When Xenonauts development started all the way back in 2009, it had a simple mission statement: to be a modern update of the X-COM series, giving things a new lick of paint but otherwise preserving the mechanical core of the game. This was very much a good idea at the time. X-COM had been criminally neglected for over a decade, with only Altair’s excruciatingly mediocre¹ UFO: AfterX series carrying the torch in the meantime, and there was definitely a gap in the market for an X-COM remake — especially after 2K announced that their own X-COM reboot would be a third-person shooter (this was the game that would eventually become the insipid Bureau).  Thus it was that Goldhawk Interactive was formed, and work began on Xenonauts.

Unfortunately for Goldhawk their inexperience with game development meant that this work dragged on and on, running into difficulty after difficulty. Five years passed. Against all odds, the market changed. It turned out that there was a proper update of the X-COM series in the works, produced by none other than perennial Civilization-peddlers Firaxis. With their turn-based pedigree and a lead developer who loved the series and knew what he was doing, initial scepticism turned to critical acclaim when the game was released in November 2012.  Xenonauts was now releasing into a world that already had a resurgent XCOM franchise, and so that initial mission statement had to change slightly: its unique selling point is no longer that it heralds an X-COM revival, but rather that it’s more X-COM than XCOM itself. Boot up Xenonauts for five minutes and it’s far easier to see the X-COM DNA, and while there are substantial under-the-hood changes, particularly on the geoscape layer, the tactical combat and the progression towards the endgame hew far more closely to the precepts laid down in the original game more than twenty years.

So in as far as Xenonauts is supposed to be a more faithful remake of the original Enemy Unknown, Goldhawk can consider that mission statement as fully accomplished. There’s TUs, automatic reaction fire, beating the shit out of aliens with shock sticks and dragging them back to the laboratory, multiple bases whose construction is identical to that found in the original, a research, engineering and personnel system that’s also pretty much a full-on clone, base assaults, base defences, losing your best soldiers to being shot in the back by sneaky alien assholes you somehow didn’t spot – pretty much everything you’d expect from a game whose quest was to replicate the core experience of the original in its entirety. That’s not to say that Goldhawk have just copied X-COM outright, though – if they had, I’d be pillorying the game far more harshly than I’m about to. They’ve attempted to streamline the twenty year-old UI (inventory and store management in particular), make the geoscape layer less braindead by beefing up the UFO interception and funding elements of the game, and close some of the game-breaking loopholes you could exploit in the original. I respect Goldhawk’s motivations and their ideas for improving each of these elements of the game; having spent 25 hours finishing a campaign on Normal, however, I have to say that where Xenonauts falls down significantly is in execution and balance.

I suppose we should start with the basics. For anyone reading who doesn’t even know what an X-COM is: Xenonauts is a game where you defend the Earth from a massive alien invasion. It has two layers. One, the geoscape, is where you manage your bases, direct your research and engineering efforts, and send out squadrons of interceptors to shoot down UFOs who are encroaching upon the airspace of the nations who are providing you with your much-needed funding. Once a UFO has crash-landed, you then send a dropship full of soldiers to assault the wreckage, kill any surviving aliens and secure their technology so that you can reverse-engineer it and develop new interceptors, weapons, armour and – eventually – a way to defeat the invaders once and for all. The geoscape is real-time with a variety of speed-settings, automatically pausing to flag up any events of note like a UFO being spotted or a research project being finished, while the UFO assault missions take place on a turn- and tile-based battlescape that pits a squad of 8-12 soldiers against anywhere up to 20-odd aliens.

Historically the battlescape has been the meat of X-COM’s gameplay, with the geoscape providing some much-needed context and control over how you approach the battlescape segments, but otherwise not having a huge amount of impact on the eventual outcome of the game unless you somehow chronically mismanaged everything on it. UFO interceptions on the geoscape were totally braindead affairs – either your interceptor was good enough to take down the UFO it was attacking or it would get blown out of the sky, with little you could do to affect the outcome – and the only real decisions you had to make involved what to research next. Even the Firaxis remake suffered from this malady to a degree, with its stripped-down geoscape only being difficult (to begin with) because it didn’t explain how important satellites were to the player. Xenonauts attempts to redress the balance between the geoscape and the battlescape by making UFO interceptions more important and more involved, while at the same time paring back the importance of the battlescape by essentially making it an optional followup to the interception: not only are you no longer penalised for not assaulting a UFO crash site, but you’re actually given an “Airstrike” option that clears it from the map and gives you a small amount of cash into the bargain.

This means that once you get used to this new way of doing things you only send your troops out to clear crashed/landed UFOs if you know it’s a new variant with some new tech inside. If you already have all the goodies from that UFO type, all you get from a successful assault is experience for your surviving soldiers and a lump sum of cash from selling all of the alien artifacts that your scientists didn’t need. A lot of the time that’s a good enough reason to send the dropship in the first place, but it’s good to have the option to just ignore crashed UFOs; battlescape fatigue has been a huge weakness in every single X-COM game, and I do appreciate that Xenonauts at least tries to introduce a remedy.

Being able to pass on battlescape missions comes at a cost, though, and it’s a price that’s paid in a lot of stress and frustration on the geoscape layer. Once you get past the very beginning of the game Xenonauts’ UFOs do not spawn singly, or even two or three at a time. Instead six or seven UFOs will spawn at once and try to overwhelm your air defences; until you get on top of things in the endgame you have to make multiple sorties with your interceptors expending their missiles shooting down one UFO, flying back to base to refuel and rearm, and then flying out again to take down a second UFO. There’s a much wider variety of UFOs in Xenonauts with drastically differing combat capabilities, and much of the strategy in interceptions comes from knowing the capabilities of your interceptors versus those of the UFOs, what they can take down singly, and what they’ll have to gang up on.

Figuring out what to commit against which bogey was a pleasing brain-teaser, and one which convinced me that Goldhawk were on to a good thing with this retooling of the geoscape, but like I said a few paragraphs back it suffers badly in terms of execution and balance. There’s a new interception minigame where you control your interceptors as they fly around a 2D map, but the UFO “AI” isn’t even worthy of the term; it picks a target and flies straight at it until either it or the UFO is destroyed. It’s a bit of a shame because once again there’s the core of a good idea in this minigame – it’s far more interesting than anything we’ve seen in an X-COM game – but thanks to that AI you can win with the same tactics every single time, turning it into an experience that’s just as braindead as its predecessors.

There’s a couple of external factors, though, that turned this interception minigame from a flawed idea into the bane of my time with the game. One of them is the way the UFOs affect your funding; money from the funding nations is your primary source of income through at least the first two thirds of the game, and they really don’t like it if you just let UFOs fly through their airspace willy-nilly. Unfortunately for you, until you get three bases up with four cutting-edge interceptors at each one – a task that will take most of the game to accomplish – you’re going to have to let at least some of them fly around for a while because so many of them spawn at once and you just don’t have enough interceptors to take them all down. As UFOs travel about the globe they crap out little event markers ranging from inoffensive phenomena like crop circles to shooting down military and civilian aircraft. I thought these were neat little bits of flavour until I realised that every single once of these events was decreasing my funding in the region in question, and after that realisation it was absolutely infuriating to see the single UFO I hadn’t taken out with the first sortie of interceptors generate four or five negative events in the time it took them to refuel and rearm.

This setup means that it’s quite literally impossible to avoid funding decreases in the first few months of the game; you simply don’t have the coverage or the raw numbers of interceptors to do a proper job of it. If you don’t start building extra bases as soon as the game starts you’ll probably lose so much funding that it becomes impossible to recover, since a funding decrease means no money to expand which means no coverage which means another funding decrease. Once again, I’m keen to stress that I think it’s a fundamentally good idea to make both funding and the geoscape important, I just think that the way its been balanced is messed up both in terms of difficulty and gameplay tempo. There’s a wave of UFOs every five or six days, but because UFOs don’t turn up outside of these waves there’s sod all to do in between except choose your research and press the fast-forward button. Because there’s no build-up in UFO numbers – the UFOs themselves get bigger and scarier, but the same amount shows up in every wave – the geoscape at the end of the game is basically the same as the geoscape at the start of it, with the only difference being that by that point you should finally have enough interceptors to kill everything in one go.

Because you’re so worried about funding decreases, then, you tend to stretch your available interceptor resources as far as they’ll possibly go. This means sending them out to deal with the UFOs one-on-one if you think you can at all manage it, which in turn usually means doing the interception manually instead of relying on the overly-pessimistic autoresolve. The UFO AI is so bad that you know you can kill the entire flight of enemy fighters with just a single Corsair even though the autoresolve says you have a 0% chance of victory, but you still have to spend a minute of your time locked in this idiotic tail-chase as you maneuver to stay out of their firing arcs. It’d be both easier and more interesting if you had more than one interceptor to play with, mind, but because of your limited resources this only happens if there’s a big UFO that you don’t think your interceptors are good enough to take on on their own.

Taken separately the flaw in each of these systems – the UFO AI, the wave system and the impact on funding – isn’t so bad, but the way they feed back off of each other is borderline catastrophic, forcing you to play the game in one particular way to even have a chance of making it through to the end. It’s a problem that’s hugely exacerbated by the sheer number of UFOs you have to deal with in the course of the game – by the time I finished mine I’d shot down more than 230 of them. Even if we generously assume I autoresolved half of those (mostly towards the end of the game) that’s still 115-odd minigames played, ensuring Xenonauts ends up with the opposite problem to the X-COM series; instead of battlescape fatigue you now suffer from geoscape fatigue, dreading the “UFO detected” popup because you know there’ll be six more of the bastards all of whom will tank your funding if you don’t take them out in a series of tedious interceptions.

Speaking of the battlescape, though. I’m going to do some complaining here too but at the end of the day I thought the issues with the battlescape were much less pronounced and more the product of technical limitations on the part of the game and the developer rather than a game-ruining design fuckup.  What Goldhawk were shooting for here was something which captured the feel of classic X-COM with a lot of new toys thrown in, and while the end result is ugly as sin it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. The one major mechanical addition is a suppression system whereby you can stop enemy units from reaction firing at you by firing automatic weapons or lobbing flashbangs at them – the latter is great for storming UFOs, at least until you research the stun grenade which acts as a sort of bug bomb for UFO control rooms. Otherwise Xenonauts concentrates on streamlining and improving the old experience while handing you a bunch of new toys to play with. Soldier progression has been divorced from their kill count so they’ll level up just by doing all the things they’d usually do in a mission, which in turn means you can use vehicles to kill aliens without worrying that they’re depriving your troops of much-needed experience. The vehicles themselves are juggernauts of destruction – not the most accurate, but who needs to be when you’re firing a laser cannon that obliterates anything in a four-tile radius of the impact point? They’ll succumb to massed fire so you do need to keep them supported with your infantry squad, but being able to rely on vehicles in this way dramatically increases the survivability of your troopers and cuts down on the number of bullshit deaths to practically zero; if somebody dies in Xenonauts it’s probably because you got sloppy and didn’t check all the corners, or went too far forward with your scout. Survivability is also helped by innovations such as the riot shield, which automatically blocks eighty points’ worth of damage from the front and is invaluable for anyone heading through the UFO entry door first, as well as heavy weapons that are genuinely useful – they take the entire turn to fire, but are pretty much a guaranteed kill on whatever you’re firing them at.

The battlescape, in short, is an incredibly slick piece of work, and despite (or perhaps because of) the attempt to improve the geoscape it’s still by far the funnest part of the game. My complaints about it range from the superficial (UFO hulls are now indestructible and I really miss breaching them with demolition charges/blaster bombs) to the annoying (the game’s line-of-sight system is somewhat inconsistent, with shots being blocked by invisible walls and aliens shooting past cover that has a 100% chance to block your return fire), but its biggest problem is actually a knock-on effect from the geoscape: in a game where you shoot down over 200 UFOs, even if you airstrike 75% of them  you’re still going to end up doing 50-odd battlescape missions. That’s far too many, and it’s a problem that’s exacerbated by the very uneven ramp-up in alien types. There’s perhaps eight enemy types in the game, and for some reason Xenonauts did not see fit to introduce half of them until I was into the final stretch. This meant that the first thirty battlescape missions were spent fighting the Caesans, who are supposed to be the game’s Sectoid equivalent but who instead look (and fight) like old men in jumpers.  There’s a Chryssalid analogue, but I saw maybe a dozen of these out of the thousand aliens I slaughtered during my campaign. In the twenty-five hours I played it, there was precisely one terror mission and two alien base missions. Everything else was UFO clearance on static maps that were recycled far, far too often. What I’m trying to get across here is that there simply isn’t enough variety in the battlescape to sustain interest over the course of the campaign, meaning that despite Xenonauts’ best efforts the sense of battlescape fatigue still remains – to the point where it’s a palpable relief when you reverse the funding decline on the geoscape and no longer feel like you have to clear UFOs for cash money.

That’s Xenonauts, then. It’s a game that, despite that mission statement of being X-COM, actually needed to be more than X-COM in order to justify its existence, which is why I’m a little sad that this review has ended up being mostly bitching; it did try, and it succeeded in as many places as it failed. It’s just that its successes are relatively low key and difficult to talk about – it’s hard to write anything about streamlining the store system beyond saying “It streamlines the store system”, even though it’s a massive improvement over the original – while its failures are far more high profile and nearly sabotage the entire game. However, there is a silver lining for Xenonauts: my issues with it are largely matters of balance, and the balance of the game can easily be changed by altering the game config files via a text editor. If you found yourself getting frustrated by the funding system, as I did, you could easily alter those files so that each negative event only resulted in a tenth of the funding loss. While this isn’t an excuse for the game’s flaws, Xenonauts’ moddability is such that I suspect it’ll end up being the cure for them in the long run. I’m not sure I’d recommend the base game to anyone who wasn’t seriously into X-COM, but if you’re happy with either waiting to see what the community comes up with or else modding those files yourself it’s probably worth picking up at some point.

The post Thoughts: Xenonauts appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Enemy Within is the first expansion to the XCOM remake, a game which was pretty well received on here over a year ago but which in the long run turned out to suffer from some fairly deep-seated structural issues – the aliens’ completely supine geoscape presence and an inverse difficulty curve  being amongst the most prominent. A good thing, then, that it was made by Firaxis, since if there’s one thing Firaxis excel at it’s fixing critical flaws with comprehensive and well-designed expansion packs. After the success of Gods and Kings and the well-designed additions Brave New World made to Civ V (even if I didn’t particularly agree with them all that much) I had high hopes that Enemy Within would do the same for XCOM.

Unfortunately — and as I’ve mentioned several times on here — high hopes usually only lead to disappointment and broken dreams. So it goes with Enemy Within, which manages to be a solid expansion while only partially living up to its potential to turn XCOM from flawed gem into genuine classic. As with Gods and Kings the headline features – Meld and Exalt – fall kind of flat, and it’s left to the unannounced changes and additions to the research trees and game balance to pull EW’s soldiers out of the plasma fire.

Let’s talk about the expansion pack’s big failure first, because it involves the feature I was looking forward to the most: Exalt. Exalt is supposed to be a third faction in the game; they’re a sort of paramilitary anti-XCOM that wants to harness the alien technology to further their own end goal of taking over the world, which brings them into direct confrontation with your forces.  This seemed like it might be a neat way of fixing up the static, unreactive nature of the geoscape segments: the addition of a human(ish) organisation that has many similarities to XCOM and who is working in direct opposition to you would have let them run a version of that parallel campaign structure I so enjoyed in the original X-COM. Potentially we could have had three-way fights with XCOM and Exalt both trying to carry off as much alien tech from a crashed UFO as possible, and Exalt running their own game in the background of the geoscape, setting up hidden cells within funding countries and – if unchecked – increasing their influence to the point where your funding is reduced or even stopped. Perhaps I was letting my imagination run away with me, but this is why the reveal of Exalt a month or two ago got me quite excited. I thought they’d listened to the criticism they were getting about the dull geoscape and were actively trying to liven it up a bit in the expansion. Doing what Firaxis do best, in other words. I certainly never thought they’d stuff such a promising idea up quite so badly as they have here.

Sadly as things stand Exalt are worse than a wasted opportunity – rather, they’re actively detrimental to the game and I really, really wish they’d been cut from the final product. And they should have been cut, because Exalt in their current form simply cannot be taken seriously as either a gameplay mechanic or a threat to XCOM. The way they work is that every so often you’ll get a message saying that Exalt have done something annoying – stolen some money, say, or slowed down some research. Then you get the option to send in one of your soldiers as a covert operative to infiltrate the Exalt cell responsible. They go in with no armour and armed only with a pistol plus gadgets, but this doesn’t matter because when you extract them you get to send a full squad into the resulting battlescape mission, which then becomes a simple matter of keeping the operative’s head down while your soldiers who actually have guns do all the hard work of fighting the Exalt forces.

Exalt soldiers themselves are clones of your own XCOM troop classes dressed in pinstripe suits and face masks. They have the same abilities and basic weapons as your men, but the AI is much, much worse at using them than a human player; given the inherent fragility of humans in XCOM this means that most Exalt missions are braindead turkey shoots, especially because they’re so heavily scripted. There’s two types of mission: one is a king-of-the-hill style fight over a satellite transmitter, and the other just involves getting your covert operative to hack some beacons and then back to the Skyranger. The latter type of mission is never not insultingly easy, since I twigged very quickly that there’d be 2-3 groups of Exalt already on-map and once I’d cleared those out I was free to set up defensive positions to slaughter the reinforcements that would appear once I started hacking beacons. The fights over the transmitters are almost good, though; there’s a constant stream of Exalt coming in from off-map to try and storm the transmitter location, and depending on where it is the battles between your soldiers and the Exalt operatives can become incredibly short-range and nasty as you all try to pile on top of the transmitter. The close-quarters fighting gets so brutal, in fact, that I found myself wishing they’d included dedicated melee weapons. As it was Exalt at least provided me with one of the most memorable XCOM battles I’ll ever have, an absolutely cut-throat encounter on a rooftop where the staircase access and ground floor were wrecked by explosives very early on and Exalt switched to swarming up the sides of the building, critically wounding both my MEC trooper and the medic I sent in to stabilise her and prompting a desperate attempt to kill off the last of the enemy forces before they both bled out. By the end of it the building was a ruin, the roof was covered in corpses and every single one of my troops was nursing a heavy wound of some kind, but I got everyone out alive.

That’s very much the exception, though. For every encounter like that one you’ll have four where the transmitter is in some ludicrously defensible position where you can just dig in and gun down the Exalt as they spawn in from the sides of the map. Their AI for these missions doesn’t help, either, as they suicidally run forward to try to cram into the transmitter zone and turn themselves into prime targets for the much-increased quantity of explosives your squad can now carry. Exalt soldiers are also very much outclassed after the mid-game; they upgrade once to tougher Elite versions who carry laser weapons and have some interesting gene-mod abilities, but they have no answer to Titan armour and plasma guns, and even in the early game you’ve got the ability to bring a giant robot suit to this particular gunfight. In general the Exalt missions suffer from a particularly acute case of the level janitor feeling I get towards XCOM’s endgame, where I know clearing a mission is going to be fairly easy but I still have to go through the motions in order to avoid casualties, and this just compounds the overall feeling of pointlessness that afflicts the whole of the Exalt feature.

Exalt are given almost no explanation, you see. The aliens are inscrutable (at least until that godawful end mission) but you at least get to find out a little bit about who they are through the eyes of your scientists and engineers as they research alien biology and technology. They have backstory, even if its not related to the player through direct means. Exalt on the other hand have no backstory, no context and no point. Except for a few throwaway lines from Vahlen, Shen and Command Guy their motivations remain completely unclear; and their presence on the geoscape is almost maddeningly incidental: each covert operation you complete gives you a piece of information about where the Exalt HQ isn’t (this is a not-even-barely-disguised ripoff of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and I really think Firaxis can probably do slightly better than that for inspiration) but the cells come and go at random and their only purpose is to give you the opportunity to smack down some more Exalt in one of those dull and repetitive shooting galleries. Even once you’ve found and stormed the HQ you’re none the wiser as to who the fuck these people were or why you had to expend so much effort clearing up after them; they’re so insubstantial and compartmentalised from the main gameplay that you could remove them from the expansion entirely and it wouldn’t suffer at all, and in fact would probably be massively improved. I really don’t know how this headline game feature was botched so completely, but the end result is that everything to do with Exalt is textureless, flavourless and an almost colossal waste of time.

Then you’ve got Meld. I had my doubts about its effectiveness from the moment it was announced; the idea is that on most regular missions two containers of Meld will spawn somewhere on the map with a timer countdown, and in order to get to the Meld before they self-destruct you have to abandon the super-cautious tactics that maximise squad survival and play somewhat more aggressively. The incentive for getting Meld is that it’s used as currency for buying the other two headline features of Enemy Within – the gene-mod upgrades and the MEC troopers, which I’ll get to in a minute – but sadly I have to say that my doubts were well-founded for two reasons. The first is that even if you’re playing very cautiously you can still scrape up enough Meld to upgrade some soldiers and manufacture a couple of robot suits; as long as you don’t want an entire squad of genetically-engineered badasses this is a sufficient amount to get you through the whole campaign. The second is that if you offer me a choice between “a gene upgrade for my Assault trooper” and “a squad that’s alive at the end of the mission” I’m always going to pick the latter. The potential for failure cascade and the severe consequences of such mean that risking your squad’s well-being for a measly ten points of Meld just isn’t worth it.

(An aside: we have now finished the bitching part of the review. It’s probably going to turn out to be much longer than the good part largely because I find it much easier to pillory something than I do to sing its praises, but I would like to say up front that there’s at least as much good in Enemy Within as there is bad or mediocre. It’s just that the good parts are a lot subtler and harder to describe.)

Now, as to what the Meld buys you: I have mixed feelings about the gene mod upgrades since the whole process and most of the upgrades themselves are incredibly underwhelming, offering boring stat bonuses like +10 to aim after a miss and no visual changes to your gene modded soldiers except that they now look like Arnie in Predator. However there’s a significant minority of upgrades that make the feature worth including; I particularly like the leg upgrades that gives your troops super-jumping abilities and the anti-psi brain upgrades, while Mimetic skin (a sort of semi-permanent cloak) is arguably overpowered. Gene mods aren’t a bad idea, they just aren’t explored to their fullest potential. MEC troopers, on the other hand… well. MEC troopers do this.

MEC troopers can punch aliens through cars. MEC troopers can deploy flamethrowers to burn out Chyssalid infestations. MEC troopers can fire a ludicrous number of long-range grenades and proximity mines. MEC troopers can turn themselves into piece of High Cover and still fire their explosive weapons. MEC troopers are, in short, where a lot of the good design is hiding in Enemy Within, not to mention a lot of the content since once a soldier is converted into a MEC trooper (through the not-at-all creepy process of chopping off all their limbs and replacing them with bionics) they lose their old speciality and get access to a whole new class tree, with different additional abilities depending on which particular mech suit they’re piloting. Having a MEC trooper come along on a mission is a lot of fun, but you don’t get to have all of it since the aliens get their own version – the Mechtoid – that appears fairly early on and gives the Sectoids some much-needed punch.¹

The aliens in general has been subtly rebalanced so that waiting around to research everything before attacking the alien base doesn’t tilt the scales quite so heavily in your favour, with the appearance of certain advanced enemy types no longer tied to your hitting certain points in XCOM’s “plot”.  I still think it’s better to bide your time since there’s still some scripted appearances and replacements that can be avoided until you’re ready, but it’s no longer the guaranteed free ride it used to be.  Certainly I felt much more pressured in the mid-game, even losing some experienced soldiers in bloody, visceral battles with Mutons and Berserkers. Hell, I’ve even had to retreat from one or two missions because the squad got too beaten up to continue. As far as the battlescape goes this rebalancing has done a lot to shore up that inverse difficulty curve, and while there’s still a point where you’ve got such a tech and experience advantage that clearing missions becomes a triviality it at least occurs a couple of months further into the game than it used to.

As for the geoscape we’ve already established that Exalt is irrelevant, and the way panic management has gone in my EW game has matched my experience in vanilla XCOM: everything seems like it’s going to hell in the first three months, and then suddenly you get on top of it and all your remaining countries are at one panic. Thanks to the new game features, however, there’s a lot more to do in the base management part of the game, with new avenues of research, new base facilities and new Foundry projects all competing for your limited resources.  Some of these are very badly thought-out – I’d like to meet whoever on Firaxis’ design team thought a Needle grenade would be a worthwhile inclusion to the game – but most have at least limited utility and some are ridiculously useful, like the Foundry upgrade that gives all of your soldiers the ability to carry two items into combat instead of one. Like the alien rebalancing these new base management features don’t fix the core problems that the geoscape has, but by bulking it out a little they at least allieviate the symptoms.

The last two changes in particular are what turn Enemy Within into a worthwhile expansion. New content like the MEC troopers is always welcome, but these are the areas where Enemy Within does a half-decent job of tackling the issues that turned the original XCOM into a two-playthrough game. Along with the non-expansion Second Wave mutators they provide at least a semblance of replayability to a game that sorely lacked it, and whatever else you can say about Firaxis they do listen to feedback (even if they then take that feedback and make something like Exalt) as evidenced by the much-requested cosmetic improvements like new armour skins, helmets and voice acting for the multi-national XCOM soldiers in languages other than American. As with Gods and Kings there is actually far more content in this expansion than what’s written on the tin, and it’s the hidden stuff that ultimately makes Enemy Within well worth picking up – at least, if you liked XCOM in the first place. If you hated it, well, I very much doubt it’s going to change your mind since it’s still the same game, for better or worse. On the balance of what’s here, though, I do think it is better. Just.

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The post Thoughts: Enemy Within. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is it. This is the game I have been waiting for ever since it was announced at the start of the year, and for a good decade before that. Watching literally every single attempt to “update” XCOM for the modern generation over the last ten years has been a painful experience, and I was more than a little aghast when it seemed like the official update would be a first-person shooter with lots of conveniently-placed waist-high cover. Then Firaxis said they were making a proper tactical squad-based TBS, and everyone rejoiced. Then Firaxis mentioned the things they were going to change – no time units, only one base, unlimited reloads on the guns, to mention just a few of them – and everyone said “Er.” Or at least I did. The lead designer on XCOM, Jake Solomon, did an excellent job of explaining the reasoning behind Firaxis’s tinkering and at least left open the possibility that it might not be a total disaster, so while I wasn’t all that hopeful for the game I decided to reserve judgement until I actually played it.  

XCOM is a heady mix of tactical turn-based combat and global resource management.  The earth is being attacked by mysterious extraterrestrial invaders wielding technology so advanced that conventional military forces are useless against them. In order to combat the alien threat the XCOM initiative is activated; XCOM is a shadowy multinational organisation dedicated to stopping the invasion by gathering information about the alien agenda and reverse-engineering their technology, often after it’s been prised from the cold dead hands of the alien soldiers. They have access to the best equipment, the best scientists and the best combat troops on the planet, and they operate from an actual literal secret mountain lair. Your job is to direct XCOM’s efforts towards understanding and eventually defeating the aliens in the best way you can. You decide what gets researched, what gets manufactured, which events merit an XCOM response and which should be ignored as part of a long-term strategy. This is all done via the “ant farm” base management screen. When you dispatch troops to deal with an alien incursion a Skyranger transport craft will leave the base and travel to the mission site, at which point the game transitions to a tactical battle between the XCOM troopers and whatever alien forces are present.

Now, you may have heard something about the original XCOM’s reputation as one of the most unforgiving strategy games out there, and I’m happy to report that that’s something that has made it through to this modern update entirely intact despite the extensive changes to the game mechanics. You start the game with a bunch of rookie soldiers armed with advanced assault rifles and clad in the most high-tech body armour Earth can provide. They look so tough and beefy, like they could eat an entire cow for breakfast and then the table as well. The squad selection and equipping screen is accompanied by stirring music to get you fired up for the battle ahead. With you in command surely the brave men and women of XCOM are ready to handle anything the aliens can throw at them?

This tragically misplaced sense of confidence will be just the first casualty in a long war that will claim many, many lives.  Those rifles? They fire bullets which might kill one of the smallest, weakest alien types if you’re lucky and you concentrate your fire. That body armour? Your troops might as well be wearing cardboard for all the good it does against alien plasma weapons. And the soldiers themselves? Well, they’re all too human; once the first hapless rookie gets his face melted off by a plasma blast the rest all have a high chance of panicking, after which you’ll get to hear their terrified screams as they blast away at the nearest thing that moves. If it’s an alien it’ll likely be a fruitless attempt to delay the inevitable. If it’s a fellow XCOM trooper, well… let’s just say that body armour isn’t much good against Earth weapons either. Forget the mission objectives: just having rookies survive their initial encounters with the alien forces is a victory in and of itself. If they manage to get a few kills while living to tell the tale they’ll gradually turn into seasoned soldiers who can face down a charging Muton Berserker without wetting themselves in terror, but for now you’re stuck with these rookies, and XCOM is admirably Darwinian in the way it treats them. The strong – and the lucky – will survive to become stronger. The weak will become just another name on the memorial wall in the barracks. This is the most crucial part of XCOM without which it wouldn’t feel like an XCOM game, and Firaxis have gotten it very, very right.

Let’s get down to details. Tactical combat in the original XCOM was absurdly detailed and let you do a lot of crazy stuff once you got to grips with the system, but that system itself wasn’t exactly elegant. Or balanced. Firaxis’s take streamlines it – I almost want to say consolises it, except that’d be an insult to the amount of thought that’s gone into it – so that while much of the same functionality exists, it can only be accessed by specific troop classes with the appropriate special abilities gained by levelling up. Rookie soldiers with no abilities can only perform the most basic of actions: moving and shooting. Each soldier gets two moves per turn. After the first move the soldier can perform an action — such as shooting his weapon, throwing a grenade or going into overwatch – or move again, which basically uses up the soldier’s action for that turn. Doing any sort of action immediately ends the soldier’s turn unless they have specific abilities that allow them to continue, so if you shoot without moving you’re stuck where you are until the next turn rolls around.

This may not be a bad thing if you’re in particularly good cover. XCOM chooses to model cover in the abstract rather than as an actual, physical object that can stop bullets/lasers/plasma blasts. There are two types of cover in the game: high and low. High cover confers a -40% penalty to the chance to hit of anyone who chooses to take a potshot at somebody hunkered down behind it. Low cover does the same thing, but the penalty is only half that of high cover. While cover can be destroyed by errant weapons fire or explosives (destroying cover is one of the primary uses of explosives), a soldier hiding just around a corner cannot expect the corner to save him from enemy fire as all it will actually do is confer a -40% chance to hit. If the aliens manage to roll a hit regardless then their plasma blasts will hit, to the point where the graphical representation of the plasma on your computer screen will go right through the wall to do so.

What this abstract modelling of shooting and cover boils down to is that if you can be seen by an enemy unit, you can be shot by it. Being in good cover makes that shot less likely to connect, but that’s all it does. Still, being in cover is better than being in no cover at all, as units that are exposed in the open or which have been flanked by the enemy so that they can fire into their sides are far more likely to suffer a critical hit. This system took me a little while to get used to and I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, but once I discovered that pushing F1 would give me a complete breakdown of all the factors affecting my chance to hit an enemy I finally got over its inherent counterintuitiveness. It is possibly not how I would have done it, but I cannot deny that once I knew how to use it it did work, and it worked well. It just requires players used to the old game to make the mental jump from a detailed yet complex tactical battlefield to something which bears more than a passing resemblance to Blood Bowl in terms of random chance and risk management.

All newly hired XCOM soldiers start out as Rookies (unless you buy the upgrade in the Officer Training School, but I’ll get to that later). Rookies have an incredibly high mortality rate because they’re awful shots, have no morale and are probably equipped – if you bothered equipping them at all – with the obsolete weapons and armour your veteran troopers no longer needed. On top of that rookies get all of the worst jobs in XCOM on the basis that until they have a few kills under their belt they’re completely expendable. Crashed UFO needs scouting? Send the rookie in first. Have to capture a live alien specimen? Here, rookie, take this short range stun-gun and subdue that enraged half-ton Muton soldier, we’ll be right behind you. As a result of this mentality very few soldiers make it past the rank of Squaddie, but once they do their abilities start to increase dramatically as this is where the class system comes into play.

Once a rookie has been promoted to a Squaddie they’ll be assigned one of four specialties that determines their future role on the battlefield: Assault, Heavy, Sniper or Support. Assaults and Snipers tend to be the star squad members and receive a host of abilities geared towards short- and long-range combat respectively. Assaults are armed with close-range shotguns, can shoot after moving twice, can shoot twice at the same target and get bonus health based on the type of armour they’re wearing, so they’re the ones who do most of the UFO-storming. Snipers get bonuses for occupying high ground as well as an ability that lets them shoot at any alien a squadmate can see, making them perfect for sitting in a sniper’s perch towards the rear of the battlefield providing supporting fire to the rest of the squad as they advance.

By contrast Heavies and Supports are less greedy with the kill-stealing but having at least one of each in your squad is critical, as they have support abilities that clear the way for the Assault troopers and keep them alive while they’re advancing. Heavies are valuable mainly for the sheer quantity of explosives they can vomit out during the course of a mission; while their suppression abilities are also useful a fully-upgraded Heavy with two rockets and two grenades has the job of removing inconvenient rocks, trees, walls and even whole groups of enemies from the battlefield. Finally, Supports have smoke grenades that give a defence bonus to anyone inside them and are the most efficient medics in the squad, which is good because they’re absolutely bloody awful at killing anything.

As soldiers rank up through killing things they’ll unlock more and more of these abilities inside their specialty, meaning a Colonel isn’t just a better shot but can do far more on the battlefield than a basic Squaddie can. Extra abilities are also conferred by whatever equipment a soldier has; every soldier gets armour which represented on the battlefield by extra health points, a primary weapon (ludicrously each class is restricted to just one weapon type, meaning a sniper can only use sniper rifles and not regular rifles), a pistol they can draw when they’re out of ammo and don’t have time to reload (reloading takes a full action), and one piece of auxiliary equipment. This can be anything from a grenade to extra armour inserts to a medikit, and anything that isn’t passive gives them extra options on the battlefield. And when you unlock the secrets of the human brain you can test all your soldiers for psionic abilities too.

So while you can’t do anywhere near as much as you can in the original X-COM to begin with, the tactical game gradually expands until it’s nearly as deep and complex as its forebear without any of the needlessly opaque stats and equipment management. Still, your soldiers won’t get anywhere without the tools and political support they need to do the job, and they can’t shoot down UFOs singlehandedly either, which is where the base and resource management side of things comes in. This is something from the original which did badly need improvement, as it was a relatively simple matter to set up a Heavy Plasma production line so that XCOM could move into the arms dealing business; morally objectionable, perhaps, but it did mean you never had to worry about money ever again. You didn’t even have to pay attention to the council of funding nations except in so far as losing too many of them would lose the game. Here, though, things are far, far, trickier. I might even go so far as to say I found balancing XCOM’s books and directing their R&D efforts to be the most challenging part of the game. Alien alloys can no longer be manufactured and only a very few types of item can be sold to the grey market for extra cash, making money and resources far scarcer than they were before. As a result you really have to make some hard decisions about what you should prioritise and what is going to have to wait till later, and I think it would be quite easy to lose the game if you played the base management side of it badly.

Probably the most important thing you do in base management is launching surveillance satellites to spot alien activity and providing interceptor coverage to the funding nations so that you can shoot down any UFOs that appear. The alien craft you detect will gradually get bigger and more heavily-armed as time goes on, so keeping your interceptors fully-upgraded is important if you don’t want to see them get splashed almost instantly by the UFO they’re chasing. Shot down UFOs can be assaulted by your troopers to retrieve alien tech and resources, as can UFOs that have landed on their own. You also have to respond to alien abduction attempts and terror attacks which involve going into an urban centre and duking it out with the alien forces present, often catching the terrified civilians you’re supposed to be protecting in the crossfire. The point of all this is to keep global panic levels down. Each funding member of the Council of Nations has its own individual panic level ranging from one to five. Panic is increased by unopposed alien attacks and incursions. Panic is reduced by successfully stopping those attacks and providing obvious protection to the civilian population of Earth. Each month the Council will review your progress in combating the alien threat, and if a funding member has a panic level of five when this review happens they’ll withdraw from the Council. If eight members withdraw the XCOM project is shut down, and it’s game over for you.

Keeping panic levels down isn’t always easy, though. For one thing, alien activity occurs regardless of whether you have satellite coverage in an area — and satellites take a long time to build and deploy — so it’s not like it isn’t happening just because you can’t see it. For another, abduction attempts always occur in threes (for some reason) and you can only respond to one of them, so you’re guaranteed to see an increase in panic in at least two countries whenever they come up. You will lose members from the council before you can get your satellite network set up; it’s merely a question of whether or not you can do it fast enough to stop the full-blown haemorrhage that will result in game over.

Then there’s the actual research and base building part of the base management. Research requires raw resources as well as alien artifacts so it’s not so easy to hoover up all the research in the game this time around, and then when you get to the part where you build your shiny new toys you often find they’re very, very pricey in terms of both money and alloys. Outfitting a full squad with plasma weapons and powered armour is ruinously expensive, almost to the point where it becomes tempting to try and stun aliens instead of killing them so that their weapons won’t self-destruct when they die. You’ll want to take at least one of each type of alien alive, though, as each one you interrogate provides an insight into a particular area of alien tech that manifests itself in-game as a hefty research bonus. Having more scientists and engineers speeds up research and makes manufacturing cheaper, but you can’t just buy them from the shop any more. Instead you have to get them as mission rewards and as bonuses for having satellite coverage over certain regions (each workshop you build also comes with bonus engineers, although I didn’t figure this out until after it mattered), which makes little logical sense to me but which essentially transforms them into another type of resource; research and manufacturing projects require minimum numbers of scientists and engineers to tackle, so having lots of them around is important.  As for the overall tech tree and research/plot progression it follows the path laid down by the original fairly closely (although without the fruitless casting around for an Alien Navigator to stun to get the hyperwave relay) which isn’t the worse thing they could have done, although I am a little bit disappointed there aren’t too many extras.

So yeah. I really like both the strategic resource management and the tactical combat sides of XCOM. I really like XCOM as a game; it’s a worthy update of one of the titles I regard as a timeless classic. Is there anything I didn’t like?

As it turns out, yes. Aside from the plentiful niggles mentioned above – soldiers only being able to equip one type of weapon, abduction attempts always occurring in threes, scientists being an abstract resource you can’t directly acquire – there’s a couple of additional ones I’d like to talk about. First, having your trooper’s specialities be randomly assigned when they hit Squaddie rank is really dumb. It’s not quite as offensive as the psi-screening process in the original – where you’d send in your highest-ranked soldier with fifty confirmed kills only to discover he had the mental acuities of a kitten, making him useless in the psi-dominated late game – but it is incredibly annoying to have a batch of fifteen rookies turn out to be one assault, two heavies, three supports and nine snipers. I spent most of the game desperately trying out rookie after rookie to try to find another Assault trooper, and eventually resorted to getting one as a reward for doing one of the alien abduction missions. I’ve played through the entire game now, chewing through thirty or forty soldiers (this is a very low casualty rate for XCOM) and I’ve still only seen one naturally-occurring Assault class. I don’t know why this mechanic is in the game as it discourages training up rookies when you know they’re probably going to end up being the fortieth sniper on your roster; it makes it unnecessarily difficult to assemble a well-balanced squad.

Then there are the UI and tutorial issues. Firaxis really, really needs to hire somebody who knows what they’re doing here, because the UI has been by far the weakest part of both Civ V and XCOM. The UI here requires too many clicks to do basic actions, randomly rearranges your actions and abilities on the action bar, displays a hit percentage popup over the alien icons in the bottom right that has bugger all relation to the actual hit percentage, and loves zooming the camera up above the roof of the UFO you’re infiltrating when all your troops are inside it. To make matters worse I feel the attempts to add plot and flavouring to the game have largely backfired as they mainly manifest themselves via intrusive, inescapable interludes during a mission. Use explosive weapons too much at the start of the game and the scientist lady will chide you repeatedly for destroying all that lovely alien tech. She’ll also comment whenever you find something new, as will her colleague in the engineering department, and sometimes the game will actually pause while she reads out her lines. There are occasional missions where you have to rescue an NPC, and until you reach the NPC in question the game will, at the start of every single turn, zoom in on the NPC while they shout “LOOK! LOOK! I’M HERE! COME GET ME!” and won’t give control back until they’re done. And honestly, the less said about the cutscenes in this game the better. I hated every attempt to shoehorn in actual characters to the game – my soldiers are the characters, not some poorly-written generic role-fillers — and dearly wished there was some option in the menu to turn all of this crap off, but there wasn’t.

And last but not least, there are the bugs. XCOM is not Civ V, but it does have a few teething issues in the code that I hope are patched out sooner rather than later. First and foremost is the one where the game stops accepting any kind of control input during the tactical missions, necessitating a restart (this is what’s making me leery of trying Ironman right now); there’s also more than a few graphical glitches and the alien spawning system does not react well to the use of mind-controlled aliens to scout out the terrain ahead, often spawning groups of aliens right on top of your squad prompting a desperate firefight to kill them all before they wipe you out. They’re not serious or game-breaking in any way (unless you’re playing on Ironman) but the game would be much better off if they didn’t exist at all.

Nevertheless playing XCOM has, in general, been an absolutely stunning and engrossing experience. It is a game I had exceedingly high expectations for and which nearly met them. I can see myself playing it at least as much as I have the original, and I’m actually very excited to see if Firaxis attempt to expand on the concept at all. XCOM is already a critical success; hopefully it’ll have commercial success to match and we’ll get an expansion or a sequel of some kind. This update won’t be for everyone – I think that if you have a particularly burning hatred for random number generators the tactical combat would very definitely rub you up the wrong way – but I think anyone who has been bemoaning the death of the squad-based tactical combat game owes it to themselves to buy XCOM, since it’s basically what you’ve been waiting for all these years. And hey, if XCOM really doesn’t end up doing it for you, there’s always Xenonauts.

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The issue of Game Informer with the preview of Firaxis’s X-COM remake has hit the streets. I don’t have a copy, but helpful people are culling the salient details and posting them on various forums. The major eyebrow raising changes are below.

Only one “main” base. It’s apparently still possible to build outposts which provide radar coverage and hangars to reduce travel time to a UFO crash site, but all other functions are consolidated into a single base which handles research, manufacture, training, living space etc. This could be a good thing since managing three bases’ worth of scientists was a massive pain in the original, but I do wonder what it’ll do to base attacks. If they only give you one base, then having the possibility of outright losing the game by failing a base attack mission seems a little bit harsh.

There’s no ammo any more. Or rather there is, but only as an abstract concept. Soldiers still have to reload their guns but are assumed to have enough ammo for said guns that they’ll never run out. This makes a broad amount of sense (I certainly can never remember a time when I ran out of heavy plasma ammo what with those generous 35-round clip sizes) but it’s going to have knock on effects. There’s not going to be a weapon with the comedy value of the blaster bomb launcher in the game, for example, and it also raises significant questions over weapons which use different ammunition types like the autocannon. If they don’t include the ability to spray incendiary rounds absolutely everywhere then it’s not X-COM, as far as I’m concerned.

Soldiers no longer improve organically. There was little chance of this making it into the remake intact, but I was kind of hoping Firaxis wouldn’t be so gosh-darned predictable in implementing a perk-based levelling up system. It means the soldiers will lose much of their individuality; losing a grunt will be far less painful when there’s two more just like him with the exact same skillset.

And finally, the biggie: There are no more turn units in the game. Soldiers now have two actions per turn instead which can be used for moving, shooting, reloading etc. It’s this more than anything else which is going to make or break the game, and I fear it’s going to wind up breaking it because right there you’re removing a lot of the options players of the old game had at their fingertips that could be dealt with using the TU system. Crouching, for example: is that going to make it into the game? How would it be implemented – as a free action? What about priming grenades without throwing them? Opening doors without going inside a building? The proposed system can certainly work and I’ll wait for clarification before condemning the remake based on it, but it’s one which changes the entire flow of the game and simplifies things a little too much for my liking.

There’s a whole bunch of other changes that I broadly approve of, but these last three are the ones which have the potential to make the game recognizably Not X-COM. It’ll be something different. Not necessarily something bad, but definitely something in the vein of Railroads! or Pirates! rather than the detailed tactical shooter I was hoping for.

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“Legendary” is probably pushing it a little bit.

Contrary to what you might think, I didn’t outright condemn the FPS XCOM “update” when I first saw it. I was sceptical about how good it would be, yes, but unlike some old classics there’s definitely room to adapt the basic tenets of X-COM gameplay to a first person game. Hell, game developers recognised they had this latitude over a decade ago when FPSes were still a hot new thing and not the tired old warhorse of gaming. Unfortunately after the screenshots and videos revealed scripted alien encounter cutscenes along with an uncanny proliferation of waist-high cover rather than the Rainbow Six-style tactical shooter I’d envisaged, any hopes I might have had for X-COM were dashed barring 2K Games suffering a sudden rash of sanity and also giving the licence to a dedicated strategy game developer like Firaxis.

Which is why I was somewhat surprised to discover, upon getting out of bed yesterday, that they had done exactly that.

Let’s be clear about this. There are still several significant question marks hanging over what exactly Firaxis are eventually going to churn out onto my hard drive. For starters there’s the parallel console/PC development issue, which means they’re going to have to make some concessions to the consoles even if it’s just in terms of controls and UI. For seconds, Firaxis’ prestige is somewhat dented after the bug-ridden release of Civ V –and whatever you might think of the game now I think everyone agrees that it was in a sorry state on release – while their previous updates of classic Microprose strategy games haven’t exactly had the best results. Even Pirates!, the Good One, suffered in comparison to the original because Firaxis failed to adequately disguise the fact that it was essentially a collection of minigames this time around. Based on their track record of the past few years their true update of Enemy Unknown is by no means guaranteed to be a surefire hit.

But then there’s this. Even though the cynical side of me is screaming that this is exactly the sort of marketing gambit you’d open with given the amazing level of grumpiness die-hard X-COM fans displayed over the FPS version, even though I can probably find a similar video of Jon Schafer saying the same kinds of things about Civilization V, I can’t help but be somewhat enthused that these three guys, at least, seem to hold Enemy Unknown in high regard and – far more importantly – cite many of the facets that made it such an engrossing strategy experience as critical gameplay elements. It gives me some hope that the final product will be something regarded as being a worthy continuation of the series a la Apocalypse, even if it doesn’t quite manage to bottle the same lightning the original did.

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