draw fire before going down, but that comes with the rather significant caveat that various enemies are difficult to reliably distract (eg Mecs that go for Micromissile usage are extremely likely to ignore the Berserker, targeting a cluster of your own troops) and Berserkers primarily showing up in Retaliation missions means you usually have to worry about the possibility of enemies going for civilians instead.
Their melee attack potential is also fairly decent. They have more Strength than a Stun Lancer (50 to the Stun Lancer's 40), which means they're more prone to Stunning or knocking Unconscious enemies than a Stun Lancer, and the damage is decent enough too. If you get lucky, they can keep a key enemy under control or instantly take it out of the fight.
Or they could whiff entirely, and now all they're contributing is their potential as a distraction. Whoops.
In practice, the main appeal of Dominating a Berserker is getting to skip chewing through their massive HP, with secondary appeal from how underwhelming their corpse utility is -the part where you don't loot Dominated enemy bodies is only technically a flaw with Berserkers, as while you can spend their corpses the payoff for such is painfully limited. And even this appeal comes back to the issue of reliability...
One oddity in War of the Chosen has to do with the new variation on Retaliations added by War of the Chosen. It's possible to roll that mission type as your first encounter with Berserkers, and in that case the mission will virtually always have six pods, all of which are made up of a Berserker leading two regular Mutons. This is a completely bonkers outcome, facing you with an absolutely ludicrous amount of HP to burn through, where every individual threat is very dangerous, and the Resistance soldiers helping you consistently perform poorly against. Berserkers leading Mutons is absolutely a valid thing for mission generation to do, but normally it doesn't happen when you first encounter Berserkers -they usually start out leading a Stun Lancer and a Trooper, that kind of relatively unthreatening combination- and for the original Retaliation mission type you'd get eg three or four pods on the map, two of which had Berserkers. The new Retaliation mission type has six pods as standard, sure, but something strange is happening here, and it's a very unpleasant sort of strange, as the Muton horde is extremely dangerous. This can easily turn into not only a mission failure, but a mission failure that kills multiple people on your squad, even if you brought all your most experienced soldiers, have the ability to field a full squad of six, have Predator Armor and all relevant magnetic-tier weapons purchased, and are reasonably experienced and competent at the game as a whole.
I'm not sure if this is a glitch, exactly, but I'd be shocked if it was a fully intentional possibility.
In any event, overall there's not a lot of actual strategy to talk about with Berserkers. They can be intimidating to a new player, potentially even quite problematic if, for example, you didn't heavily prioritize researching and purchasing magnetic weapons, due to their massive HP pool, but their inability to use Cover and lack of abilities that are interesting to engage with means there's little to talk about in terms of combat strategy. The only somewhat-interesting element to them is how their nature as an HP sponge combined with Rage means you should often focus down their podmates first and kill them second, and in general may wish to avoid attacking them if you're not confident in your ability to kill them...
... but this latter point is a bit moot overall due to their lack of other defenses and whatnot. By the time Berserkers show up, you've got levels, and very possibly Scopes and/or Perception PCSes, and you can probably actually assume every shot you take at a Berserker is going to hit. The only uncertainty in your ability to kill a Berserker is in damage rolls.
They also don't get many opportunities to shine, particularly in the base game: they're only allowed to show up in Retaliation missions, the Avenger Defense mission, and the final mission when talking the base game. Depending on when the Avenger Defense hits, you may see Berserkers in literally two missions in your entire campaign: their first Retaliation mission, and the final mission. War of the Chosen helps by adding a handful of new mission types they're allowed to generate in and allowing Chosen and Savage to spread them into many other missions types more irregularly, but even in War of the Chosen it's entirely possible to end up only seeing them twice in a given run!
It's a bit disappointing. Berserkers in Enemy Unknown had insane mechanics and didn't make any kind of realistic sense in-universe, but if you focused on them purely as a gameplay piece they at least required you to really think differently when fighting them, even if some of the specific elements of that were fairly dumb and problematic. (ie that Bull Rush could only be used on a target in Cover, meaning you had incentives to exit Cover if Berserkers were around and no shooting threats were active, where this wasn't intuitive or sensible) XCOM 2 Berserkers are, as gameplay pieces, distinguished primarily by mechanics they share with multiple other enemies -and Stun Lancers in particular steal their thunder by showing up earlier while being an incredibly tough-for-their-time melee enemy that can Disorient/Stun/KO your units in melee!
In the base game, they were even more disappointing, mind, since it's entirely possible to have Dragon Rounds and/or Incendiary Grenades by the time they show up, and being on fire completely disables them in base XCOM 2. War of the Chosen removing that tool for completely trivializing them at least ensures a minimum level of engagement with them as combat pieces, instead of shooting them once and then ignoring them for a turn or two while dealing with real threats.
Berserkers still really need something to set them further apart from the other tough melee enemies of the game, though...
Sadly, even the Berserker Autopsy isn't mechanically interesting or worthwhile. It unlocks one Item, which is single-use-for-the-entire-game and requires 2 Berserker corpses per such Item while being merely okay rather than amazing. (When you don't tend to get very many Berserker corpses in a run, remember) I personally would tend to recommend skipping the Berserker Autopsy entirely if you have literally anything else your science team could be doing.
Sadly, even the Berserker Autopsy isn't mechanically interesting or worthwhile. It unlocks one Item, which is single-use-for-the-entire-game and requires 2 Berserker corpses per such Item while being merely okay rather than amazing. (When you don't tend to get very many Berserker corpses in a run, remember) I personally would tend to recommend skipping the Berserker Autopsy entirely if you have literally anything else your science team could be doing.
No, War of the Chosen didn't make the Berserker Autopsy somehow more useful.
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In a lot of ways, the Berserker actually frustrates me even more in XCOM 2 than in the previous game when it comes to the conceptual/narrative layer.
To its credit, this new design better justifies being a brutal melee attacker with no ranged weapon; it's a warped creature forced to grow tremendously huge (And with no skin for... some reason...), too incoherent to even cram it into a suit of armor let alone give an actual weapon.
Buuuut my core issue with the Berserker was 'why not do a Reaper design if you're making a straight melee Alien' and this is even worse about that. The previous design I could imagine might've been intended to, like, have a shoulder-mounted cannon or otherwise been a ranged attacker and they just gave up due to engine limitations and adapted the work they've already put in. (Until the Seeker, there were no units that had melee and ranged attacks in the previous game, and the Seeker isn't even performing a regular melee attack, but rather a weird hacked-together special attack that happens to occur point-blank) This design is bluntly designed to be Beast That Punches And Maybe Bites. So... seriously, why not make it a Reaper?
This is made particularly bad by the lack of a Blood Call equivalent, making 'Berserkers are Muton variants' an Informed Attributed until the Alien Hunters DLC bothered to make a (Weak, nonsensical) mechanical connection between the two. (Okay, and War of the Chosen adds another one, but it's honestly a bit eyebrow-raising that a soldier picking up a fear of Mutons automatically includes a fear of Berserkers, given how it's not immediately obvious they're related at all)
The fact that it's so completely removed from the prior Berserker design also makes it difficult for me to take seriously any suggestion that they made a Berserker instead of a Reaper design because XCOM 2 is a sequel to the prior game. Especially since XCOM 2 is perfectly happy to completely trash old enemy designs and replace them with conceptually completely different enemies, as we'll be getting into in a later post.
I'm just left baffled.
The actual aesthetics are puzzling even beyond that, starting from the part where Bersrkers are skinless. Broadly speaking I can almost understand the artistic motivation; removing the skin allows the muscles to be on full display, helping convey that this is a hugely muscled monster... but skin is a rather important part of an organism's ability to survive, and the design would look plenty muscled even if it did have its skin. So. What?
I can almost imagine that part of the point is to illustrate how dramatically the Ethereals can manipulate the biology of their minions, except Vipers contrasting with Thin Men does a much better job of that. So it's just redundant at that job.
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In a lot of ways, the Berserker actually frustrates me even more in XCOM 2 than in the previous game when it comes to the conceptual/narrative layer.
To its credit, this new design better justifies being a brutal melee attacker with no ranged weapon; it's a warped creature forced to grow tremendously huge (And with no skin for... some reason...), too incoherent to even cram it into a suit of armor let alone give an actual weapon.
Buuuut my core issue with the Berserker was 'why not do a Reaper design if you're making a straight melee Alien' and this is even worse about that. The previous design I could imagine might've been intended to, like, have a shoulder-mounted cannon or otherwise been a ranged attacker and they just gave up due to engine limitations and adapted the work they've already put in. (Until the Seeker, there were no units that had melee and ranged attacks in the previous game, and the Seeker isn't even performing a regular melee attack, but rather a weird hacked-together special attack that happens to occur point-blank) This design is bluntly designed to be Beast That Punches And Maybe Bites. So... seriously, why not make it a Reaper?
This is made particularly bad by the lack of a Blood Call equivalent, making 'Berserkers are Muton variants' an Informed Attributed until the Alien Hunters DLC bothered to make a (Weak, nonsensical) mechanical connection between the two. (Okay, and War of the Chosen adds another one, but it's honestly a bit eyebrow-raising that a soldier picking up a fear of Mutons automatically includes a fear of Berserkers, given how it's not immediately obvious they're related at all)
The fact that it's so completely removed from the prior Berserker design also makes it difficult for me to take seriously any suggestion that they made a Berserker instead of a Reaper design because XCOM 2 is a sequel to the prior game. Especially since XCOM 2 is perfectly happy to completely trash old enemy designs and replace them with conceptually completely different enemies, as we'll be getting into in a later post.
I'm just left baffled.
The actual aesthetics are puzzling even beyond that, starting from the part where Bersrkers are skinless. Broadly speaking I can almost understand the artistic motivation; removing the skin allows the muscles to be on full display, helping convey that this is a hugely muscled monster... but skin is a rather important part of an organism's ability to survive, and the design would look plenty muscled even if it did have its skin. So. What?
I can almost imagine that part of the point is to illustrate how dramatically the Ethereals can manipulate the biology of their minions, except Vipers contrasting with Thin Men does a much better job of that. So it's just redundant at that job.
Then there's all the metal bits scattered across the Berserker's body. Most of them appear to be ports, suggesting Berserkers are supposed to be pumped full of some chemical on a regular basis, but then there's the bits on their knuckles; are those supposed to be knuckle-dusters? Why so small? How do they stay on, anyway? And if they are supposed to be knuckle-dusters, why is it Muton attack animations consistently avoid taking advantage of such utility, instead preferring to clasp their hands together and slam them down on their victim? And if they're not knuckle-dusters, what the heck are they? Looking at concept art and close-ups of high-res renditions hasn't clarified anything to me, beyond seeming to indicate they're probably meant to be more ports sort of... stapled on? I guess? But that's still confusing on a number of levels.
Even the ports on the skin just raise questions, given XCOM 2 doesn't have similar ports on... any entity (Aside the Berserker Queen, but she's so obviously using the Berserker model as a base that's not necessarily significant), and no enemy design from the prior game had them either. If Thin Men had had ports visible, or if the Speaker visibly had ports hidden behind, like, his collar or something, I might guess the ports were representative of how the Ethereals apply Meld to manipulate their minions in a more general sense, and the Berserker just happens to have the most prominent ports because the Ethereals don't intend for them to be seen by anyone whose opinions they care about. That would certainly be consistent with Gene Modding soldiers involving metal ports to pump Meld into them, for example.
But no, it's conspicuously only Berserkers that have ports like this, and the game never addresses them at all. Tygan doesn't ramble at you about the ports having a residue he doesn't recognize and that's absolutely fascinating under a microscope, or something. Shen doesn't get upset at the Ethereals so obviously engaging in permanent modification of their minions with no effort to keep it safe and clean or anything. Bradford doesn't casually wonder aloud whether the old, armored Berserkers had those ports too. So what am I supposed to think they're about?
Then there's the mouth: on the plus side, the vaguely Predator-style mouth is actually consistent with the Muton design. It's not obvious because regular Mutons have the respirator/gas mask, but if you look closely you can see the evidence that they have the same type of mouth as a Berserker. On the minus side... that dangerous-looking mouth is not used in any of their attacking animations. Attacks are fist-based, period. The mouth filled with razor teeth and topped with multiple tusks is only used for roaring.
As a final bit of 'huh?' we have what's going on with the upper part of their head, where they have a row of pits recessed into a raised plate. There's two basic possibilities here: possibility one is that this is a weird helmet or plate of bone functioning as a helmet, in which case... huh? How do they see out from under it? Even looking closely at high-res models, they'd... what, maybe have a bit of peripheral vision? Maybe? And also, at that point what's the recesses in the plate about? Are they supposed to be fake eyes like how various butterflies have eyespots on their wings to confuse predators? A natural row of pits found in an ordinary Muton skull that serve some esoteric purpose XCOM 2 never even hints at? Seriously, what's with those spots in this theory?
Possibility two is that the Berserker is so extremely altered that instead of the two forward-facing eyes of a regular Muton, they have a series of tiny eyes protected under a raised plate of bone. This is a weird theory, and honestly I suspect it wasn't the original intention (If you look closely at a high-res model, you can just barely see a couple depressions under the bottom portion of the plate that are probably intended to be the outer portion of their eye sockets), but the Berserker Queen's design seems to embrace this scenario by placing a series of widgets over the depressions that end up looking like the Berserker version of spec ops vision gear, so it's worth delving into regardless. That's such a weird scenario it's actually kind of intriguing... but, again, nobody reacts appropriately. The Autopsy doesn't have Tygan going 'wow! These are genetically identical to regular Mutons, but they have 10 tiny eyes in two rows! How did the Elders do that?' Bradford doesn't mention offhand that shooting them in the head isn't very effective because it won't get through the bone and you're not going to blind them by taking out a couple eyes. Shen doesn't express nausea at the latest Ethereal experiment casually making massive changes to living organisms for their own convenience.
Then there's the mouth: on the plus side, the vaguely Predator-style mouth is actually consistent with the Muton design. It's not obvious because regular Mutons have the respirator/gas mask, but if you look closely you can see the evidence that they have the same type of mouth as a Berserker. On the minus side... that dangerous-looking mouth is not used in any of their attacking animations. Attacks are fist-based, period. The mouth filled with razor teeth and topped with multiple tusks is only used for roaring.
As a final bit of 'huh?' we have what's going on with the upper part of their head, where they have a row of pits recessed into a raised plate. There's two basic possibilities here: possibility one is that this is a weird helmet or plate of bone functioning as a helmet, in which case... huh? How do they see out from under it? Even looking closely at high-res models, they'd... what, maybe have a bit of peripheral vision? Maybe? And also, at that point what's the recesses in the plate about? Are they supposed to be fake eyes like how various butterflies have eyespots on their wings to confuse predators? A natural row of pits found in an ordinary Muton skull that serve some esoteric purpose XCOM 2 never even hints at? Seriously, what's with those spots in this theory?
Possibility two is that the Berserker is so extremely altered that instead of the two forward-facing eyes of a regular Muton, they have a series of tiny eyes protected under a raised plate of bone. This is a weird theory, and honestly I suspect it wasn't the original intention (If you look closely at a high-res model, you can just barely see a couple depressions under the bottom portion of the plate that are probably intended to be the outer portion of their eye sockets), but the Berserker Queen's design seems to embrace this scenario by placing a series of widgets over the depressions that end up looking like the Berserker version of spec ops vision gear, so it's worth delving into regardless. That's such a weird scenario it's actually kind of intriguing... but, again, nobody reacts appropriately. The Autopsy doesn't have Tygan going 'wow! These are genetically identical to regular Mutons, but they have 10 tiny eyes in two rows! How did the Elders do that?' Bradford doesn't mention offhand that shooting them in the head isn't very effective because it won't get through the bone and you're not going to blind them by taking out a couple eyes. Shen doesn't express nausea at the latest Ethereal experiment casually making massive changes to living organisms for their own convenience.
It would also be a bit strange for XCOM 2 to casually have the Ethereals radically overhaul Muton eyes in particular successfully without commentary, given Thin Men having snake eyes was a thing and XCOM 2 doesn't retcon it, and indeed has the Speaker conspicuously hiding his eyes behind sunglasses, suggesting that while the Thin Man process has improved the eyes remain a stumbling block for some reason.
Having looked closely at high-res models and looked for concept art, honestly I suspect the Berserker's design is a weird... not precisely an accident, but not a properly-intended idea. I'm pretty sure what happened is that a concept artist drew up a Berserker with skin, and also drew one without skin as a guideline for where the musculature is attached and whatnot so the people pulling together the 3D model would know how to animate the overall motion and any depiction of musculature straining against the skin...
... only then somebody looked at the no-skin guideline art and decided it looked cool in its own right and it got run with even though that wasn't the original plan and is extremely bizarre and confusing. And also they didn't modify any dialogue or anything to reflect this random decision, for whatever exact reason. Which is an incredibly confusing decision chain, honestly, but it seems the most likely one all things considered.
I do actually think the Berserker's head is a neat, distinctive design, and the Berserker animations are actually some of my favorites.
I just have a lot of trouble getting past the part where this is supposed to be a Muton variant, when this makes so little sense from so many perspectives.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of the whole thing is that the game of course blames the Berserker's condition on Ethereal 'genetic manipulation'. If they were the only extreme example the game provided of the Ethereals heavily modifying individuals in disturbing ways, many of these issues would remain present (Seriously, what is up with the metal bits on their hands?), but there'd be an obvious purpose being served in claiming them to be derived from Mutons: so we can see how far the Ethereals can and do take such modification. But Thin Men already did that, with Vipers cementing how drastic the changes Ethereals can induce are: no purpose is being served by insisting Berserkers are a Muton variant, instead of just... making Reapers.
Whereas if Berserkers were, for example, a state Muton women went into under certain conditions, that would actually be doing something with the idea that they're Mutons. Whether the game focused on the biological elements ("Yeah, Muton women can turn into supersoldier killing machines, the evolutionary history for why this happens and why Muton men don't do it is pretty interesting...") or sociological elements ("Any Muton can become a Berserker, biologically speaking, but taboos from the time before the Ethereals conquered them insist the drugs that induce the state are forbidden to men"), or even used it as a new vector for showing how awful the Ethereals are ("Berserkers are what you get when you steal a Muton mom's child. Yes, that means the Ethereals deliberately turn newly-minted parents into enraged killing machines by virtue of stealing their children, and double-down on the awful by pointing them at unarmed civilians who obviously didn't take the children. Yes, the Ethereals somehow rationalize this as For Everyone's Own Good. Are you horrified yet?"), there'd be something interesting that would actually justify the decision. (This would even sidestep the eye issue: if Berserkers replacing their eye system entirely were natural, like some especially alien twist on the flatfish wandering eye weirdness, then there's no inconsistency with Ethereals struggling to change Viper eyes to a far less dramatic extent)
I'd still be cranky at the ongoing decision to ignore Reapers, particularly given War of the Chosen is perfectly happy to give us Reapers-the-skill-on-Rangers on top of Reapers-the-class (ie it's not that War of the Chosen refused to bring back Reapers-the-alien because the linguistic repetition would be unnecessarily confusing), but that would be a separate issue at that point, so whatever.
All that said, kudos to whoever all handled the animations of Mutons and Berserkers: in spite of their vastly different proportions and completely different kit, the animations do a surprisingly decent job of selling the idea that the same basic being is piloting these very different bodies, as Mutons and Berserkers share several types of responses you don't see on other enemies. I'm particularly thinking of their responses to injuries, where they flinch away and then roar in the direction of their attacker. ADVENT troops will respond to an injury by hunching down for a second and visibly shaking off the pain, as one comparison point, while Sectoids will clutch at their chest for a second and then do their distinctive growl/hiss noises up at the air, not at their attacker. The only other enemy that has an injury response animation I'd consider similar to the Muton and Berserker animations is the Archon's, and it's entirely possible XCOM 2 intends them to be heavily-modified Mutons so that would potentially actually reinforce my point.
Also positive is that Berserkers have some of my favorite sound effects in all of XCOM 2. Intimidating roars and the sounds of something very heavy in motion are regularly invoked by games, but it's surprisingly rare for me to find a given game's execution of either particularly compelling. That XCOM 2 sticks the landing on both is quite unusual, and the Berserker's roar is very distinctive too. They even manage to sound like they're related to regular Mutons, though it's a lot less obvious than the animation connection.
Though on the other hand Berserkers are also the single largest enemy to ragdoll on death, and quite clearly show why large enemies are not ideal to use ragdolling with. It's not so bad when you kill a Berserker during your turn, only occasionally producing conspicuous strangeness, but when a Berserker is killed by reaction fire the results end up coming across like a balloon animal switched places with the alien you just killed. There's no sound as they impact and bounce once ragdolling, and the ragdolling behaves as if the Berserker's body is filled with air instead of muscle and bone, with slow-motion bouncing being a regular thing. And even when you kill a Berserker during your own turn, you can still end up walking a soldier through their body and ending up pulling it about, where it again looks like the Berserker's body is an air-filled balloon instead of a heavy flesh-and-blood body.
Most enemy ragdoll physics are pretty silly if you think about them realistically, but the Berserker is by far the most jarring, in your face example of the ragdoll physics being goofy.
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Next time, we go slightly out of order to cover the Archon.
See you then.
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