XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

I consider the 1994 turn-based tactical masterpiece X-COM: UFO Defense to be the single best videogame ever made. Compared directly to that impossibly high standard, Firaxis' 2012 remake, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, does remarkably well. It's a somewhat-simplified version that nevertheless succeeds, particularly on Classic difficulty, in recreating the original's skin-tingling atmosphere, white-knuckle tension, and bottomless tactical depth. Turning the tide against alien invaders with a group of outgunned and outnumbered soldiers who live and die (and many will die) based on how our decisions interact with a virtual roll of the dice creates countless moments of sky-high triumph and staggering defeats.



When I say that Enemy Unknown is "somewhat simplified," that's not exactly a negative. The original X-COM is an incredibly complex game that, frankly, could use a little simplification. Enemy Unknown remains a massive, multi-layered game in which you run an international organization dedicated to kicking aliens off the Earth. On the high-level strategy game, that's a task that involves a basic but interesting adjacency-based minigame of building an underground base from which you monitor and respond to global alien activity, dispatch fighter jets that automatically shoot down UFOs, and send an absurdly small squad of up to six elite troops (1,000 would be small, when you think about it) to kill or capture aliens before your funding nations panic and bail on you.

Delaying the Inevitable

Yet no matter how many alien-monitoring satellites you launch or UFOs you shoot down on the fancy 3D holographic globe, the rising tide of panic will inevitably overtake you. Knowing that, and feeling helpless as countries slip away, creates a driving sense of do-or-die urgency for you to succeed in your missions on the ground. All the while, just slowing down the spread of panic forces you to siphon resources from crucial R&D of new weapons, armor, and gadgetry to improve your ground troops' chances.


Those ground missions, where the gameplay switches to a top-down isometric view and you control the every movement of every soldier in turn, are the meat of XCOM. It's the part where I sit on the edge of my seat as I order my Assault soldier to take a desperate, 35% shot against a horrific Xenomorph-like Chryssalid, where success will mean the difference between victory and being impregnated with an alien baby. It's where I close my eyes as I tell my sniper to go for a weapon-disabling hit from across the map that will prevent that intimidating Cyberdisc from blasting someone with its mega-cannon and hope for the best. It is an amazingly addictive, challenging, and rewarding experience that has me absolutely hooked.

Are You a Gambling Man?

Each mission is like a hand of poker -- a skilled player will win most of the time by calculating odds and making safe bets, but when the luck of the cards turns against you, the best you can do is minimize your losses. I've had hot streaks where I've hit every reckless 30% shot I took, and conversely single turns where I've missed multiple sure-thing 80% shots. That random element means you can do everything right and still lose, and makes keeping a squad alive long enough to become elite veterans a real challenge.

Provided they survive long enough, each soldier is randomly assigned into one of four classes -- Assault, Heavy, Support, or Sniper -- and each class has its own skill tree with some great abilities. Having to choose between two skill options at each level, such as the Heavy's choice between Holo-Targeting (which grants aim assists to everyone else) and Bullet Swarm (which allows firing twice each turn) makes me stop and consider how I want to use each soldier, and which skill will best interact with his fellow squadmates. I'm still uncovering new uses for each skill, but so far the number of skill choices I'm finding to be no-brainers is pretty low. I do occasionally feel hamstrung by class limitations, though -- Snipers, for example, aren't able to equip anything but a sniper rifle and a pistol, making them more of a burden than a help at low levels when they haven't unlocked the ability to move and then shoot or fire at any target in any unit's sight range. At high levels, of course, they're incredibly deadly.


The stakes in these gambles are far higher if you customize the appearance and names of your squad members before embarking on a mission -- and you really should. Even though they generally end up looking like 10 flavors of the same GI Joe with different zany facial hair, commanding friends, family, and coworkers into combat (as opposed to the standard randomly generated team) magnifies and personalizes the highs of victory and lows of defeat. I have, on several occasions, caught myself getting angry with a real person over their XCOM counterpart missing an easy shot or panicking when I needed them most, and I've apologized in person for getting them killed.

Boots on the Ground

Even with randoms, though, I get to know and love them, because Firaxis has done a wonderful job of making what has a traditionally been a distant and static style of game look and feel up close and action-packed. Even though nothing moves until you tell it to, and you have unlimited time to make your calls the camera will frequently zoom in for over-the-shoulder perspectives for most shots and certain actions, and every action is exaggerated for effect. The sheer enthusiasm with which squaddies will throw themselves through plate-glass windows (even when there's a door a few steps to the right) never gets old.

Early on I thought for sure I'd disable these dynamic mini-cutscenes, but turning them off would make me miss so many great animations: watching a Thin Man vault over obstacles or a zombified human take a graceless tumble off a rooftop adds a lot to the experience, and the close-up view of a skittering Chryssalid approaching can strike some good terror. Yeah, there are plenty of instances when the camera or animation will get confused and you'll see an obstructed view of a Sectoid firing through a wall, but that's a small price for the payoff when it works.


The two-move system that replaces UFO Defense's extremely granular time units (which literally lets you control every step) is indeed simpler, but I find it to be an elegant simplicity. To be successful in Enemy Unknown I have to ask myself a lot of important questions about every move -- not just whether I've got the shot I want, but also where it leaves my soldier at the end of the turn. Is he in cover? ('Cause if he's not, he's probably gonna die.) Is it good cover? Is he vulnerable to being flanked by a nearby alien, negating his cover? Do I use both moves for a better position, or move slowly and save a move for reaction fire to catch the enemy moving out of cover during its turn? Do I throw a grenade to do low damage but destroy the enemy's cover? Does my soldier have squadmates in position to support him? There's no shortage of considerations to be made, and all of them are meaningful.

Battlefield Miscommunication

Getting those orders across clearly, however, can be a challenge due to some UI issues in tactical combat. After growing tired of the on-screen controls' endless demands for confirmation of orders I found satisfaction with the remappable keys, which allow one-button activation of common commands like Overwatch (Y, by default). Once I got that down, the only problems were throwing grenades, which can be fussy when they reach maximum range, and moving troops around multi-story structures, which sometimes causes a crazy flickering effect that on several occasions resulted in sending a soldier to the wrong spot, out of cover, where he was promptly murdered. That part's still not cool.

A different flavor of UI trouble extends to the base view, where I can't shake the feeling that I shouldn't have to drill down into quite so many menus to access the information I want. Though it's totally usable, it's inefficient, and it makes me long for the kind of PC-specific UI makeover modders gave to Skyrim.


Battles take place across a wide variety of intentionally generic locations -- the kind of places you'd see just about anywhere in the civilized world. Killing aliens everywhere from restaurants to cemeteries to gas stations and freeways grounds Enemy Unknown in the real world before it takes us to the more fantastical alien ship interiors. As a fan of the old-school X-COM, I do miss the endless replayablity of randomly generated tactical maps -- Firaxis says there are more than 80 different maps in the rotation, though having played for more than 50 hours now I feel like I know most of them pretty well. Of course, that doesn't make these maps stale or boring, and won't for a good long while thanks to random enemy placement and composition, but some are on the small side, and others -- such as one that takes place in a train station -- give me the impression of fighting down a narrow corridor instead of sweeping an open area.

A Predictable Change of Pace

Most of the corridor-style missions are special Council missions, which give you a an objective in addition to hunting down and killing everything, such as escorting a VIP or disabling a bomb. The bomb-disarming missions in particular make you race against a clock, and can force you to make risky moves. I both love and hate these missions -- they're a great change of pace, but they're also the most scripted, and thus predictable of Enemy Unknown's missions. Once you've played them, you've got a pretty good idea of how they're going to go down, including where enemy reinforcements will spawn.


Where the maps really do impress is in the level of detail that's layered on top of them. Birds fly away as a soldier or alien approaches, country music plays in a gas station that you only hear when you zoom in, rats scurry across the floors, and rainstorms cause water to flow through the streets. It's makes me wish civilians showed up more frequently than in the occasional Terror missions to give these places more of a real-world feel.

Wrecking Team

Additionally, I'm a huge sucker for destructibility in games, and Enemy Unknown deliveres well in that department. When I'm done with a good hard fight against tougher aliens like Mutons, odds are the area will be reduced to a smoking ruin. Grenades and rocket launchers rip apart buildings and wipe out enemy cover, and missed laser and plasma shots can blow holes in walls or set cars ablaze. It keeps the battlefield feeling dynamic, as every shot could potentially destroy or create essential cover, and it serves as an excellent reminder of how powerful these guns are.


Getting access to more guns, and to handy gear like flying Archangel armor, means climbing the tech tree. It's not huge, which is slightly disappointing -- on Normal difficulty I had no trouble researching everything by the end. Like in the original game, the choice is in what to research first, not whether to specialize in one area at the expense of another. I'm also a little bummed that the weapons themselves aren't a little more interesting -- lasers and plasma weapons function fairly identically except for the plasma's superior firepower. I'd have liked to have seen a reason to take a laser weapon when a plasma's available, such as superior accuracy.

Locked In

That's not a huge deal, though. The only thing I feel Enemy Unknown is really missing is on-battlefield inventory management. I equate the differences between old-school X-COM and Enemy Unknown to those between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, in that the newer one discards a clumsy but flexible inventory management system that allowed you to do things like swap out ammo on the fly in favor of pre-deployment equipping and class-based powers. It works well enough, but it's hugely frustrating when the guy carrying the medikit gets shot and is lying on the ground dying, and I can't save him because I can't have another soldier grab it and use it. It's right there, man! Pick it up!



Difficulty levels make a huge, game-changing difference. Despite the AI being no slouch -- it's very capable of performing deadly flanking maneuvers and rarely openly displays stupidity -- I found Normal to be fairly easy until the last third of my roughly 22-hour campaign (new players' experiences will vary), I'm still struggling to fight my way through on Classic -- and even that pales in comparison to the absolutely ruthless Impossible mode. Even a hardcore player should expect a high bodycount above Normal.

I Am Iron Man

Part of why I'm having such a hard time beating Classic is that I'm playing on Iron Man mode, which disables the ability to reload a saved game should a mission go badly. (You can do Normal Iron Man, too). Iron Man definitely ups the tension -- each move has to be second-guessed, and the threat of a full-squad wipeout exists in every single mission. On Normal, I'd be confident I could come back from that and rank up a new squad from raw recruits; on Classic, it's all but game over. As of this writing, I've yet to make it past the halfway mark in the campaign, and I expect it to take me a good long while to come out on top.


Enemy Unknown's story, which comes in voiceovers and brief cutscenes from your trio of department heads back at XCOM HQ every time you encounter something important or research a landmark piece of alien tech, does a fairly good job of moving things along, and in the end even gives a reasonably good explanation for why the aliens are abducting humans rather than simply invading in force and annihilating everyone. I also appreciate how it drives me to capture aliens alive for interrogation rather than simply killing everything, since it demands a more delicate hand and riskier, higher-reward tactics. The characters themselves aren't terribly interesting, of course, but they're not there to steal the show from our own stories.

Collateral Damage

Speaking of Iron Man mode and the end of the campaign, I've encountered only one bug that could be considered game-breaking. On the final mission, I'd used a psychic soldier to mind-control a durable Muton Berserker to use as a bullet sponge. He performed admirably, and apparently my squad grew so attached to their pet that, when he finally succombed to a hail of plasma fire, they grieved as though they'd lost one of their own. Touching as that is, it led to one of my Heavies panicking and shooting a character who must survive to the end of the mission with his heavy plasma gun. If that were an Iron Man run, yeah, that'd have broken my game.


Multiplayer abandons all the fiction and lets two players go head to head with mixed-and-matched six-unit squads of humans and aliens. Though there's only the one mode (kill everything) there's a lot of depth to be had here, both in selecting your squad before a match without knowing what enemies you'll face (do you go all-in with specialized aliens, take expensive but versatile humans, or a mix of both?) and in the actual combat tactics. In the dozen games I've played so far I've had some amazing comeback victories, some blowouts, and some facepalming defeats where I really should've spread my Sectoids out more when facing a Heavy with a rocket launcher. I do hate the interface for selecting your multiplayer squad, though. It's a very basic, text-heavy setup that's nothing like the single-player character customization, and until you understand what all of the human soldier presets mean it's a bit of an ordeal to figure out.

There's a bigger issue, though: it never happened to me, but my opponents -- several of them -- complained that some or all of their troops would randomly become unselectable during their turn. That's a game-ender, and until it's sorted out I recommend sticking to friendly matches rather than getting invested in ranked games. Even so, I'm still very glad multiplayer's in here. It's a first for the series, and I foresee myself spending a lot of hours with it, even if I have to restart a few times.


Save The World... Better

Meanwhile, the toughness and the randomness makes Enemy Unknown an extremely replayable single-player game. Especially combined with the Civilization-like starting bonuses you get for choosing to place XCOM HQ on different continents (North America, for example, gets cheaper interceptor aircraft while Europe gets discounted workshops and laboratories), and Iron Man mode, every attempt is a potential story about that one time when the raw recruit saved the hardened Colonel's butt... or when he panicked and shot his superior officer dead. The struggle of going from underdogs to alpha dogs is timeless, and bears endless repeating -- especially now that there's online stat tracking and achievements galore.

You've seen me nitpick quite a few things in this review, including several things I think could be better and a couple of issues I'd consider major that absolutely need to be fixed (Firaxis is already working on a few of them), but I don't want to leave you with the impression that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is anything less than an amazing, triumphant game right down to its core. It's XCOM's Batman Begins, in effect -- it does a magnificent job of rebooting the series with its soul intact, delivering an awesome modern experience and paving the way for a future that doesn't just recreate the tense tactical battles and global strategy of the 18-year-old original, but builds on them. (By the way, this is one of the few times I'm actually thrilled at the prospect of DLC.) I implore you to play it if you have any interest in turn-based tactics whatsoever -- it is indisputably the best of its genre made in at least a decade. I leave the title of Best Game Ever with the original, but playing this one has done this old X-COM fan's heart good, and I believe it will make a whole lot of new fans, too.