This weekend, the New York Times reported on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which apparently found unidentifiable alien alloys. While we have no clue what the hell those alloys are, here are some video game alloys that might as well be real now.

I bought XCOM: Enemy Unknown five years ago and still haven’t touched it.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is a turn-based Shakespearean tragedy generator, and also there are aliens. Steam users have been sharing their tales of devastation, woe, and, every once in a while, victory.

There’s a mod for XCOM 2 called [WotC] Overwatch Mercy Squadmate. It does exactly what the name and picture here suggest, adding the angelic healer to XCOM 2's new expansion, War of the Chosen.

“Nothing lasts forever,” my mother told me when I was a child. “Not even 2K’s library of games—a few of which are pretty solid—on the App Store.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is a very good arts and crafts game that also includes the occasional tactical battle against aliens. Show me your best posters!

If you’ve never played XCOM 2, here’s my advice: Skip the vanilla version and start by playing the new expansion, War of the Chosen. It’s the best 2K’s XCOM series has ever been.

Back when Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor first came out in 2014, people pretty much immediately started asking, “When will other games get Nemesis Systems?” Flash forward three years, and the most prominent game to do it is… Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor. But soon you’ll be able to add XCOM 2 to that…

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was one of the strangest announcements at E3 this year, and fearless Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo got a chance to play it for about 15 minutes. Based on what we’ve seen so far, this mash-up works surprisingly well!

Phoenix Point is a new strategy game from Julian Gollop, creator of the original X-Com. Unlike his last game, Chaos Reborn, this one’s a spiritual successor to X-Com, on which the modern XCOM series is based. It’s still very much in development and is seeking funding on Fig.

All Walls Must Fall is a tactics game that owes as much to Rez as it does to XCOM. It takes place in a future Berlin where the Cold War never ended. Time-traveling agents loop the same night over and over via tactical battles that occur to the beat of music. Looks wild! It’s on Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter.

Long War was one of the first XCOM reboot’s most popular and beloved mods, so much so that XCOM 2 ended up liberally cribbing notes from its playbook. Now there’s a Long War for XCOM 2, and it’s a doozy.

Angela “Overkill” Hill is the strawweight champion of the world’s most prominent women’s MMA organization, Invicta. She’s on the verge of a second crack at UFC glory. Last time around, though, she found herself too bogged down by the pressures of fight life to compete as well as she could. These days, she’s using…

XCOM 2 is a phenomenal strategy game. The DLC Firaxis has released in its wake, on the other hand, has mostly been middling. Thankfully, Shen’s Last Gift is straight-up good. It lets you improve the shit out of your squad. With mechs.

Hello internet, it’s been a while. Ten months since my last blog in fact. There have been many reasons for the long pause: my marriage last August; the extensive renovations on our new home; the workload that comes with being a teacher, and other very grown-up things. For a few months I wasn’t even really playing…

Inspired by the announcement of Civilization VI, buccura added a certain familiar face to XCOM 2. Why’s he nicknamed “Nukem”? It’s a long, exceedingly amusing story.

Usually, XCOM 2 is a game where you battle aliens in missions, pray to god (who is probably also an alien) that your precious troops don’t get perma-killed, and purchase upgrades between missions. This mod changes that entirely.