2,209 reviews. 82% positive. #3 on Steam’s New Releases chart. And a launch-day patch that erased a player’s 34-hour campaign.

Xenonauts 2 hit version 1.0 on April 2, 2026, and by every conventional metric, it’s a win for Goldhawk Interactive and publisher Hooded Horse. The hardcore turn-based strategy game — a spiritual successor to 1994’s X-COM: UFO Defense — carries a “Very Positive” rating across more than 2,000 player reviews. PC Gamer awarded it 91%. Shacknews scored it an 8 out of 10. Not bad for a game built around managing individual soldier vision cones and time-unit budgets in a genre most major publishers have long since abandoned.

Then you read the most visible negative review on the Steam page, from a player with 33.8 hours logged: “Their updated deleted all of my saved data and now I can only start a new game. Waste of time and money.”

For a studio celebrating the finish line of a nearly three-year Early Access marathon, that’s a self-inflicted wound at the worst possible moment.

Three Years of Building

Xenonauts 2 first entered Early Access in July 2023. Over seven major milestones, Goldhawk overhauled the air-combat system, rebuilt the tutorial, and added a more involved early game centered on The Cleaners — a pro-alien militia working to sabotage the player’s resistance efforts before the invasion proper begins. The studio layered in new alien enemy types, bigger UFO classes, a defined endgame with closing cinematics, and reworked strategic-layer mechanics including a supporters system and redesigned invasion phases.

According to the Hooded Horse press release, the 1.0 build also ships with new 3D models and animations, expanded maps and biomes, Steam Workshop integration for modding, localization into 15 languages, and what the publisher describes as “an alien invasion’s worth of bug-fixes, tweaks, and quality of life improvements.”

The critical reception suggests those iterations paid off. PC Gamer’s reviewer — who admitted to never playing the ’90s originals — wrote that Xenonauts 2 “finally revealed the truth” about the classic X-COM design, praising the tactical battles as the “star of the show” and celebrating moments of hard-won triumph against overwhelming odds.

Shacknews called the ground combat “excellent,” noting that even opening doors with the game’s fog of war always felt like “tugging on the wires of a bomb waiting to go off.” Both outlets agreed the difficulty is punishing even on normal. Shacknews singled out air combat as the weak link, calling it “shallow and easily solved” — a minigame that collapses into a repetitive afterburn-and-barrel-roll routine.

The Self-Inflicted Wound

A 1.0 launch is also a marketing moment, and the save-wiping issue is drawing attention at exactly the wrong time. The negative review sits prominently on the Steam page, and its author isn’t a drive-by troll — they invested 34 hours into the game before an update made that investment disappear. Another player with 37.7 hours logged suggested they also had to restart after a recent update, though they maintained a positive recommendation.

This is the structural risk of Early Access done long. Developers iterate for years with real players funding and testing the product. But when the final build introduces changes incompatible with existing saves, the community that carried the game through development is told their progress no longer counts. Some accept it as the cost of early participation. Others — evidently — do not.

Goldhawk had not publicly addressed the save-deletion reports as of press time. A patch, an explanation, or even a straightforward acknowledgment could defuse the situation quickly. Every hour of silence is another hour that review climbs the visibility rankings.

A Cult Following, Renewed

The original Xenonauts launched in 2014 from the same UK-based studio and developed a cult following that sustained Goldhawk for over a decade. Xenonauts 2 is that loyalty made tangible — a sequel built on the conviction that an audience still exists for uncompromising, old-school tactical strategy where a single bad turn can end a 20-hour campaign.

At 731 concurrent players and climbing, with a 35% launch discount dropping the price to $25.99 through April 15 on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store, that conviction appears well-founded. This was never going to compete with the AAA floor. Hooded Horse — the publisher behind Manor Lords and Against the Storm — has built its entire business on serving audiences that major publishers ignore.

Xenonauts 2 looks like another data point validating that strategy. Goldhawk just needs to patch the one that’s bleeding.

Sources