I am officially looking at mods for XCOM 2. I love challenging games, and I've been a good sport. But XCOM 2's balancing is a total mess.

Enemies regularly one-shot my "on a roof behind full cover" soldiers, while my guys can't hit an alien in the head from three feet away. And when they do hit, the shots are constantly "grazing", or simply doing pathetic amounts of damage.

But that's ok-- I've toiled away and made plentiful use of the game's quick saving and loading, probably to the tune of two hundred times in my thirty hours playing the game so far, making the game tough, but not impossible.

Until today: I hit one of those missions with the damned timers, that force you to run head-long into the insanity, versus playing calmly and strategically. Right from the get-go, there was a Turret, an Archon, a Heavy Lancer, an Officer, and a Shield Bearer. Given the hit and damage problems I laid out above, that's probably a five or six turn encounter all-told, on an eight timer mission.

But I'm pretty good at this genre, having played it for nigh-on thirty years and having beaten some of the category's most difficult entries. So, I manage the situation pretty well for a few turns, hacking the Turret and gradually battling my way to the objective-- until reinforcements arrived. This dropped down another Captain, another Heavy Lancer, and another Advanced Solider. At that point, I had six enemies, who I can barely hit, surrounding my five guy party.

Realizing the impossibility of my predicament, I sent the team into bug out mode, making a mad dash for the objective. My first solider arrived in the target room, and guess what was behind the building: a Codex, a Heavy Lancer, and another Officer.

My very next action was to hit escape, and click on the "Quit to Desktop" option. I give up. I surrender. The aliens win.

I did some reading about this game last night, and it turns out that at the eleventh hour, they completely scrapped and re-did the game's balancing, because the developers who wrote the engine thought it was too easy. Balancing a game based on the programmer's experience is one of the core game design 101 no-no's, taught in every game design college course and presentation. And XCOM 2 is a case-in-point example of why not to do that.

My hope is that I can find some mods to reduce the enemy counts in the missions back to reasonable levels, eliminate those obnoxious timers, and make my characters' aim as good as the aliens', in some combination that feels like the game is properly balanced. My goal is for it to be difficult, but fair, which is not how the game feels in its shipped form. Right now, it plays like one of those totally amateur "let's throw a bunch of Bowsers into a room with a spring floor" Super Mario Maker levels.