A flogging willingly endured
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a turn-based strategy game developed by Firaxis. Brutally challenging and immensely satisfying, XCOM grabs a hold of you and never lets go. It’s packed to the brim with interesting content, always testing your willpower and ability to make consequential decisions. The game juxtaposes a resource managing strategy component with a turn-based combat game that combine to create a robust, demanding experience. Constantly faced with critical decisions, XCOM will have you balancing expenditures and managing time, making unremitting trade-offs throughout. This game leeches onto some deep part of your psyche and sucks you into its blissfully maddening, tumultuous world.
The most exciting element of XCOM is its well paced, intricate combat. Thankfully, you are eased into the action during the first few hours of the game. The battlefield is broken down into a multilevel grid, filled with various objects and buildings that can be used as cover. Small objects like benches and and trash cans offer half cover and larger objects like walls and trucks provide full cover (you can still be attacked in full cover). Enemies are scattered about each map, remaining hidden until you gain line of sight on them. Each soldier in your party of four to six units is allocated two moves per turn. You can either make a small move, and take an action, or, use both of your moves to cover a large amount of ground, leaving your soldier defenseless and unable to make another move. Positioning soldiers at higher elevations grants bonuses to accuracy and defense. Soldier’s available actions include firing upon enemies, activating a defensive stance, reloading, using special abilities, and activating a reactionary stance called “overwatch”. Overwatch will trigger if an enemy advances into your soldier’s line of sight. If triggered, your soldier will take a reaction shot, hopefully hitting the enemy. This ability is the crux of the combat. It’s what’s going to keep your troops alive and maintain your sanity. Rather than rushing into battle, you should be focusing on slowly advancing and keeping soldiers in overwatch until you spot enemies. This will assure that you are ready for a flank and won’t be left unprepared.. I lost a lot of soldiers before I learned this - combat is definitely not to be rushed through.
Your soldiers gain experience through battle and learn new abilities. Each soldier starts as a rookie and upon their first promotion, attain a class type that will determine their leveling tree. The classes are medic, assault, heavy, and sniper. Medics can use defensive abilities and heal allies, assaults have greater movement distance and close range capabilities, heavies carry light machine guns and rockets, and snipers have long range with high damage, but suffer some movement penalties. Each class feels distinct, specialized, and useful. Mastering their roles in battle is essential to your success. Their talent trees are filled with well thought out abilities that you’ll have to select wisely. Usually, there will be two abilities to choose from and rarely is there a clear-cut choice. You’re always making a trade-off - both gaining and losing capabilities. It’s important to try to keep these soldiers alive as they’ll gain immense power during their later levels and are irreplaceable during the second half of the campaign.
Keeping your soldiers alive is a difficult task thanks to the game’s terrifying cast of aliens. They range from small mundane looking aliens with three bars of health all the way up to hulking robots with twenty bars of health, capable of launching a barrage of missiles at a helpless group of your soldiers. The repertoire of aliens in between can launch AOE poison attacks, flank you by using propulsion jets, turn your troops into zombies that eventual spawn more enemies, and the nastier ones can use mind control to force your troops into firing upon friendly units. All of these enemies have great names too: sectopod, thin man, muton, floater and chryssalid to name a few. You’ll get to know them all very well as they’ll be wreaking havoc on your sorry ass the entire game.
The game is anchored by the XCOM base which serves as the game’s main hub. This is where all of the research, construction, and battle preparations are conducted in between combat missions. The base is presented as a 2D/3D cross-section of a sprawling underground network resembling an ant farm. You can see each little room in action - the laboratory, engineering bay, the hangar, etc. This view looks really slick and resembles sort of dream toy I wish I had during my childhood.
The actions taking place in the base are a separate game from the combat scenarios. Your goal is to push your technologies ahead while keeping panic levels down across the globe. You’ll do this by scanning the planet for alien threats, shooting down UFOs, fighting off alien invasions, launching satellites, and taking your research forward. Most of the research is done in the laboratories. You can perform autopsies on enemies and research powerful new alien technologies that will hopefully give you a fighting chance against the opposition. After each successful research project, you are rewarded with a creatively written description of the project’s findings along with an upgrade. These upgrades can be built in the engineering bay. This is where you can build things like new weapons, armor, accessories, satellites, ships, etc. The engineering bay also allows you to construct new base components underground. After excavating an area, you can build additional labs, power generators (needed to power base add-ons), satellite uplinks (allows multiple satellites to be launched), a foundry (additional research projects), and an interrogation chamber.
All of the research projects and construction take time and money. Time slowly passes and is accelerated by scanning the globe - it’s sort of like a dice roll. Hitting a button rotates the globe causing days to pass by until you are randomly prompted with an invading UFO, ground mission, or special request. While time passes, projects get completed and soldiers recover from battle wounds. Completing these random events reduces panic in certain countries, nets you spoils from battle, and contributes to your overall monthly rating. Your rating is basically a report card that grades your performance and governs the amount of pay you’ll earn. You also earn money by selling items recovered from battle (something that’s never explained). Money and time are FLEETING. At no point will you ever feel like you have enough of either resource and you’ll constantly be scratching your head wondering what to do next.
XCOM does an amazing job of making you feel completely screwed. You’re always faced with the threats of countries backing out of the project, lack of money and time, losses of soldiers in battle, and aliens shooting down your hard earned satellites and ships. You’re constantly on edge trying to stay ahead of the heaping pile of crap the game is throwing at you. It’s overwhelming, difficult and totally nuts... yet, this is all somehow enjoyable - it’s maddeningly pleasurable in some masochistic, self-flagellating sort of way.
You’re never free of danger or at ease during the campaign. Trade-offs are a major theme running throughout. For everything thing you choose to do, something else suffers as a result. If you pick a perk for a soldier, you miss out on another strong perk. If you decide to aide a panic ridden country, the threat level in two other countries rises. If you move a soldier twice to cover more ground on a turn, your soldier will more than likely sustain damage. You need to maintain harmony between your overall offensive and defensive capabilities. You’re constantly trying to balance out your choices and expenditures, always making sacrifices. There’s an astounding amount of things to spend your money on and there’s not nearly enough cash to fund it all. It’s all completely nerve-racking and mentally ruinous.
Thankfully, overcoming the game’s hardships feels truly monumental. As a result of the game being such an abject asshole to you, beating it down couldn’t feel any better. I found myself cheering out loud on several occasions after landing an unlikely critical hit on an enemy or luckily dodging a missile barrage. The feeling you get when you finish a mission with all of your troops alive is all-out catharsis. It’s overcoming this gauntlet that keeps you coming back. It’s akin to a game like Super Meat Boy or Trials in its unforgiving, yet rewarding gameplay.
XCOM enemy unknown is beast of game. It’s a relentless, frenetic assault on your mind’s well being and it’s awesome. Its beating is willingly endured thanks to the game’s ability to keep you just barely ahead of the aliens at every turn. You’ll constantly be scraping together resources and making advancements to keep an edge up on the enemies. The sense of progression and the game’s requisite vigilance is what makes it so satisfying to overcome and so hard to put down. You truly feel like a commander leading during a time of crisis. It’s certainly not for everybody, but if you’re in the mood something unique and challenging, this is your game.
