Originally posted December 2012
Strategy games (turn-based or otherwise) usually have their own niche market. Sure, there are the Blizzard strategy games that have a wide appeal and the franchises like Civilization that have been around for decades. With no new Starcraft experience till next year, and the popularity of the first-person shooter ever increasing, it was unlikely there were going to be any big strategy games in time for the holidays. Yet the people at Fireaxis were able to deliver the goods. It may not have been a new Civilization game, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown is still a true gem of this year along with a franchise name about as old as the Civilization games. But is this gem a perfect diamond, or do the cracks make the edges too sharp to hold?Story
It’s a pretty straight-forward experience: Aliens invade, the world is in a panic, the nations’ representatives activate the “XCOM project” to help defend against the assault, and you take the role of the silent commander in charge of Earth’s last line of defense. The story is told mostly through one-way dialogue bubbles with the primary characters of the base which include: the typical ambitious scientist, the pessimistic engineer, and the confident military advisor. Occasionally there will be a cut-scene involving these characters interacting with each other or talking to you directly as the commander.The story the three provide you is nothing short of familiar to the genre. It doesn’t matter if you wish to reference games, movies, or comics; the story is nothing new. But that’s okay because Uncharted 2 showed that you can have a fun experience through a game’s campaign that is entirely familiar and full of archetypes or clichés, so long as it’s done well. For the most part, XCOM delivers. The characters are convincing and the moments are memorable. When you shoot down your first UFO and the cinematic plays of all the people clapping their hands in celebration, you’ll be pretty pleased with yourself. This is especially true if you’ve already experienced the game’s unforgiving difficulties.
The game will not be easy and it sets you up for it with the tutorials, should you choose to utilize that function. In the very first mission the game requires you to lead your team in a specific way, which inevitably ends with their names in the memorial. This is to get players used to the possibility of failure and death among their subordinates. If you choose to take up the challenge of playing this game on Classic Ironman mode, which is the equivalent of “hard mode” with only one save and no ability to take back your poor decisions, you will be in for a lot of heartache and, unfortunately, it may not be over the death of your soldiers.
Gameplay
Much like Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls, XCOM is an unforgiving game. There will be plenty of moments where the battle is seemingly unfair or overwhelming, but through good luck and wise decisions earth’s defenses were able to overcome the odds. Then the game will smack all that confidence you may have gained back down with a battle that, at first, looked like a walk in the park but somehow managed to annihilate the entire team through exploiting your confidence and carelessness.Be prepared to see your elite squad of soldiers with superhuman abilities and high-tech equipment miss their target frequently, even though there was a helpful statistic telling you they had a 98% chance of making the shot. Unfortunately, due to the unforgiving nature of this game, your entire mission is likely hinging on your soldier making that shot, because if they miss, the aliens with the better gear and abilities are much less likely to do the same. All too often, your mission’s success depends on whether or not each member of the team can hit the same, over-powered enemy.
You will shake your head, you will put your face in your hands, and you will raise your hands to the sky to represent the shame, shock, and bliss of success you experience when playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Despite its unforgiving nature, or perhaps because of it, each untarnished victory is extremely rewarding; much like the taste of victory in Dark Souls. Likewise, losing some of your best soldiers will likely have the opposite effect. You can, of course, save and load up the game prior to your mistakes that lead to their deaths, should you choose not to engage in Ironman mode. However, the risk/reward of playing with no back up saves makes the game so much more intense when playing on Ironman, it’s hard to recommend playing the game with the option to simply load up a previous save; unless taking into account the possibility of glitches.
Unfortunately, XCOM suffers immensely from bugs and glitches. It’s difficult to say if there was ever another game that was so fun to play that the game-breaking glitches XCOM endures did not completely mar the experience. Still, there is still no excuse for some of the glitches encountered. On multiple occasions, forward progression was completely prevented due to the game simply being unable to continue, or because an enemy fell through the map and didn’t die, even though it was required to kill it before proceeding further (this happened in the final level). Nothing will make you want to stop playing a game more than getting all the way to the end, victory well within your sights, only to realize that since you only had one save from playing Ironman mode, you are completely f***** for something outside of your control and, therefore, must start over from the very beginning.
It says a great deal that even after experiencing these game-breaking flaws, the game is still easily recommendable because the core gameplay is so fun. XCOM does a good job at making the player feel like they are in charge of Earth’s last line of defense and that your decisions have a real impact on whether or not human’s will survive the alien attack. Part of this is achieved in the meta-game where players have to direct the construction of their base along with designating any research, engineering, or training that needs to take place. There are particular bonuses and detriments to where you build your facilities, forcing you to plan out the placement of your base, lest you wish to go bankrupt in a few months due to careless planning.
There is something to be said with the sublime pleasure one experiences when a project is completed at headquarters, too. Whether, it’s the construction of a new satellite nexus, allowing you to launch more satellites into orbit and thus increasing your monthly funds, or simply the most recent autopsy completed by the scientists, the upgrades and bonuses you get from completing the necessary maintenance is very rewarding. The developers were able to really come up with a good technique of dangling the carrot, enticing players to plan and continue their next task. Not to mention, sometimes the reward is simply seeing the level of detail the developers put into developing their world. For instance, with the research department, every time a project is completed like an alien autopsy or the studying of some alien weaponry, a lengthy page of text comes up describing the technology in detail and well within the character of the lead researcher. It helps immerse the player and tells the story in a more meaningful way. Nothing makes it seem like the human race is more of an underdog than reading how the human version of the plasma rifle could be studied for years, but this makeshift thing that cost a quarter of your monthly funds to replicate is the best they could do with a week’s time to research it.
There is a downside to this part of the game. If you manage to survive to the later parts of XCOM, the research and development of your base start to level out and become less rewarding as the campaign slows to a crawl and XCOM becomes more of a waiting game as you twiddle your thumbs in anticipation for the next encounter and opportunity to reap the rewards—these rewards being pieces of alien technology that you can put into further research and engineering projects. Once you’ve established your base as successful, you end up just sitting and waiting for the next UFO interception. This is an unfortunate reward for those skilled enough to make it over XCOM’s rough learning curve. While the story may be prolonged due to the delaying of decisions, much of the alien’s arsenal will continue to improve at its own rate. This means, if you take your time, or lose too many of your best soldiers, the battle will only be tougher to win as the aliens get better and you stay the same.
But this part of XCOM is more than just an underground Sim City that rewards you for planning and having your minions do research in the midst of an impending disaster. The meat of the gameplay lies with the soldiers on the battlefield. With the idea of a dangling carrot in mind, each of your soldiers has his/her own stats and abilities based on their classes and as they level up, improve in those abilities accordingly. Each soldier starts out a rookie with no clear distinction between weapon preferences or valid abilities to assist on the battlefield. Upon leveling up, the soldier enters a class (you don’t get to choose which). From here, a tech tree forms in which you must decide with each increase in level, which skill the soldier should have. Many of these choices will be difficult to make as the skills all have their uses, so you really have to choose based on your playstyle. For instance, a sniper-prone player will likely have 2 snipers per team of six each specialized in their own way; one will be for hanging back in a single spot and shooting enemies their squadmates see with the use of squad sight ability, while the other will be used for flanking/scouting and getting to the high ground.
While the formulas in place seem very straightforward, it can lead to some unorthodox strategies that will cause even the most amateurish commanders to blush with the success of their ingenuity. It’s often after these moments that the commander will get cocky and send a unit out too far into the battlefield, sealing his/her fate. There can be times that the proper use of cover and special abilities by your teams in the field can get their teammates out of sticky situations, but such an occasion is rare. Nonetheless, there are multiple playstyles available to you and the core gameplay of tactically taking down armies of aliens with just a squad of 4-6 soldiers is extremely satisfying. There are moments where the controls stick or a glitch occurs and units will go to the wrong spot on the map, leaving themselves exposed. Or there will be times when the units will be able to shoot at an enemy that is seemingly covered completely, but will still appear as “exposed”. Yet, these are still not enough to make the game an overall pleasure.
At least, that’s true with the single player. Multiplayer can be a different experience altogether. Playing against another human who has a grasp on the game’s exploits with the sense of competition that comes with multiplayer matches always led to more frustration than satisfaction; the glitches and unresponsive controls didn’t help. Even the victories didn’t feel legit as there were times when the enemy’s units just ended up in locations that no one would intentionally leave their soldier. With a timer in place to keep things moving, the unresponsiveness of the controls really becomes more apparent. You want your sniper to move to the corner square on the roof, but, for whatever reason, the block keeps shifting back to the adjacent square and there are only 90 seconds left for you do this with the rest of your squad. Perhaps playing against a friend, this would be a more satisfying experience, but for the most part, it was better just to stick with the campaign; the randomness of each encounter serve well toward the game’s replay value anyway.
Presentation
Once again, the experience is marred a bit by the frequent glitches, but will not impact the overall experience enough to turn you away, which can also be said for the presentation. There were times when a sniper would switch to his/her pistol yet the gun’s texture remained the same, which lead to funny moments where a solder would hold a sniper-rifle with both hands outstretched and experience the typical kickback of a pistol when firing. It’s amusing and relatively harmless in an otherwise good-looking game.XCOM uses the Unreal 3 engine, which continues to show its age. Textures will take a while to load and frequently pop in well after the level has loaded. The grid on which every soldier moves through each map can appear ugly at times, particularly when under water; the lines of the grid would have the tendency to interact with the water that was just a little weird to see. Still, the textures do look nice once they’ve properly loaded.
The art direction is where this game is visually appealing. The alien designs are as creative as they are familiar. There are the typical ones that have the big heads and bug eyes, but the chrysilid and muton designs are fresh and show that the team really had an idea for how they wanted to make the aliens a threat to the human race. The little touches to the armor and weapon design as well as the details the characters provide in text or dialogue help add to the immersion as well as make the world just a little more interesting. There is a lot of information at your disposal if you really want to get lost in the descriptive world of XCOM.
The sound is stellar with some real satisfying blasts from the explosions and alien blasters. The sound of a plasma rifle is really pleasing and terrifying at the same time. Not to mention, the death rattles of the soldiers and aliens can linger in your mind in a way that shows they put some effort into making their sound work. But it’s the music that steals the show in the sound department. From the same composer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Michael McCann, the music blends some ominous tones in a techno-heavy orchestral score. It serves well at amping up the action just as it does as being ambient sound while you set up your squad in the foggy swamp.
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