XCOM 2 is free to keep on the Epic Games Store

This week’s headline free game on the Epic Games Store is a goodie: XCOM 2. You have one week to grab Firaxis’s sequel to their alien-busting turn-based tactics game, the streamlined reboot of ye olde X-COM games. XCOM 2 is a good game, well worth grabbing for free! Also free right now is Insurmountable, a roguelike like mountaineering game.

Hit the Epic Games Store before 4pm on Thursday the 21st and you can grab these two free for keepsies.

XCOM 2 is good. It is. fun stuff Really. Adam’s XCOM 2 review in 2016 called it “a classic in its own right and as good a sequel as I can remember.” But I’m being a little reserved because oh goodness me it is so, so, so much better with its expansion, War Of The Chosen, which isn’t included in the freebie. Yeah, XCOM 2 is nice. But XCOM 2: WOTC is fantastic. I’m in the final few missions of a WOTC game myself and have completed all the expansion and DLC missions, leaving me with a game that… it’s nice, it really is, but cor WOTC is a right beaut.

If you do want the whole shebang, the Epic Store is currently offering an 80% discount on a pack with XCOM 2’s expansion and all the DLC packs. Grab the base game for free and you can upgrade to get the rest for only £7.99. That discount lasts until the 28th. It’s more expensive than the Steam discount in February but still a great price.

Insurmountable is pretty decent too. In our 2021 Insurmountable review, Matthew Castle said that the attempt to channel mountain climbing into a roguelikelike was “a surprisingly taut genre fit, occasionally let down by fiddly execution.”

Today has also brought Insurmountable’s big version 2.0 update. It brings a new story, a new tutorial, side missions with procedurally generated maps, and more. That update’s hitting the Steam and GOG versions too, obvs.

After these two, the next freebies will be first-person horror Amnesia: Rebirth and top-down co-op monster-masher Riverbond. Thursday the 21st for those.