Meanwhile, enemy reinforcements have gotten much, much meaner. That’s a problem with the main game, too, but it’s often more pronounced here. Rushing in to get a clean shot can just as easily bring another five or six enemies down on your head before you’re ready for them. In my experience this balance change has been a good one in individual firefights because it reduces the dependency on explosives as a one-size-fits-all solution, though the increased number and size of enemy pods on the map tends to make flanking extremely risky. And with some often-aggressive turn timers on many of the mission types (including several new ones, like jailbreaks), getting bogged down in a firefight can be the difference between success and failure. That makes it much more difficult to push through entrenched enemies because you have to either bring up some heavier weaponry (such as a Grenadier with an anti-cover upgrade) to blast them out or flank them. Most standard-issue grenades will only damage the enemy hiding behind the object, so they’re still good for bombarding a position, but nowhere near as effective at quickly ending a fight. “The biggest shock to the system in moment-to-moment combat – on top of the much greater variety of Advent troop variants and their heavier weaponry – is no longer being able to depend on regular grenades to destroy enemy cover.
