XCOM 2 Collection 1.2.3

Twenty years after world leaders surrendered, Earth runs on the aliens’ promised future. Resistance is scattered, underfunded, and outgunned. This is the problem XCOM 2 Collection drops on your desk — and the Avenger’s bridge is where you solve it, one covert op at a time.

What the Collection includes

• Alien-occupied Earth setting two decades after the initial invasion
• Five soldier classes, each with its own talent tree
• Mission system that varies maps and objectives across different locations
• Guerrilla tactics: ambushes, loot collection, and evacuation ops
• Avenger base building — rooms grant battlefield advantages
• Research and engineering for weapons, armour, and upgrades
• Mod tools for custom campaigns, alien types, classes, and tactical rules
• Interface localised into 11 languages

Rosetta 2 Playability on an M1 MacBook Air

The build is Intel x86-64 and runs through Rosetta 2. On a 2020 MacBook Air with an M1 chip under macOS Sequoia, the game is playable, though you should set expectations accordingly. Turn-based strategy forgives modest frame rates, so the passive-cooled Air handles mission maps without issue — just keep shadows and ambient occlusion dialled back. Load times are unremarkable, and fanless operation means the laptop stays quiet throughout long planning sessions on the Avenger.

08:42 on the Avenger: Launch to Tactical

You launch the app from the Applications folder. The main menu loads — no splash-screen delays worth mentioning on the M1 Air under Rosetta. You pick Load Game and drop straight onto the Avenger’s bridge at 08:42, in-game time. Bradford is already pointing at a hologlobe marker over eastern Europe.

The first five minutes are pure housekeeping. You sweep the research lab: the autopsied ADVENT Shieldbearer finally unlocked plated armour. You queue the engineering team to build three sets — estimated completion, six days. A quick check of the infirmary shows your top Sharpshooter still down for another eight days with a critical wound. No grenadier to fill the gap, so you re-jig the squad roster right there on the squad-select screen, dragging a second Ranger into the mix.

Next comes the geoscape layer. Three resistance havens are flashing — a retaliation strike in progress, a guerrilla op with an engineer reward, and a supply raid labelled “moderate” enemy activity. You scan the Dark Events list: if you skip the guerrilla op, ADVENT armour upgrades go live in three weeks. You take the guerrilla op. The Avenger’s flight path sweeps across the Atlantic, and you spend the transit time in the Armory kitting out the squad with an experimental medikit and a freshly built mimic beacon.

Mission boots. The Skyranger drops your five soldiers at the edge of a half-destroyed city square. Concealment is active. You spend three full minutes on the opening overwatch trap — nothing moves into sight, so you inch a Phantom Ranger up the left flank. She spots a pod: two Troopers, one Officer, and a Viper coiled behind a burnt-out van. You set up the ambush. The grenadier launches a plasma grenade to shred armour, the Sharpshooter cleans up the Viper from high ground, and the Rangers mop up. One Trooper survives and calls for backup — now you have two turns to reach the objective before reinforcements arrive. The extraction zone is on the far side of the map. That tight timer forces a sprint, which costs you a Specialist caught out of cover on turn five. She bleeds out. You finish the mission, bag the engineer, and fly home with four soldiers and a memorial to pin on the barracks wall.

Back on the Avenger: promote survivors, assign the new engineer to a power relay, save, and quit. The loop took roughly 40 minutes of real time.

Game Won’t Open? Clear the Gatekeeper Block

Game won’t launch after copying to Applications. The disk image mounts fine, but double-clicking the icon does nothing. Usually a Gatekeeper block. Head to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the security section, and you should see a prompt about an app from an unidentified developer. Click Open Anyway. This is a one-time step for the build.

Frame drops on mission maps with lots of fire and smoke. The Intel binary means some effects hit the M1’s GPU harder than you would expect. Turn Screen Space Ambient Occlusion off entirely. Drop Shadow Quality to low and switch Anti-Aliasing to FXAA — the performance gain is noticeable, and the art style still holds up well at medium viewing distances.

Mods not showing in the launcher. XCOM 2 Collection looks for mods in the same directory structure the Windows version uses, but the macOS path is different. Create a Mods folder at the right location — Feral’s documentation spells it out — and restart the game. If a mod still fails, check whether it requires the War of the Chosen highlander mod or another dependency you have skipped.

Soldier customisation pool not saving. The character pool saves to a local .bin file. If you play across multiple machines or wipe your preferences folder, the pool disappears. Export it manually from the Character Pool menu after a heavy editing session. The export button is tucked in the bottom-left corner of that screen — easy to miss.

The long-war player’s Saturday morning

A player who has clocked hundreds of hours in XCOM: Enemy Unknown approaches XCOM 2 Collection with a specific goal: a Legend difficulty run with no squad-size upgrades and the “Ironman” option ticked. They boot the game on a quiet Saturday morning, coffee within reach.

Month one is brutal. The first retaliation mission lands on day 12. Three resistance fighters and four squaddies against a pod of Stun Lancers and a Sectoid. The player spends twenty minutes wrestling with line-of-sight previews, counting tiles, and debating whether to evac early and fail the mission or risk a full wipe. They push forward. Two soldiers are knocked unconscious; a third panics and shoots a civilian. The mission ends in a technical success with a single soldier standing — a Grenadier at two health with the extraction zone three tiles away.

They spend the next hour rebuilding: rotating rookies through easy guerrilla ops, prioritising weapon fragments over corpses at the research screen, and selling excess elerium cores on the Black Market for supplies. Avenger rooms are placed with obsessive adjacency — a Workshop flanked by a Power Relay and a Resistance Comms centre, leaving exactly one exposed slot for a future Proving Ground. The Shadow Chamber comes online in month three, two weeks behind the ideal schedule, but still early enough to reveal the first Chosen’s weaknesses before the assault on the stronghold.

By lunchtime the campaign is stabilised, and the player closes the lid knowing the real test — the first Chosen encounter — waits on the hologlobe, saved mid-mission at turn three.

• Mac version — initial release build

• Architecture: Intel x86-64 (runs on Apple Silicon via Rosetta 2)
• Tested on macOS Sequoia, 2020 MacBook Air with Apple M1