YMMV / XCOM: Long War

• Broken Base:
  • Fatigue. Some players like it because it forces you to build a large roster of troops rather than relying on one A-Team to clean house every mission. Others hate it because it forces a large amount of downtime on deployed troops, stretching to weeks and past the point of "realism", something that only gets worse once Genemods, Officers and Psionics come into play.
  • Some players like the Infiltration mechanic in 2 because it actually makes stealth viable, as opposed to merely a means to set up an ambush, and makes the game play more like how the guerilla movement XCOM is supposed to be. Others, on the other hand, consider it a problem since the mod gives players all these fancy new classes and a bigger maximum squad size and then penalises them for wanting to go to town on the aliens. Several meta-mods have been made to reduce the penalty for low infiltration so players can actually make use of their combat power, and eventually the mod itself changed things so bringing only one soldier doesn't make that much difference to infiltration as bringing three or four.
• Contested Sequel: While the first iteration of Long War, designed for XCOM Enemy Unknown, has been near universally praised, the second iteration of Long War 2 designed for XCOM 2 has a mixed reception, due to the obtuse campaign progression and equipment upgrade mechanic. There's also in contrast of Long War adding many sub-mods to make modding easier or to customize difficulty as the player sees fit, the Steam Workshop feature in XCOM 2 is noted to often causing compatibility issues with the game.
• Misaimed "Realism": Some of the criticism of the Fatigue system cites this point. Soldiers in the real world indeed are rotated in and out of the frontline to give them a chance to relax and heal, but since at least World War I it's been expected for a soldier to stay on the frontline for a week before rotating out to rest for another week; Long War instead suggests that soldiers need to take several weeks or even months off to recuperate after going on just a single combat mission.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: While there's no debate that Long War 2 comes up with a handful of interesting mechanics (like more weapons tiers, more enemy types, a much longer campaign, and the infiltration system), there is a portion of the fanbase that considers the official War of the Chosen DLC superior overall despite that add-on's own shortcomings. The most frequently cited reasons are Long War 2s obscure campaign progress system and its supremely tedious equipment upgrade mechanic (see Scrappy Mechanic below), compared to WotC's much more streamlined gameplay, cool and rewarding boss fights, and its three new, unique soldier classes.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The first game's air war is widely loathed for being much more difficult and complicated than in vanilla, which wasn't exactly the height of fun in the first place. It's entirely possible to do well in tactical combat but go into a death spiral because of difficulty with the air war.
  • Rocket scatter. It's bad enough when normal guns miss, but at least they don't do anything then. Rocket scatter can cause friendly fire to multiple XCOM troopers and is worsened not just by bad Aim stat but also by distance to the target, making rocket use even more of a gamble than in vanilla.
  • 2 makes it possible for all enemy types to Dodge, down to the lowest Trooper. Combined with the nerfs to grenades such as no more guaranteed cover destruction, it makes fighting a pain. That all XCOM operatives also benefit from Dodge doesn't entirely mitigate this. Later versions of the game included an option to adjust the Graze mechanic, to the point that you can turn it off entirely.
  • XCOM 2's equipment upgrade mechanic has you research a new technology, then pay a flat fee for all of your soldiers to upgrade their respective gear in one go. It's irreproducible why Long War 2 scrapped this extremely convenient system in favor of an extremely tedious alternative that forces you to build and equip every single damn item individually. Gets especially annoying with upgraded weapons since you must remove any installed weapon mods from the old gun, switch menues to equip the new gun, then reinstall the weapon mods one by one... about 30-40 times, depending on how many soldiers you have, every time you research a new weapon tier (of which there are four).