I got XCOM 2 for $5 on the steam sale. Been playing that for a week straight and really enjoying it.

I enjoyed the first one in a very limited way before getting frustrated and moving on. For XCOM 2 I went in with better expectations and forethought about the strategy being crucial to understand for the harder difficulties to be beatable. So I elected to play on the "veteran" difficulty (one step above the easiest).

It's definitely still been a bit frustrating at times, and I've had to resort to reloading saves more than I'd like to admit, cuz I'm going for a no deaths run. But now that I've almost beaten it and understand the ins and outs better, both in the field and in the larger planning room, I feel like I could bump the difficulty up a notch on a fresh playthrough.

It reminds me of playing a game like civilization where the missteps made early on can crush any hopes of survival even with tons of save reloads cheesing the odds.

I've been playing on my steam deck hooked up to my TV, and it runs pretty well. Had to tweak some settings but got it running 1920x1080 without any performance issues. Controller support is pretty good although it never recognizes my controller on game startup unless I manually switch input to keyboard and then back to controller.

I also noticed some crashing start occurring on a regular basis whenever loading a save, but restarting the deck resolved it.