The Skyranger lunged at the subway platform in Delhi, India. Thrusters vectoring down on their gimbals, the big tires taking the impact on thick shocks. The fireteam burst from the landing ramp into the dark and the rain, with Assaulter Edwin “Geronimo” Garcia up front. They saw blood, a fine mist of it along the stairs, a small pool on the landing. The way it reflected the light, you could tell it was fresh. A paper bag blew along the ground as my men slowly tucked into hard cover behind the railway signage. I strained to hear our quarry in the night.
We were not alone. A tall, thin man with round glasses stepped from the shadows across the track. And then came his twin—and his triplicate. Another pair of clones beside a commuter bench were illuminated by a flash of lightning. And then our world was lit green by plasma fire coming from all directions. Kim “Steady” Check, our heavy gunner, set one of the clones inside her holographic sights. The rest of the team had a solid target now and let loose volleys of their own. Metal wilted around my team, chips of concrete flew, but they kept firing into the night.
Consider the audacity of Firaxis Games’ Jake Solomon. It’s all fine and good to praise X-Com: Enemy Unknown as one of the finest PC games ever made. But to remake it? Many have tried to modernize the game and failed, including series originator Julian Gallop himself. Perhaps the most successful games to follow in X-Com’s turn-based tactical footsteps were Valkyria Chronicles and Frozen Synapse, but they never dared to tie combat to base building and a tech tree. Solomon’s team went for it, and just to make it harder on themselves, they tacked on the added goal of broadening the game’s audience to include console gamers.
They straight up nailed it.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown puts you in control of the eponymous paramilitary organization, tasked with defending the earth from an alien menace. You will take the field in small, tactical engagements fought from an isometric perspective with soldiers that grow unique abilities over time. You will return to your base with fantastic treasures in the form of alien technology, then research your way into driving the alien scum from Earth once and for all. You will have to patiently build an underground base, relentlessly recruit talented engineers and scientists, all while keeping the population of the planet safe and at ease with the growing threat of abduction and xeno-terrorism. These are the same spinning plates found in the classic 1994 game of the same name, and the tensions and the traumas feel very much the same here.
The drama in the new XCOM is not found in managing your logistics to make sure you have enough ammunition day-to-day, but in the last-minute reload under fire, the desperate grenade hurled at a hidden enemy, the rear-guard action that saves your team but costs your best soldier her life. These dramas were in the original X-Com if you took care to look for them, but in this remake they come often and organically to the player.
Firaxis has taken the decision-making process that made the original so addictive and expanded on it, creating a play experience that's much more detailed than the original’s endless bug hunts. Limited cash flow can force choices between research in weapons you can’t afford to produce and research in life-saving armor you don’t have the supplies to build. You will need to go to desperate lengths to capture live aliens, take ludicrous risks to prevent civilian casualties, and charge into the teeth of withering gunfire to defuse deadly bombs. The developers obviously cared enough about the X-Com lineage to put their own mark on it, and their concern shows in every aspect of the game.
Calling the game accessible is not the same as calling the game easy. In fact, the Classic mode is quite challenging. In my first “terror” mission, against an assault by Chryssalids (fast Alien-type razor-clawed parasites), I saw my entire squad wiped out as they desperately retreated to the spawn point. Nearly a dozen hours spent building up those virtual men and women were rendered moot in moments. It was heartbreaking—and true to the original X-Com. Now that I’ve put 20+ more hours into Normal mode, I’m more comfortable with the system and ready to tackle Classic mode again.
Tragically, the game seems like it was not optimized for the keyboard and mouse. Clicking on the interface feels finicky, and the hotkeys keep moving around on you as you play. Overwatch—an action that tells your soldiers to fire during the alien’s turn, and perhaps the most-pressed key during any engagement—shifts between four different keys depending on who you’re controlling, but always remains on the Y button when using an Xbox 360 controller. Likewise, the zoom key is easier to reach on the controller (left trigger) than on the keyboard (‘G’? Really?).
And you’ll need to zoom quite a bit, because the game's camera is not perfect. It feels like Firaxis shot a movie with the wrong lens on. You can hardly see what’s going on at times because the overall view is too narrow, and zooming back from the action during your planning phase is required to plot your advance. The zoom is especially tight on the death animations. Instead of an artful pirouette, you’re often treated to little more than a gibbous splash and an alien limb flailing out of frame. It feels as though the developers were a bit ashamed of the size of their compact maps and tried to hide the issue with a narrow field of view.
But the maps are laid out well, and each of the 70 hand-made scenarios tells a story—a high-rise rooftop under construction in Tokyo with exposed scaffolds and tarps blowing in the wind, a paper company in London with the portrait of the CEO in the lobby, a burned out forest in a cold Russian swamp.
Aside from the camera, the game's presentation is larded with a luxury that strategy gamers will be largely unaccustomed to, reflected in everything from the detailed environments and beautiful art to the engrossing sound design. (The game looks a bit too much like a Gears of War tactics game with a bit of Mass Effect thrown in for my tastes—perhaps an artifact of the Unreal engine it’s based on.)
This remake is also notable for the sheer variety available in both gameplay and visual design. Missions vary from investigating traditional UFO crash sites to bomb defusing missions and VIP escorts. The game will reward multiple playthroughs.
In the end, this is not the X-Com that everyone was expecting. It’s more. It’s better. If you’re merely looking for a highly competent re-skin of the original X-Com, keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming Xenonauts from fledgling developer Goldhawk Interactive. This XCOM: Enemy Unknown stands apart from the original in its presentation, but it shares a common, classic soul.
The Good:
- Snappy, immersive tactical gameplay replaces the slog genre veterans are used to
- Love for the universe’s lore—the game has respectful fan-service in spades
- Subtly expanded tech tree with fewer dead ends and more incremental growth
- Unique soldier roles like Assault, Sniper, and Heavy give richness and diversity to soldier growth
- Lavish environmental detail and dynamic animations
- Multiple objectives from battle to battle
- Challenging difficulty settings, including an Ironman mode where there is no going backwards to a previous game save
- Functional multiplayer scrimmage mode
The Bad:
- Narrow field of view and some occasional oddities of the camera
- Atrocious air battles with alien craft
The Ugly:
- Fixed isometric perspectives vs. a free-floating camera
- Poor implementation of keyboard and mouse controls. It’s time to get an Xbox controller for your computer if you don’t have one already
- Over-simplified base building mechanics are too abstract for their own good
Verdict: Buy it.
Listing image by 2K Games / Firaxis
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