Few tactical shooters stack up to XCOM. The venerable sci-fi series is considered best-in-class for the genre, thanks to a formula calcified in the widely praised XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its equally praised successor, XCOM 2. (The spinoff XCOM: Chimera Squad, released in 2020, is fine.)
But maybe you’ve played those games to death, and are craving something to fill the void. What follows is a tastefully chosen (if I do say so myself) selection of the best tactical shooters that are like XCOM without actually, y’know, being XCOM. Hopefully it’ll tide you over until XCOM 3—or, more realistically, until the studio’s Marvel-themed spinoff performs one of those silly superhero landings later this year.
