Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. On tonight's show, we welcome our friend freelance writer Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

And for the first time, we welcome the escapists, Jonathan Bolting.

Hi, everyone.

And we also welcome back our friend from the game design roundtable, David Heron.

Hello. Great to be back.

So tonight's show is the first reaction shot, I suppose, to XCOM 2.

Now, Rowan and Jonathan, I believe you may have had a little more time with it due to review

code going out a little early.

And David and I have been playing since release.

And I feel like I've observed at least an interesting phenomenon with reactions to this game.

Reviewers were pretty universally really high on this game.

People who were playing it sort of the week before it came out.

Like, all I heard was this is a tremendous leap forward, really, like a significant improvement

on the original X-com.

And then it got out in the wild.

And I was seeing a lot of people who I would have really like sort of bet the farm that they would have

been like really into literally anything with XCOM on on the front of the on the front of

the box a lot of those people having surprisingly negative reactions a lot of people being a little

underwhelmed and I thought that was an interesting that was sort of an interesting wrinkle in the story of, in the story of XCOM too.

And I think this group we gather here tonight is sort of a decent cross-section of reactions.

Rowan, why don't you start us off here?

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