XCOM: Enemy Unknown generates stories like few other games. These are player-made stories, forged in turn-based battle, that you’ll relay breathlessly to the unwitting stars you’ve created the next day. You might tell your girlfriend that she shot your boss in the chest after her best friend was eaten by a four-legged monster from beyond the stars. Or you’ll find yourself informing your co-workers that, sadly, they’ve tested negative for the kind of latent psychic powers that would let them control someone’s mind.
In short, XCOM will make you care. Playing as the titular organisation’s commander, you’re given a small squad of multinational soldiers, an alien menace to repel and a few thousand square feet of hollowed-out rock from which to do so. You’re invited to mine out the latter and to fill it with facilities to aid your war effort, including laboratories that increase research speed and satellite uplinks that allow you to monitor more of the globe for UFO. The soldiers who live there are fully customisable, allowing you to change their hairstyle, armour colour, and their names. It’s thanks to this that you can press-gang your friends, co-workers and even pets (or whatever else your mind can concoct) into service. But it’s thanks to Firaxis’ sterling pacing and combat that you’ll invest in whether they live or die.
As soon as a soldier kills an alien enemy, his or her specialisation is dictated. Heavies wield machine guns, and can lay down blankets of fire; Support soldiers can heal their comrades, or provide smoke grenade cover for a retreat; Assault soldiers carry shotguns and excel when close to their foes; while Snipers fire devastating volleys the length of the screen. At the beginning of the game, facing flimsy, bulbous-headed Sectoids, players can fill their squads with whatever kind of soldier they fancy, but by the halfway point missions require serious tactical consideration, even on Normal difficulty.
XCOM’s combat is consistently tense, and usually thrilling. The right move triggers a spike of euphoria. That move can be as simple as setting up a Heavy in an elevated position, setting them to ‘Overwatch’, and watching as they cut down an alien that moves in their field of vision. It can be as complicated as sending a Sniper in jetpack-equipped Archangel armour to the top of a building, using a Support soldier to toss a critical-hit enhancing smoke grenade, before forcing your hiding Assault class character to fire a shot at an enemy’s position to flush them out into the open.
The result of a bad move is disappointment, but crucially that disappointment can’t be aimed at the game. XCOM gives you the tools to succeed. You’ll end up with a top soldier: the one who’s been with you since the first mission; the one you’ve kitted out in the best armour, and given the best weapons to; the one who’s made his way furthest down the multi-stage, branching unlock tree for his character class. If they die, it’s your fault. You may have been too impatient, rushing them forward, using their two allotted actions per turn to waltz through an enemy’s firing cone. Or you could have been too cautious, and the civilian rescue mission the game tasked you with has turned into the opening of a zombie movie, the very people you were sent to save now infested with alien seed and groaning their desire to devour your bones.
The main campaign isn’t truly open-ended, and there are certain missions that you must complete in order to successfully defend the planet. But XCOM is masterfully paced, and every decision that gets made is your decision – the result of gnawing tension and the tottering balance of risk and reward. Early on, you’ll discover a hidden alien base. You can either attack it now and hope your soldiers are ready, or hang on for a bit, using the extra time to research an extra gun, or shoot down a few UFOs and plunder their wreckage for the spoils of war and battle experience. But what if you lose a man? What if a saucer appears over one of the already-panicked parts of the globe and you can’t commit the forces there, causing the country to drop out of the XCOM project? What if? Other games promise meaningful decisions. XCOM winks at you and promises respite from these decisions. If it came, you’d take it like water in a desert. It never comes.
Combat fatigue can set in. Bouncing back and forth from your home base to the combat screen can get mentally draining. It’s as mentally draining as you’d expect the job of ‘Earth’s saviour’ to be, really, but when you’re shooting down four UFOs in as many weeks, their spooky interiors can start to feel passé.
Their decor of these ships may look the same, but their contents rarely do. Enemies quickly ramp up in scale and offensive output. Thin Men and Floaters can be knocked out in a shot or two with a mid-level laser rifle; Mutoids are vast, overmuscled monster-men who’ll Bullrush your squad, then halve your poor team’s health bars in a single backhand slap. Tactical demands vary considerably depending on foe and mission type, often requiring you to either save civilians or kill everything you see. That said, by the end of the game you’ll have hit on a combat formula that suits, and your ragtag bunch of squaddies will likely have become a mega-armour-clad gang of elites, able to shred all but the most horrific foes with a few volleys.
But that eventuality feels like a reward. Charting a course through Earth’s imminent destruction is as unashamedly difficult as it was in 1994’s X-COM. It’s possible, through bad planning and bad management, to doom the planet early on, making the game feel unfair. Get it right, however – survive the stresses of management, and the strains of aliens – and you’ll feel like world’s greatest hero.
