2K Games and Firaxis have succeeded in rekindling a long-dead franchise with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This turn-based strategy?game?is a reimagining of 1994's X-COM: UFO Defense, a long-beloved game that last saw a sequel in 2001 with the ill-received X-COM: Enforcer, a shooter that didn't have any of the first game's strategy. XCOM: Enemy Unknown feels like a straight remake of the original, bringing almost everything gamers loved about it to the PC, Xbox 360?, and PlayStation 3?, with updated graphics, streamlined gameplay, and plenty of challenge. I reviewed the PC version.
Aliens Attack
The premise of XCOM: Enemy Unknown is simple. Aliens are invading. They're starting with abductions, but as the game progresses it becomes all-out war against Earth. That's where you come in. You command XCOM, a global team that has to fight the aliens. You alternate between the strategic organization level and the tactical combat level, winning battles and building your forces to be ready for new threats.
Half of the game takes place in XCOM headquarters, where you have to manage a large underground installation with multiple types of facilities and uses. Scientists research alien equipment you bring back and let you equip your squads with newer and better weapons and armor. Engineers build the new equipment and excavate and construct new facilities in your headquarters. Soldiers can be given different types of equipment and assigned different skills based on their randomly-assigned class (Assault, Heavy, Support, and Sniper) and their rank, which acts as a level system that rewards soldiers you keep alive and in missions. The Situation Room lets you monitor levels of panic around the world and deploy satellites to improve your cash flow and ability to track threats. These are are important because new equipment and facilities cost money and if too many countries and areas panic and leave the XCOM alliance, the shadowy council will pull the plug on it. Finally, Mission Control lets you scan the planet for threats, respond to requests for aid, and scramble interceptors to shoot down UFOs. Time slowly ticks by in the headquarters unless you speed it up by scanning the world, and those hours and days that pass mean you can research new equipment and build new facilities. The more time that passes, the more time the aliens have to send bigger threats your way, so you have to balance between focusing on shoring up your equipment and taking the fight to them.
Future Warfare
The other half of the game takes place on the ground in different combat missions. You control a squad of up to six soldiers who kill aliens, rescue civilians, defuse bombs, and perform other tasks in large, tile-based, multi-level maps. Each turn, your soldiers can perform up to two actions: move and shoot, move twice as far, move and use items, and perform special attacks like fire rocket launchers (for heavy soldiers) and deal extra damage with head shots (for snipers). As soldiers grow by killing aliens and surviving missions, they get new skills. However, if they die in combat, they're gone and you have to replace them with a less experienced soldier. Since each soldier can be given unique names and looks, it's easy to become attached to them as you walk them through multiple missions, and it makes it that much harder to see them get disintegrated by an alien laser pistol. You'll constantly? weigh the merits of aggressively moving forward to complete the mission and trying to keep all your squad alive. The soldier customization isn't quite as robust as in the original XCOM, but it has enough options to give you control over your squad and make you feel attached to your soldiers.
Cover and maneuvering are every bit as important as skills and equipment in battle. Each map is covered in a fog of war, and you need to carefully move your squad forward while keeping them out of the open to find the aliens without getting everyone killed in a few moves. Cover like cars, walls, and wreckage afford your soldiers protection and can mean the difference between an alien winging a soldier and putting him in the infirmary for a week and outright blowing his head off. It's a simple, vital element that is easy enough to use (move your soldiers to objects on the battlefield that show shields or half-shields, depending on how much cover they give in different directions) and keeps the game from becoming a question of loading up heavy weapons and rushing the enemy.
Each playthrough randomizes events, and missions are randomly generated from a pool of maps and objectives (most involving killing all the aliens). It gives the game some variety, but the maps and missions tend to feel similar as you play a full game. Like Diablo III?, XCOM: Enemy Unknown would have benefitted from a more granular, tile-based system that procedurally generates maps instead of taking huge, familiar game chunks and bringing them together. It feels less random than the original X-Com, like Diablo III feels less random than Diablo II.
PC Gameplay
I played the PC version, which uses a mouse and keyboard to control the game. Since the action is tile-based, moving soldiers and making them fire is as easily as right-clicking on a location and left-clicking on an enemy. The gamepad controls of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions are about as accessible, using the analog stick instead of a mouse but otherwise offering the same tactical control.
A multiplayer mode lets you face off against friends, but it's fairly limited. Multiplayer games are squad-based with point limits, giving each unit both human (based on equipment) and alien a point value. Players can have small squads of a few very powerful units or a full squad of weak or modest units, and there's no single right way to do it. It's a fun way to play the alien units, but there isn't much depth to it.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is the return of a beloved and forgotten sci-fi franchise that will entertain tactics fans and satisfy classic gaming fans.?More randomized maps and more online options would have been great, but as it stands XCOM: Enemy Unknown is already an excellent strategy game, despite the features it lacks.
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