When malevolent aliens invade the Earth, it’s comforting to know that the fine men and women of the XCOM Project are back to defend our worldly borders. Few games are as beloved and revered by their fans as 1993’s X-COM: UFO Defense — an out-of-this-world feat for the relatively stodgy genre of turn-based strategy — so reactions ranged from “giddy” to “panicked” when news broke that Firaxis was working on a remake, Enemy Unknown. Well, consider us sold — this all-new XCOM lives up to the legacy, delivering a deep strategy experience that’s true to the original while streamlined enough to play well with an Xbox controller.
Enemy’s lengthy single-player campaign begins with an invasion by mystery ETs who start abducting humans from around the world. In response, the Earth’s major nations pool their resources to start the XCOM Project, an elite research and response organization formed to intercept alien assaults. If widespread panic overwhelms a country (usually because it was infiltrated by aliens), it’ll withdraw its support — and funding — from the project.
Surprisingly for a game published by 2K, the plot is pretty thin: “kill aliens, recover tech, and stop the invasion” is the order of the day, so don’t expect much in the way of narrative-filled cutscenes or interesting characters. Story missions slowly reveal the extraterrestrials’ secrets and ominous intent, but much of the game is spent meticulously macro-managing the XCOM Project inside your home base by directing resources and personnel, researching upgrades, appeasing funding nations, and scanning the globe for random threats and abductions — all on a very tight budget. When you respond to a threat with military force, the action switches to a turn-based mission in which you’ll direct a squad of up to six soldiers to engage aliens on the ground.
After the first handful of super-easy tutorial missions, Enemy’s difficulty ramps up considerably, even on the default setting. Abduction alerts tend to come with a choice of three scenarios, often ranging from grades of “Difficult” to “Very Difficult.” (“Easy” and “Moderate” become rarer as the game progresses.) In these situations, whichever two countries you ignore will experience a rise in their panic levels, bringing them closer to pulling out of the project, which means you’ll need to find other ways (launching satellites, fulfilling random requests) to calm them. And as soldiers are automatically promoted after missions, new specializations and abilities will unlock, meaning you’ll want to protect your veterans in the field as much as possible. One devastating attack from a creepy four-legged Chryssalid can turn a high-ranking soldier into a zombie…permanently. Fall behind in a key area — research, personnel, money, resources, or country support — and you might as well cede control of Earth to our new alien overlords.
The upshot of XCOM’s high difficulty is that you’ll need to manually save on a regular, if not constant, basis. (Autosave is off by default.) If too many funding nations leave the project over the course of the campaign, you’ll lose and either have to reload an earlier save or restart from the beginning of the campaign. Luckily, you can save at almost any time, either in combat or while at base.
The turn-based missions can be thrilling because you never know exactly what new aliens you’ll encounter or where they’ll show up on the map. Each soldier gets two moves per turn, and you can make them run to a new spot, take a shot, reload, enter Overwatch mode (set to reflexively fire when an alien comes into view), heal, or perform some class-specific maneuver. Likewise, the aliens are a creative mix of simple gun-toting Sectoids, burly Berserkers, heavily armored flying Cyberdiscs, mind-controlling Sectoid Commanders, and other assorted creepy-crawlies.
Besides the perfunctory storyline, which probably won’t be much of a negative for strategy diehards, our only real criticism with XCOM is that it doesn’t have the same level of sparkling polish we’ve come to expect from a 2K game.
The visuals are only so-so, with bland character models (especially the humans) and some dark, murky levels with indistinct environments. Important text is sometimes obscured by the background or drifts off-screen when presented in a pop-up bubble. And successful (and unsuccessful) missions are rewarded with the same dull, wordless cinematic of your ship flying back to base. On the whole, XCOM will keep fans spellbound with its depth, but it could’ve used a little more time in the cooker to add that something extra.
PUBLISHER: 2K Games • DEVELOPER: Firaxis Games • ESRB Mature • MULTIPLAYER 2 on Xbox Live • ACHIEVEMENTS: Inhuman • COST: $60
+ Deep turn-based strategy.
+ A fitting resurrection of a 20-year-old franchise.
– Lacks the extra polish we’d expect from a big-budget game; not much of a story; very tough difficulty curve.
? Why is multiplayer limited to two players?
Metalcor1987
October 29, 2012 at 11:58pm
I'm new to the Xcom universe, but I loved this game from beginning to end! Fully customizing your squad is awesome, MasterChief was my heavy, Marcus Fenix was my assault, Batman and John Shepard were my snipers, and Cortana and Damon Baird were my supports. RIP Brock Samson your sacrifice to stop four chrisalids will never be forgotten!
