“When thinking about what XCOM is, loss sort of underpins a lot of it,” said XCOM 2

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“ To say Impossible Iron Man is canon is perfect.

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“ ‘Out of all the millions of times Enemy Unknown was played, how many of them resulted in this story line?’

“ Central's gone through the difficulties that XCOM has.

Impossible is the highest of XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s difficulty settings, and gives the already-tough aliens significant bonuses to deployment numbers, hit points, aim, and critical hit bonuses, as well as starting every country with a higher panic level. It’s absolutely vicious, and only the very best commanders stand a chance against that threat – just 1.1% of all XCOM players on Steam have earned the Our Finest Hour achievement for beating Enemy Unknown on this setting.Iron Man, of course, is where you voluntarily give up the ability to reload a game from a save if things go horribly wrong, making soldier permadeath truly permanent and sending the tension level of every move through the roof. Only 1.7% of Steam players have the No Looking Back achievement for winning an Iron Man game, but that allows Classic, the second-highest difficulty setting, as well as Impossible. (I managed to earn that one on Classic, but I haven’t even come close on Impossible.)One bonus side effect of losing the first war with the aliens is that this setting is arguably a better fit for the kind of four- to six-man squad gameplay of XCOM 2 than Enemy Unknown, where the counter-invasion force ostensibly has the backing of the world’s resources. “It’s been a lot easier thematically,” admitted Solomon. “There was always a person who was like, ‘Why doesn’t the government just give you everything they have?’ Okay, this sort of fits. We’re very much a strike team that’s going in to infiltrate, whether it’s in these new city centers or whether you’re being dropped into these different locations, small towns, things like that.”

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references.