About six months after my glowing review of the original XCOM reboot I wrote a followup piece that comprehensively laid into the game for flaws that had become apparent on subsequent playthroughs. The aliens’ completely passive presence on the geoscape. The introduction of new, tougher enemy types being linked to your completing plot missions that had no time factor involved, allowing you to game the system by researching endgame weapons and armour before tackling any of them. An inverse difficulty curve where the first three months of the game were by far the hardest as you desperately tried to keep your rookies alive with only basic weapons and equipment. A whole host of paper tiger systems (such as panic), where the various NPCs screamed at you to play the game in a certain way in an attempt to mask the fact that playing slowly and cautiously — and liberally vomiting explosives anywhere in direct contravention of Vahlen’s instructions — would result in flawless completion of 95% of missions. The Enemy Within expansion pack alleviated some of these flaws, but it couldn’t fix the worst of them as they were baked into the very structure of the game itself. Any trulycomprehensive cure would require a complete restructure of XCOM’s systems that only a sequel could provide.

Fast-forward three years, and my initial impression on playing XCOM 2 was that series lead Jake Solomon had been reading this blog¹ and had made a game that directly incorporated all of that feedback. At first glance XCOM 2 is specifically set up to counter nearly all of the criticisms that had become so apparent after several years with the first game. Just as with the first XCOM, though, “at first glance” is liable to lead to an unduly favourable impression of the game; it takes time to get under the hood and fully understand the new and improved systems and mechanics of the sequel, and my conclusion is that while XCOM 2 is a worthy sequel and a great game in its own right, it’s not quite the revolutionary experience it would like you to believe it is – both figuratively and mechanically.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twelve months you’ll be aware by now that XCOM 2 does do something pretty daring for a sequel: it sets itself against the backdrop of a future Earth where XCOM lost the first game in a matter of weeks. The aliens annihilated Earth’s military and gave XCOM enough hard knocks that the remnants of the Council were all too glad to surrender by signing an Accord that handed over control of the planet². Fast forward twenty years and the aliens have an ironclad grip on things via their quasi-militaristic front organisation ADVENT, which has gifted the population of Earth many marvellous scientific advances derived from alien technology that mask their nefarious true plans for the human race. There are various underground resistance groups fighting against these plans, coordinated by a still-operational XCOM that’s led by a scarred, embittered Bradford — whose sweater was presumably one of the many casualties of the First Alien War — but thematically there’s a definite role inversion here compared to the first game.  XCOM is no longer a legitimate entity fighting from a position of relative strength that’s backed by all the resources of Earth’s governments; they’re a quasi-terrorist organisation that has to engage in guerilla warfare against an entrenched alien enemy, and which is forced to scrounge up supplies (XCOM 2’s money) from a variety of sources in order to carry on the fight.

This is a great excuse to completely overhaul the geoscape layer – this is XCOM’s name for the strategic part of the game where you spend resources to research and develop new equipment and weapons, build new base facilities and decide which missions to take on next. In XCOM 1 the geoscape layer just didn’t work for long-term play; once you figured out what to research when and what you could get away with in terms of the panic meter and the plot missions it became an almost braindead experience. XCOM 2 attempts to throw nearly all of that out and starts from scratch, and the first step towards rebuilding it into something better is taken by giving XCOM a flying base: the Avenger. The Avenger travels around the globe to various mission sites and other points of interest, however it can only travel to regions where you have made contact with the local resistance cell. This is done by spending time and a secondary currency called Intel, however you can only contact a new region if you have enough “comms capacity” from the communications facilities inside your base – and the point that you understand this is the point at which you first realise that maybe XCOM 2 isn’t quite the drastic overhaul you were led to believe, since this is just a repackaged Satellites mechanic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely a big improvement over Satellites since opening up new regions now goes far beyond just giving you more income  (each newly contacted region gives you a boost to your monthly supply), but it is something that is indicative of XCOM 2’s general approach: nearly all of the mechanics from XCOM are still present in some form, they’ve just been retooled into something that is in the vast majority of cases an improvement over what came before.

So the Terror Missions where you have to save civilians from encroaching alien forces are back, they’ve just been recast as Retaliation Events where the aliens assault a resistance cell. The pick-one-out-of-three Alien Activity/Abduction missions are back, except they’re now Guerilla Missions where you can counter one of three alien Dark Events – should these come to fruition they’ll give the aliens temporary bonuses like additional armour for their grunts or sending a UFO to hunt the Avenger. Panic has received a more significant retooling into the Avatar Project counter – more on this in just a second – but it still fulfils that basic role of a thing that loses you the game if you let it tick up too much. Something that is quite conspicuous by its absence are UFO interceptions; XCOM doesn’t have any fighter craft so instead you just get occasional leads on disabled UFOs/ADVENT supply convoys fed to you by the Resistance. I think there’s scope to make an interesting mechanic out of interceptions but since they added very little to XCOM in their current incarnation I’m fine with being dropped until somebody can figure out what that interesting mechanic is.

The one genuinely new concept the XCOM 2 geoscape layer introduces is the concept of time as a resource. In XCOM 1 the geoscape was somewhere you went to kill time while you waited for the next mission to pop up or the next piece of research to complete. XCOM 2’s geoscape by contrast has you deciding on the best place to spend time, as everything you do there that isn’t just flying from point A to point B takes a certain amount of it. The map is liberally scattered with points of interest where you can spend a certain amount of time “scanning” in order to get some bonus resource income. Or you can spend it contacting new Resistance regions or building Radio Relay towers to make contacting far-flung regions easier. You can fly back to Resistance HQ and spend time there to get some passive bonuses for the Avenger – faster facility construction, faster recovery time for wounded soldiers, or gathering Intel (which can be quite hard to come by otherwise). Even gathering your basic monthly supply income takes time, as it’s dumped somewhere on the globe and necessitates you having to fly over and spend time grabbing it all up.

This works quite well in tandem with the new incarnation of the Panic meter: the Avatar Project. The Avatar Project is the thing that the first XCOM very conspicuously did not do: it’s a secret goal for the aliens that they’re working towards all the time, and almost completely independently of your actions on the geoscape. Every so often the Avatar Project counter at the top of the geoscape screen will tick up. There are certain Dark Events which, if you do not block them, add one or two ticks to the Avatar counter. The aliens periodically construct facilities around the globe to aid in their Avatar Project research; allowing one of these facilities to exist looks like it also speeds up the rate at which that counter fills up. There are only two ways you can reduce the aliens’ Avatar progress:

• Blow up the Avatar research facilities by sending your soldiers in to plant C4 charges. This will remove any ticks that that facility was responsible for adding – worthwhile when its got three ticks on it, less so when it only has one unless you’re really desperate.
• Complete plot missions.

The second point is by far the best way to reduce Avatar progress – in the one campaign I’ve completed so far there was still an element of waiting until I was good and ready before doing these objectives, but I got really lucky with my initial facility spawns and was able to knock four ticks off of the counter relatively quickly. I was also lucky in that I was able to block nearly every single Dark Event that added to the Avatar counter. Even so there was definitely a point several months in where I was feeling very pressured – I’d had time to research Tier 2 weapons and armour, but Tier 3 was very much beyond my reach before I had to start paying attention to the plot objectives. The Avatar Project functions adequately for the first 50% of the campaign as a way of keeping pressure on the player and making them very aware that time is precious; I think that once you understand how it works it’s far too easy to get on top of the Avatar counter in the late game and keep it down to 3-4 ticks (out of 12), but I also know that I had it relatively easy when it came to initial non-plot options for buying myself time. The counter could definitely stand to advance a little more aggressively — but then I was only playing on Normal. Classic might be a whole other story. Regardless it’s a huge, huge improvement over Panic, and any flaws in its implementation could probably be fixed with balancing tweaks rather than yet another overhaul of the fundamental mechanics.

Base facility construction has also received an overhaul, although it’s a substantially subtler one. Nearly all the facilities from XCOM return in some form; the big difference here is how you deal with engineers and scientists in base management. First, you get them as individual, named engineers scientists from mission rewards (and, occasionally, purchasing them from Resistance HQ and/or the black market) rather than as the abstract numbers the first XCOM dealt with. Each scientist you acquire gives a passive, diminishing bonus to research speed (so the first scientist gives +50%, the second +33% and so on) and you can build laboratories and assign scientists to them for further research boosts – but I never found this to be necessary in my game, as having 3-4 scientists just sitting around was enough to get tolerable research speeds. Engineers are a different story entirely, however. Engineers are used to excavate debris to create new construction slots as well as speeding the construction of the facilities you place in those slots, but their real utility is in being assigned to your various base facilities for huge bonuses in how those facilities operate. For example, a basic, unstaffed Resistance Comms facility increases your Comms capacity by one (or maybe two, I forget which). Adding an engineer raises that capacity by an additional two. Upgrading the facility with an additional station and putting a second engineer in raises that capacity by an additional four. It’s a similar story with the other facilities, with engineers increasing your power output, soldier healing/training time or the construction time of prototype weapons in the Proving Ground. Because time is so precious now Engineers are insanely valuable, and I found myself blocked on geoscape progression more than a few times because I didn’t have enough; I was regularly swapping around the ones I had according to what I needed most at the time.

In hindsight I’m kicking myself for never building the Workshop, which is a facility that provides Engineer bonuses to all adjacent facilities – but that’s not something you can really understand the utility of until you’ve already run into Engineer blockages. I found the base management part of the geoscape really tricky because it’s something you need to plan months in advance, and you can’t plan effectively when you’re still figuring out how everything works. I remember having that problem with the first XCOM too, where I mis-attributed it to the base management actually being difficult. I don’t think that’s the case with XCOM 2 but I do think there are much more interesting decisions to be made here, especially with the early availability of psionics (another thing I didn’t make good use of in my campaign, but which were devastatingly powerful even in the endgame) and the Proving Ground facility that provides most of your best utility items. What I can definitely say is that I’m excited to try it again on Classic with a more optimal strategy – it feels like there’s multiple viable options and plenty of room for refinement, rather than the one-size-fits-all strategy of XCOM.

Compared to the geoscape the alterations to the tactical battlescape portion of the game are somewhat lower-key, even though one of them is basically the headline feature of XCOM 2. Most of these changes are designed to counter the foolproof method of beating battlescape missions in XCOM — which was to inch forward a couple of tiles at a time with everyone permanently on overwatch — as well as the common complaint that it was always you finding the aliens rather than the other way around, which put far too much power into the hands of the player. Since your soldiers are now part of a covert resistance organisation engaged in hit-and-run attacks they start most missions in a state of stealth; they can run around unhindered as long as they don’t blunder into any alien line-of-sight (helpfully marked by big red eyeball indicators on the relevant tiles) and set up devastating ambushes on oblivious groups of enemies who are standing around in the open. As soon as you fire your first shot stealth is dropped and the gameplay transitions to the standard XCOM battlescape – where uncovering a new group of enemies gives them a free move to seek cover — so making effective use of this first ambush by setting up your squad in overwatch (which doesn’t have any of the usual penalties to aim when you’re firing from an ambush position) prior to firing that first shot is critical, especially since the bad guys now have many more nasty tricks up their sleeve.

The flipside of stealth is that every mission involving it also has a time limit for you to achieve an objective, which is usually “Get to a thing and hack it” although there’s also destruction/protection of communication relays and the VIP extraction missions (which are awful in a good way, as you’re forced to be a little more discriminating in your use of firepower). This is the antidote to the overwatch-creeping tactic above; not only does overwatch appear to be less effective in XCOM 2, but if you’re super cautious you’ll simply run out of time to complete the mission. It would seem a little draconian if the stealth didn’t give you a free hand in setting up your assault; as it is the two go together very well indeed, allowing you to freely move around in the opening turns of the mission while punishing you for dragging your feet and encouraging you to come up with solutions to inconvenient tactical fuckups on the fly instead of avoiding them entirely by being conservative in your play. The stealth missions are also broken up with more conventional gameplay according to the old rules of XCOM - but even here I found myself being more aggressive simply because I could afford to be.

This is because, pound for pound, the redone soldier classes of XCOM 2 are vastly more effective than their XCOM counterparts. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still weak as kittens to start with and you have to be on your toes even in the late game to avoid unnecessary losses, but they have a much wider range of useful skills and items to draw upon in combat. There’s new utility items such as Mimic Beacons (arguably the MVP of my completed campaign, and something that should be researched ASAP), as well as passive boosts to your soldiers’ stats through Combat Sims and weapon upgrades that provide free reloads and bonuses to aim or crit. The soldier skill trees are still split out into two branches per class, however this time around each of the branches is powerful and worthwhile. The Assault has become the Ranger, able to specialise in either scouting or melee combat; the Support is now the Specialist, with access to drones that can either heal and buff allies remotely or hack and electrocute enemies; the Sniper’s pistol tree has now been reworked for the Sharpshooter so that it’s arguably more powerful than the sniper rifle in combination with special ammo; and then finally there’s the Grenadier.

The Grenadier deserves a special mention. Instead of the Heavy’s rocket launcher they lug around a grenade launcher that doesn’t have as much range, but which is capable of indirect fire and which can launch any type of grenade in the game with a boost to damage and lethal radius. Explosives in general are even more important in XCOM 2 than they were in the first XCOM, as there’s a new armour mechanic whereby armoured units have between one and six points of armour that absorb a corresponding amount of incoming damage; only damage that exceeds the target’s armour value will make it through and damage their HP bar. In order to defeat heavily armoured enemies you have to either use abilities that ignore armour completely (psionic powers and the Specialist’s electric shocks are great for this) or else shred the armour first using — you guessed it — a copious quantity of explosives. The Grenadier also has a skill that lets their standard cannon shots shred armour, making them the go-to guys for armour removal, cover removal and softening up large groups of enemies for the rest of your squad. The new equipment options include a vastly expanded array of grenade types such as EMP, flashbang, incendiary and gas grenades, all of which can be plugged into the grenade launcher for that damage and explosive radius boost. There’s also specialised sets of heavy armour that come with special inbuilt heavy weapons, the default version of which is a rocket launcher.

As a consequence I always found myself carting around at least two Grenadiers on every mission, and my level of comfort with how a mission was playing out was directly correlated with the number of grenades and/or rockets I had left.  The increased availability and use of explosive weapons also shows off the new destruction and environmental burning effects; if there are enemies perched on top of a roof you can now destroy the ground underneath their feet, dropping them one or two storeys and dealing additional fall damage, while all explosives have a chance to set buildings alight – and this fire will continue burning and destroying terrain in subsequent turns, which did come back on me a couple of times as I accidentally dropped a building on my squads’ heads. It’s worth noting that the aliens aren’t without their own tricks and have a number of new and incredibly annoying abilities to offset your soldiers’ increased power, but on the whole I think it’s a net win for the forces of XCOM.

And while I’m talking about the soldiers, I should spare a few words to talk about the general art direction of the game. The cutscenes and writing are the usual bland Firaxis crap, but I think that the general art direction — and the soldier customisation options in particular — is actually pretty amazing. You can take a screenshot of nearly any action zoom event from XCOM 2 and use it as a publicity photo for the game; XCOM 2 absolutely nails stylish soldiers killing aliens in stylish ways thanks to new weapon effects (plasma rifles in particular now look like they hit hard) and a dizzying array of options for playing soldier dress-up. These don’t fully unlock until you’ve levelled them up a bit, but once you do you can alter just about anything you can think of – I was particularly taken with the metallic camouflage options for the last tier of powered armour, as well as the belated realisation that I could have cigar-chewing Grenadiers blasting enemy Sectopods with their plasma cannon. The new environments provide a fitting backdrop for the carnage, with the camera and lighting effects really accentuating the highlights of the ongoing battle. Watching a battlescape action unfold is a genuine pleasure, and one I don’t think I’m going to get tired of any time soon. That’s a big contrast to the usual XCOM problem of battlescape fatigue.

As usual in my reviews, though, it’s time for the inevitable criticism. XCOM 2 is a fantastic game in many ways, but the areas where it continues to fuck up are the perennial Firaxis bugbears: tutorials, UI and scripted events. The tutorials are complete garbage once again, alternating between too hand-holdy (the tutorial battlescape mission literally locks off all possible moves except the one you’re supposed to make) and almost non-existent – contacting new resistance regions and the Comms facility are extremely badly explained, which is ironic considering they made exactly the same mistake with Satellites the first time around. The base navigation UI is absolutely terrible, requiring way too many clicks to change screens and generally making it a chore to get around. And the scripted events and objectives…

…yeah, this is probably the single worst thing XCOM 2 does, since not only do the objectives and scripted events seem intentionally designed to fuck over new players so that they have to restart their campaign, but it’s all entirely avoidable by this magic thing the original original X-COM did called “Not having scripted events in your game of procedurally generated battle maps”. It’s an entirely self-inflicted wound. Usually in grand strategy games any objectives you are given are designed so that they provide some structure for first-time players, but in XCOM 2 this couldn’t be further from the truth. Even apparently harmless objectives like building the Proving Ground early on seem intentionally misleading, as players will waste time and resources building a facility that doesn’t really come into its own until the mid-game when they could instead be building the Guerilla Tactics School – which is possibly the single most important facility you can build for the early game. The really unforgiveable thing about XCOM 2, though, is that fulfilling its equivalent of “Interrogate enemy species X” objectives – which has been a core part of XCOM since forever — now immediately spawn in very tough enemies who will make mincemeat of an unprepared squad. You have no warning that this is going to happen, and if you haven’t gamed the system by waiting for tier 2 or 3 armour and weapons, or you haven’t made sure you’ve cleared out every other enemy on the map first, you’re probably going to get screwed the first time you do it.

The thing about this that I find particularly annoying is that it’s a trap that will only catch out first time players. Veteran players will know what’s coming and plan ahead, but if you’re playing the game for the first time you’re already at a disadvantage while you figure out the systems and you’re probably relying on following the objectives to guide you through the game. Instead XCOM 2 sees no problem with throwing these additional obstacles in your way — obstacles that have absolutely no place in a game that’s supposed to be designed for repeated playthroughs — and I actually think that kind of design mentality is outright offensive, since not only is XCOM 2 lying to you about how you should play it (again) but this time it’s being actively malicious in doing so. It’s different from even the Alien Base in the first game, since at least with the Alien Base you knew you were heading into enemy territory and could prepare for a tough mission. By contrast these screw-you events can happen at any time if you trigger them by having the temerity to actually do what the game tells you you should be doing. Fortunately it wasn’t so much of a problem for me, as I (somewhat) intentionally decided to test the limits of the geoscape by waiting as long as possible before tackling the plot objectives – there was even some good news there as I discovered that the aliens level up their troops independently of your progress through the plot. However it still came across as tremendously awful game design, and it stood out even more when you consider how well the rest of it is put together.

XCOM 2 is still mostly the same game as its predecessor, and perhaps a little more so than I would have liked; it makes plenty of iterative changes but on the whole retains a surprisingly large quantity of the DNA of its parent. I don’t think the geoscape changes are an unqualified success – it’s a bit more hectic and there are some marginally interesting decisions to be made, but I still ended up killing time in the lategame — but the base management is genuinely tense as you try and figure out where to invest your resources and the battlescape missions are as good as they have ever been. To me, though, the most interesting thing about XCOM 2 is that it shows full awareness of the games preceding it.Too often I play sequels that have regressed in scope in some way when compared to the original title, with the usual excuse being that there wasn’t time to add certain features or functionality and that it’ll have to wait for a patch or expansion pack. XCOM 2 by contrast is just as feature-rich as XCOM was with the additional Enemy Within content, and since it refines most of that content into a better state it is one of the few sequels I’ve encountered that is just a flat-out upgrade. It’s not a perfect game by any means and makes some entirely avoidable mistakes, but it is in almost all respects better than what came before, and I don’t think I could ask for more from a sequel to the already-great XCOM.

The post Thoughts: XCOM 2 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.

At the end of the first season of Stargate SG-1 there’s an episode where Daniel Jackson inadvertently travels to an alternate reality where the Goa’uld (the alien badguys) are in the middle of a full-blown invasion of Earth. The planet’s military forces are quickly crushed, and the alternate reality versions of the main cast are killed off one by one as they desperately try to buy time for Daniel to make his way back to his own universe to warn people that an invasion is coming; by the time he does, Earth has fallen and the aliens have won. This episode is called “There But For The Grace Of God”, and I absolutely cannot think of a better way of summing up The Bureau: There But For The Grace Of Firaxis Goes XCOM.

Just like the Stargate episode, The Bureau is a glimpse into a terrifying alternate reality where third-person cover shooters reign victorious over the shattered husk of computer gaming, and where classic series like XCOM are stripped of everything that made them unique and interesting in the first place in the quest to make everything appeal to the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t even have the good manners to be memorably bad, to take risks and fuck up because it stretched too far. Instead The Bureau plays it safe and ends up being offensively bland and generic, like they assembled the game out of spare parts they had lying around, slapped a thin veneer of 60s sci-fi over the top and then put it in a box and called it XCOM. (Indeed, if you read the story of  The Bureau’s tortured development process this is pretty much exactly what happened).  There is nothing in this game that contains even the tiniest iota of original game design, and yet despite this risk-averse approach to development, despite this mentality that prioritises producing a product just like every other third-person game on the market because that’s what sells these days and the publishers like money, they’ve still managed to fuck it up. That’s quite an achievement.

That the Bureau is a terrible XCOM game won’t come as a massive shock to anyone, I think. Most people were expecting this to be the case ever since it was announced; while I don’t think it’d be impossible for XCOM to make the leap to other genres (XCOM: Interceptor was a buggy mess but it wasn’t a bad idea, while I’m probably one of the few people who thought XCOM: Alliance looked quite interesting before it was canned)  you have to go about it with a very specific mindset that doesn’t involve cribbing major game mechanics from Gears of War and Brothers in Arms¹, and as far as that goes The Bureau is guilty on all counts. What did surprise me slightly was that the Bureau is just a terrible game full stop. I was expecting to have at least some fun with the command system and whatever base management features had made it into the game, but I had overlooked two not-so-minor factors endemic to modern game development:

• They completely stripped out the base management. Of course they did. Of course they did. Base management is precisely the sort of thing that game developers and publishers are convinced will confuse the drooling, lobotomised simians they think make up their core market, and so it’s been completely chucked out the window.  I just couldn’t believe they’d take out the base management and still have the gall to try to market it as an XCOM game, is all; once you’ve done that then what’s the point in attaching this 20 year-old IP to it in the first place? I guarantee you the sort of person this game is targeted at is highly unlikely to know the XCOM series even exists. Anyway, there’s no base management in XCOM. There is a base, and you can walk around it having incredibly tedious conversations with the inhabitants in between missions, but otherwise it has all the interactivity of a rock on a shelf².
• The command system on the other hand has made it into the game, and as previously mentioned it takes a fair bit of inspiration from Brothers in Arms. Push the spacebar and you enter command mode, where time slows to a crawl, allies and enemies are highlighted in blue and red respectively, and you can issue orders to your two squadmates. This was pretty cool the first time I used it, and I immediately tried to use it to tell my squad to provide me with some cover fire while I flanked the enemy and took it out from the rear – which is why the time lag between my opening up the command system and my discovery that the squad AI is broken as fuck was about five seconds.

The squad AI deserves a bit more of an in-depth thrashing, since it’s the primary reason why the Bureau doesn’t even work as a mediocre third-person cover shooter. If enemies are behind cover they’ll take massively reduced damage, and while they’re kind enough to leave their heads poking out so that you can shoot them with sniper rifles eventually you are going to have to flank them if you want to kill them all. So you tell your two buddies to huddle down in covered positions and draw some fire while you sneak around the side so that you can get those sweet 200% damage criticals for flanking, but when you get to the flanking spot you realise that the enemy has redeployed to face you, and – even worse – there’s no covering fire coming in from where you thought you left your squadmates. This is because the squad AI is (as far as I can tell) coded to disregard orders and follow the commander once you get a certain distance away from them, except – hilariously – that distance is pathetically short and some considerable way less than the distance you’ll travel in the average flanking maneuver.  This makes flanking damn near impossible unless you get suicidally close to the enemy, which in turn renders the cover shooter gameplay a braindead slugfest.

There are other problems with the squad AI (the pathfinding in particular is absolutely godawful, and I lost count of the number of times I attacked the enemy only to realise that one of my squadmates was stuck on a piece of scenery some way back twiddling his thumbs) but that’s the one that kills The Bureau stone cold dead as far as I’m concerned. It’s just so boring, especially at the start of the game when you have no abilities and it’s just you running along a linear path from A to B that’s chock-full of video game clichés that block your route and funnel you down that path: the staircase blocked with furniture; the sheer drop you have to jump down so that you can’t go back; the unopenable door that has a rather unconvincing flat image of a room inside pasted on just behind a window; the knee-high wall you inexplicably cannot vault over — you’ll see all these things and more in the first half hour of play. It’s just so spectacularly unimaginative, and while it gets a bit better once you actually have a few things you can do in the command system that aren’t the janky move and shoot orders it’s a level design philosophy that’s present throughout the entire game.

Speaking of those abilities, which unlock as your agents gain experience by killing enemies: I don’t have a problem with them being in the game, but absolutely no attempt is made to contextualise them within the game world – no research, no engineering, no explanation of why your men can now put up shields and summon blob monsters. Because they’re not explained they end up being the functional equivalent of magic spells, which – again – seem to be in the game because other, more popular titles used them to great effect. For example, your character – Agent Carter – gets an early ability which allows him to telekinetically lift aliens out of cover so that his squad can shoot them. Why can he do this? It’s possible it’s explained later on, but I’m about six hours in and as far as I can tell it seems to be there because Mass Effect did it. Let’s not even get into the Soldier class’s Taunt ability, which forces aliens out of cover; it makes absolutely no sense that you can enrage an alien species by insulting their mothers and belittling the size of their genitalia, but it’s in the game anyway because that’s what other games do. It’s spectacularly shit.

Weapon upgrades are similarly awful. Again, there’s no research or engineering necessary to unlock them; instead you just pick them up during a mission and boom, your scientists suddenly know how to manufacture them en masse so that you can equip them in the future. The weapons themselves have absolutely no heft or sense of force to them – something of a jarring shock since I was coming to The Bureau  right after spending twenty hours in Payday’s meaty gunfights – and give the overall impression that you’re shooting the aliens with rolled-up balls of wet tissue paper. I’d complain about the upgrades consisting of affixing the word “laser” to everything in the assumption that players will be happy with Laser Shotguns and Laser SMGs, that make a slightly different sound to Earth weapons but which are otherwise functionally identical, except the proper XCOM did this too so it’ll probably seem like nitpicking. All I’ll say is that weapon variety is somewhat more important in a shooter than it is in a turn- and class-based strategy game, and that I think the unimaginative weapons contribute materially to the Bureau’s bland nature.

Last – but not least – there is the plot. Oh good god, the plot. At first, when you don’t know what the aliens are up to, it’s nearly creepy seeing what they do to towns under their control. There’s some great use of sound effects during the opening mission that reminded me of the 50s War of the Worlds movie – just general unsettling pulses of noise that give you the feeling something big and unnatural is going on. Aside from the gameplay being dull as ditchwater it didn’t seem like the plot was going to be that bad when I was at the start of the game. Then I surprised an alien infiltrator in the infirmary who spoke to me in perfect English, mwa-ha-ha-ing about their invasion plans. Then I interrogated an alien who told me everything about the invasion plans after about ten seconds of conversation. Then – sigh — the leader of the aliens started calling me up on the batphone to taunt me about how my continued victories against his incompetent underlings were all part of his master plan. Then – double sigh – it turned out that Agent Carter had a secret history with the aliens that very much looked like it was going to turn him into the Chosen One.

It was at this point that I stopped playing the game; it was bad enough that the gameplay was repetitive and unimaginative without the plot stuffing in every single bad videogame storytelling trope I’ve seen in the last five years. On top of that there’s the general sense that the game really has been stitched together out of spare parts – character animations are awful, sound effects don’t play, conversations feel like they’ve been assembled from random snippets of voice acting that nearly make sense but which are slightly too generic to convince me that they’re being used as intended. There’s also the facial animation during conversations, which ranges from “bad” to “oh my god that guy’s face is going to fall off of his face in a minute”. The production values aren’t the lowest I’ve ever seen, but they’re definitely not what I’d expect from a big-name game in 2013. Maybe it would have been acceptable – maybe the entire game would have been acceptable – back in 2006 when they started making it, but in 2013 it looks dated, feels dated and plays bloody terribly.

And the biggest irony of all is, it didn’t have to be this way. Firaxis’ XCOM might not have been perfect, but it was a good update that felt like XCOM and which did very well commercially, proving that there’s still a voracious appetite for gameplay features which are a little more complex than Shoot The Alien Right In The Face. Development woes aside (because you’d have a great deal of trouble convincing me The Bureau wouldn’t have turned out this way if development had gone swimmingly) there was no commercial imperative to make the game this dull. That I was half-expecting The Bureau to be bad doesn’t in any way excuse it. Hopefully 2K will learn from this and leave the XCOM series to Firaxis, who at least seem to have some idea of what they’re doing. Hopefully game developers in general will learn from this and stop resurrecting old IP as FPS/TPS games that somehow seem even older and tired than their antecedents. But I’m not holding my breath.

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

Darren asks

 I was poking around in the archives yesterday and noticed that there was a comment from earlier this year regarding XCOM and its lack of replayability. I agree that the game has a serious replayability problem, and I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard much about this. Would you care to elaborate? Also, since Firaxis have been hinting at it, what would you like to see in an expansion?

Yes, I think it’s fair enough that I should elaborate on this since my original review is so glowing. I wrote that in the middle of my second playthrough, before I’d managed to formulate the tactics that so reliably broke the game and run up against the now painfully-apparent limitations of the campaign and the geoscape map. Games are at their best when you first play them; you don’t know the rules and you don’t know the structure, and the fact that it’s so opaque means that anything seems possible. This was the perspective from which I viewed XCOM, but time – and the classic Ironman playthrough – has changed that perspective considerably. I still think XCOM is a good game, but it’s one that I have no real desire to go back to (aside from the odd desultory crack at the Impossible difficulty) and this post will attempt to explain why.

First you have the extremely passive nature of the campaign structure itself. In the original XCOM the aliens were running their own game in parallel with the player. Each UFO flitting around the surface had a mission, and if it managed to carry out that mission unmolested there’d be a consequence: a base would be built, a terror attack would be launched, a nation would be turned, all of which served to further the aliens’ goals if the player didn’t stop them. Crucially this activity takes place regardless of whether or not the player detects it, and the cause and effect nature of their missions means the player can actively interfere in their plans — for example, terror missions never occur if you shoot down all of the terror ships, and supply ships can be tracked to reveal the location of concealed alien bases. The game will spawn a base in response to the “plot” research, but I think that’s just about the only thing it does outside of this parallel campaign structure. Otherwise it’s you against the aliens, and if you slack off for a couple of months the aliens are going to get an advantage because they’re constantly playing their own game.

In new XCOM, however, the aliens are almost totally passive. They’re not even playing the game this time; they simply exist as targets for the player to gun down in the battlescape, with the geoscape functioning merely as a way to randomly generate new battlescape missions and manage the plot-based stuff. I’m not sure the UFOs you’re shooting down even do anything, and there’s certainly no shadowy force working against you as the terror ratings never increase independently of something the player is able to see and influence¹. The plot missions themselves follow a far more rigid structure than the original game and – somewhat hilariously – the rate at which the aliens tech up is heavily tied to how quickly the player progresses down this linear plot pathway. Firaxis try to camouflage it by having the cardboard characters shout at you to go and storm the alien base or whatever, but the fact is that you have all the time in the world to happily sit back and research endgame armour and weaponry before assaulting it since new alien types will be introduced much more slowly if you don’t move the plot forward. Assaulting the alien base will let Mutons and Sectoid Commanders loose in your game; attacking the Overseer UFO will do likewise for Sectopods and Muton Elites, and while these enemies will eventually turn up if you don’t do the plot missions they’ll do so much later when you have the technology to deal with them. The power to move the campaign along lies almost solely in the hands of the player, and there is literally no incentive for the them to do anything until they’re good and ready. This completely destroys any sense of pressure or threat that was present in the geoscape campaign up until that point.

Then there’s the matter of XCOM’s inverse difficulty curve: it starts off very difficult, and then gradually gets easier as you open up more tactical options through research. The initial high difficulty is a result of only having rookies armed with Earth assault rifles and body armour to do the missions, coupled with an extremely limited ability to produce satellites – the primary mechanism through which you get money and reduce panic — at the start of the game thanks to your low engineer count. The only challenge in XCOM’s geoscape is overcoming those twin problems; once you have, the geoscape becomes almost trivial to deal with and is just a matter of going through the motions whenever a UFO rears its head. The battlescape difficulty is less out of whack, but because the gameplay’s been shifted away from a pseudo-realistic tactical simulation to a more boardgame-style system of odds manipulation and risk management  it’s much easier to identify and adopt a one-size-fits-all strategy that will give you the highest chances of success. The end result is a game that gets easier with time, not harder, and when the end of the game is providing less challenge for the person playing it, then where is the incentive to continue?

On my first playthrough of XCOM I followed the game’s directions, tried to flank aliens in the battlescape and did the plot missions when it told me to. I lost eighteen soldiers. On my second playthrough I explicitly disobeyed its orders, grenaded every single alien I came across and only did plot missions when I had the very best weapons and armour available, and that time around I lost just two. That’s the thing that irritates me most about XCOM, I think; despite some deep design flaws it’s not a bad game, but it tries to cover up those flaws by lying to the player about the best way to play it, and as soon as they try to strike out on their own they find that the aliens are nothing more than a paper tiger. They present no threat on the geoscape map because they’re so passive; the only way you’ll lose the game there is through base mismanagement (which the game does an awful job of explaining). And because of the switch to a purely odds-based battlescape system it becomes far easier to game that as well, by slowly creeping forward and destroying any piece of cover the aliens might conceivably try to hide behind. Original XCOM was fun because its emergent and semi-adversarial nature meant that every game was different. Here the reverse is true; new XCOM does nothing to upset the player’s plans and can therefore be beaten the same way every single time.

As a final footnote there’s an interview somewhere (EDIT: looking back it appears to be this one, where he doesn’t explicitly link it to the campaign but does express genuine surprise that XCOM was a game that people might want to replay) where Jake Solomon says that the reason the campaign is so linear and unreactive is because they didn’t think players would play through the game more than once. Since he’s an avowed fan of the series I can only conclude that he’s desperately trying to excuse what they’ve made here by lying through his teeth, because I have never ever heard of a player who completed the original XCOM and didn’t start a second game. The first thing I’m hoping for from a sequel is that it’s a semi-remake of Terror from the Deep with less outright-unfair difficulty and goofy alien designs and more oppressive creepiness and an ever-present sense that you’re doomed.  The second thing I’m hoping for is that they go back to the drawing board for the Geoscape portion of the game, because as it is it fundamentally fails to provide the emergent strategy experience that was at the heart of the first three XCOM titles. In fairness to Firaxis they might actually do one or both of these things, since their treatment of Civ V shows that they do listen to player feedback and adjust their game design accordingly, but I’m not holding my breath for either.

The post The Trouble With XCOM. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

For a series that purportedly spans twenty years, the XCOM games actually have a relatively short and chequered history. Before Firaxis came along to do their very respectable reboot of the franchise the last game to carry the XCOM name – the execrable Enforcer – had been released in 2001. Before Enforcer was the similarly-terrible Interceptor, but neither of these were really XCOM games as they’re popularly understood; Enforcer was a third person shooter while Interceptor plumped for a bizarre and awful space combat environment. You have to go all the way back to 1997 to find an XCOM game with tiny men running around on a tactical battlescape map, and so the “true” XCOM games consist of the original trilogy: UFO, Terror From The Deep, and Apocalypse.  Everyone knows about UFO, since that’s the game that got the high-profile remake last year. Apocalypse was… interesting, and probably a post for another day. What I’m here to talk about today, though, is Terror From The Deep, a game with a reputation it doesn’t really deserve since it was far, far better than it had any right to be, especially when you consider its origins.

Terror From The Deep started out as a classic attempt to capitalise on an unexpectedly popular game with a hastily-developed sequel. Microprose noted the rapturous reception being given to UFO and decided they wanted a second XCOM game as soon as possible. The Gollop brothers were busy with the ambitious experiment that eventually turned out as Apocalypse, so Microprose’s UK development team was given a brief to produce an XCOM sequel in just six months. UFO had taken years to make and even back in the mid-nineties six months was an absurdly short development window, which is why Terror From The Deep ended up looking like a palette swap of UFO: the development team simply didn’t have the luxury of remaking – or even improving– the UFO engine. Graphically speaking, a palette swap and a few new terrain tilesets was all they had time for.

So Terror bears more than a passing resemblance to UFO. It looks identical and plays identically, barring the setting and some under-the-hood tinkering carried out in response to player feedback on UFO. Usually this is the sort of thing that goes down in history as a soulless cash-in on the original game’s popularity, except for two rather important factors:

1)      Making a game that’s almost identical to one of the greatest games of all time means that game is going to be almost as good, cash-in or no.

2)      The change of setting and the subtle mechanical tinkering led to Terror From The Deep having a rather sadistic appeal to exactly the sort of person who had played and enjoyed XCOM.

It’s the second one that I find interesting, since it led directly to XCOM – a game already noted for its quite capricious level of difficulty – being made even harder for its second outing. Legend has it that this was somewhat unintentional; the team behind Terror was working from feedback that experienced players of UFO found the game far too easy at higher difficulty levels and shifted Terror’s difficulty to compensate, except there was a very good non-mechanical reason for UFO’s lack of challenge: it was bugged. Starting a game at a high difficulty level worked as intended, but as soon as you got out of the first mission the game would reset the difficulty level back down to Beginner. This meant that nobody had actually played UFO on anything other than the easiest difficulty setting – hence the complaints.

Terror is a very, very difficult game to play. Not only do the difficulty settings actually work this time around, but many of the “advantages” players of UFO had become accustomed to had simply vanished. You thought the starting Earth rifle was bad? Try fighting the undersea menace armed with a harpoon gun that has less relative stopping power and a third as many rounds. The reliable workhorse of the laser weapon tier has been replaced by gauss weaponry, which have a limited ammo count and are only an improvement from harpoon guns because harpoon guns are so bloody terrible. Even the high explosive heavy weapons used to supplement harpoons have the hefty restriction that two out of three of them cannot be used outside of an underwater environment.¹ Sonic weapons are awful compared to the versatility of UFO’s heavy plasma guns.  Flying suits no longer work on dry land. This is just the changes made to XCOM’s armament, mind; when you look at the aliens and battlescapes you get a much, much longer list, including but not limited to:

• Pointless monuments in seaside resorts with twisty-turny passages inside that go nowhere and invariably have an alien hiding at the end who’ll take a point-blank shot at your guys.
• One-square cyberdiscs that can hide in said corridors, and which explode just as enthusiastically when destroyed.
• Two-stage terror missions.
• Two-stage terror missions on cruise ships, where each individual cabin must be searched for aliens.
• Lobstermen, an alien type that shrugs off ranged weapons fire and which must be eliminated through use of melee weaponry (this being another feature the XCOM playerbase asked for). Needless to say, this necessitates your fragile XCOM troopers getting into melee range in the first place.
• Flying Chryssalids.

All this stuff comes together to make Terror’s Beginner difficulty level approximately as hard as UFO’s Superhuman would have been had it not been bugged. It’s the game the players of UFO thought they wanted, except they didn’t know that UFO had had the kid gloves on the whole time they’d been playing it. This is why Terror is an awful experience for anyone who hasn’t beaten UFO, and why it gets a very bad rap even amongst the XCOM fanbase. If you’re not already intimately familiar with the gameplay mechanics and you haven’t done your research on the tech tree ahead of time² you don’t stand a chance. Seen from the perspective of a newcomer to the series, Terror From The Deep isn’t a very good game at all.

If you have beaten UFO and you’re looking for a different riff on the same theme, though, the experience of playing Terror carries with it a perverse sort of pleasure. Sure, there’s rather a lot in the game that’s just straight-up unfair or unfun, and I wish the guy who came up with those Easter island monuments had been walled up inside one of his creations to see how he liked it. But there’s no denying that I like Terror From The Deep. I like it in spite of the many mistakes it makes in trying to “improve” the XCOM formula, and I like it precisely because it doesn’t give the player any breathing room compared to UFO. UFO is a bastard to play when you’re still figuring things out, but once you’ve done that – or once you read a strategy guide that tells you how to do that – it all falls into place and you can start to powergame it. You know to beeline to laser weapons and personal armour; you know when to set up your second base; and you know when you should get your heavy plasma production line up and running. There’s an optimum strategy for winning games of UFO, and once you know what it is a lot of the game’s difficulty just evaporates like morning fog.

Terror From The Deep has the same broad strategy, but there’s a big difference in outlook between it and its elder sibling. Knowing the optimum strategy for UFO makes the game winnable. By contrast, knowing the optimum strategy for Terror makes the game survivable. You want to win a game of Terror, you’re going to have to do a bit more than mass-producing sonic weapons and researching stuff in the right order; the proliferation of two-stage missions, the tougher aliens and the crappier guns mean you have to get really, really good at the battlescape missions in order to have any chance of reaching the end of the game. By bringing this grinding element of attrition to the tactical side of things Terror tests your ability to deal with situations that are a little, shall we say, sub-optimal. Everyone’s lost rookies during terror missions, but UFO never put you in the position of having to drag a ragged, half-dead squad of survivors into round two until the very end of the game (at which point it didn’t matter anyway). Missions can now last hours rather than being over in 20-30 minutes, and this means that many stop-gap solutions you often fall back on in XCOM are no longer possible. You can’t just finish a mission before somebody bleeds out. You can’t fire off ammo willy-nilly because you know you’ll be on your way back to base in ten minutes. Often you’re put into a situation where two of your three options will result in certain death, and the third in almost-certain death, and having to pick the right one is only the start of your problems.

By taking away your quick fixes and your easy ways out, Terror pushes you into taking desperate measures you likely never considered doing in UFO. I had a squad get so shot up there were only 3-4 able-bodied troopers left, but that didn’t mean the rest got to twiddle their thumbs back at the Skyranger; instead they had to haul themselves after the battle-ready soldiers on their horribly burnt and cauterised limb-stumps, ready to provide medical aid and what little firepower they could bring to a fight. Whenever somebody got knocked out I had to rather unceremoniously stuff their unconscious body into somebody’s backpack so that they wouldn’t get left behind during a level transition — this saved more than one life when unfortunate troopers collapsed from smoke inhalation and they had to be rescued by the walking wounded. Smoke is rather ubiquitous in Terror thanks to the rather sickening quantity of explosives being thrown around. Indeed, anyone with experience of UFO would consider a Terror player to be almost carelessly trigger-happy during terror missions – that is, until they looked into the Terror player’s eyes and saw their haunted thousand-yard stare. Yes, burning down that house with two innocent civilians inside was totally necessary because it also flushed the alien that was using it for cover out into the open. And even then he took three harpoons to the face before he finally went down. Keeping the civilians alive during terror missions has always been a secondary concern in XCOM games, but in Terror it’s merely a happy coincidence if of them actually manage to get out of there in one piece. Your priorities and methods are different this time around; dictated by brutal necessity and implemented with overwhelming force because that’s the only way for your men and women to survive.³

And sure, you can do all this stuff in UFO too, but you never have to, not even in an unbugged Superhuman game. For all its reputation UFO is a remarkably easy-going game whose generous parameters never really force the player into taking risks. It’s a long time since I’ve had that sense of trying to balance on the edge of the catastrophe curve I get whenever I play Terror; perhaps this is because I haven’t quite mastered Terror in the way I have UFO, but even so it’s a game that pushes me further and harder than its predecessor ever did. It’s also a game that does a far better job of creating a creepy atmosphere, with its dilapidated underwater alien ruins and strange, rusted USOs being infinitely more unsettling to me than UFO’s clean grey hulls and notorious disco anti-grav lifts. The research screens are also a big improvement on UFO, since they’re now action shots of the things in question rather than static, schematic outlines.  Even the geoscape music is intended to project an air of menace; compare Terror’s signature track with XCOM’s more upbeat, high-tech theme. The developers knew what they were doing when they made Terror, and if they pitched things a little bit too far towards the impossible I can’t really blame them given their truncated development window.

In fact, Terror might be one of the biggest missed opportunities in gaming history: if they managed to produce this heavily-flawed gem in just six months, then what could they have made if they’d had the resources and time to do a proper job of it? Probably they’d have ended up making something that – for me at least – would have easily eclipsed the original. As it is Terror has to settle for sitting alongside UFO; it may not be the best XCOM game, but it can at least lay claim to being the least-worst of the sequels. And in a series where three out of five titles are arguably all-time classics? That’s far from a shabby result.

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The post In Praise Of: Terror From The Deep. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

“Hentzau, how are we supposed to play XCOM and not fail horribly?” is a question that precisely nobody has asked me during the last week, but I thought I’d tell you anyway. I’m currently crawling through a Classic Ironman game using exactly these tactics and I’ve reached the point where only a string of mission failures is going to lose me the game, so they do work. Some spoilers if you haven’t finished the game yet, obviously.

Where to start?

• Africa: Conventional wisdom says this is the best place to start. I’m not convinced, but there’s no denying that +30% bonus funding from Council members for the entire game is very useful and probably the best regional bonus if you’re not going into the game with a particular strategy in mind. Money is probably the number one limiting factor on what you can accomplish in base management and equipping your squad, and so more of it is always useful.
• Asia: 50% reduced cost and research time for Officer Training School upgrades and Foundry projects is insanely great if you have any intention of going down the robotics route with SHIVs. Otherwise it is merely very good.Asia’s always the second continent I try to pick up because the Foundry and pricier OTS upgrades are more of a midgame thing.
• North America: I thought this was hands down the best until it was pointed out to me that the 50% discount on ships and ship weapons Air and Space gets you doesn’t actually apply to satellites. It’s still pretty sweet, though, and takes the pressure off of rolling out Firestorms and Plasma Cannons to every continent with satellite coverage.
• Europe: I started here for my first game. Cheaper laboratories sounds great until you realise that you never actually build laboratories, so you’re taking this for the Workshop engineer bonus in getting your satellites off the ground early and nothing else.
• South America: The only genuinely stupid choice as this covers only two member nations and has the worst continent bonus to boot; instant autopsies/interrogations will save you barely a month of raw research time, and it’s likely it won’t even manage that as autopsies tend to be what you do when you’re waiting for new alien tech/materials to come in.

What base facilities to build first.

Satellites. For the love of god, satellites. Satellites get you monthly funding. Satellites reduce panic. Satellites get bonus scientists and engineers at the end of the month, and if you have complete coverage over a region you get the continental bonus for that region. Satellites are probably the key to winning the base management side of things and it’s puzzling that the game doesn’t emphasise this more.

Unfortunately the game only gives you one satellite uplink to start with which lets you build a grand total of one new satellite, so this isn’t an easy thing to get off the ground; you start with bugger all engineers and will either need a workshop or an abduction mission reward to bump you up to the ten required for a second satellite uplink. Then it’s likely you’ll need a power generation facility to be completed before the game will let you start your uplink. On the plus side you can build satellites whenever you want despite the red text telling you not to – you just can’t launch them without uplinks – so you can work on the uplinks and the satellites in parallel, but you’re still doing pretty well if you have more than two satellites up by the middle of the second month. Try to get adjacency bonuses for your uplinks as each one grants a bonus satellite; it’s for this reason that I prefer to build uplinks as soon as possible rather than waiting until I have the money and materials for a satellite nexus, as adjacency means uplinks are only slightly less efficient and you get the satellites much earlier.

Just make sure that you expand your interceptor coverage to include newly-launched satellite regions, as detected UFOs that you don’t shoot down will increase panic.

After you have 4-5 satellites up (or at least in the process of being built) you should definitely look into an Officer Training School for the extra squad slots. Past that is a matter of personal taste. Vahlen complains a lot but it’s not absolutely necessary to build an Alien Containment unit until you think you can cope with the challenge of taking down a live one, while a Foundry is probably not required until month three or four.  If there is a steam pocket on the second level then excavate it ASAP and build a thermo generator there, as this will provide all the power you need for a good long while. Trying to struggle by on basic power generators is miserable, expensive and time-consuming, so it’s worth beelining for steam.

What to research first.

Above is XCOM’s tech tree (not mine, credit in bottom right hand corner of image).

Your early game priorities should be better armour and better weapons for your soldiers. Getting carapace armour is a huge deal as it more than doubles the HP of a basic rookie soldier, making it that much more likely they’ll survive to be promoted, so I’d recommend researching this first of all even if it’s highlighted in red with a big SLOW in brackets next to it. It’s well worth the extra time spent to get it early. Guns you have a little more latitude on as the basic Earth weaponry does okay against Sectoids, Floaters and Thin Men, but you should definitely have laser weapons of some description by the end of month two when tougher enemies start showing up; don’t forget the heavy/cannon variants for craft armament either. 

Past this you have some latitude.

• You will want to research the Firestorm at least by the midgame as even interceptors with Plasma Cannon will not cut it in the mid-to-endgame. Having Firestorms around really takes the pressure off of interceptions, too.
• Titan armour is also a good one to get nice and early as it remains on the upper limits of affordability for the early-to-midgame, and means an armoured trooper will easily outclass any opposition they encounter until the alien base. Having even one suit of Titan armour on an assault class gives you a sizeable advantage on the battlefield.
• Much of the autopsy research should only be done when you can’t research anything else, with the exception of the Muton and Chyssalid autopsies; the former unlocks Ammo Conservation in the Foundry and the latter gives you Chitin Plating for manufacture.
• Plasma weapons are probably not worth researching early. They’re the best weapons in the game but they are also sodding expensive and very definitely overkill for anything up to and including a Muton. Lasers are cheap and do the job nearly as well, so plasma should only be tackled once you have the resources to produce it.

Capturing live aliens.

Is not necessary this time around except for one very obvious plot-sensitive one. Capturing live aliens is very dangerous, not to mention tricky; you have to reduce them to 3hp and then hit them with an Arc Thrower, which might miss and leave the person firing it high and dry. The 3hp requirement is irritating as laser and plasma weapons do 5-9 damage and more on a crit, meaning you’ll spend a lot of time chipping away at your target’s health with pistols trying to get his health down below the magic number, and then one of your soldiers will panic or the alien will run into some reaction fire and get wasted. You can just target aliens that have their health reduced to three or below naturally, but this means soaking up fire from the alien while you get your Arc Thrower guy into position. Like I said, it’s risky.

And what do you get for your efforts? Every alien you capture and interrogate gets you a research bonus in a certain area; for example the Muton Berserker will give you 50% to all Armour research. If you ask me this isn’t worth the effort of specifically trying to stun one since I have never found slow research speeds to be a problem so long as you’re managing the aliens’ progress properly. You should have plenty of time to research everything, bonus or not, and the main bottleneck separating you from that lovely high-tech weaponry will be on the manufacturing and supply side, not the research side. It’s certainly not worth getting XCOM troopers (who aren’t raw rookies) killed over. Only go for the low-hanging fruit; if you happen to have an arc thrower guy standing next to a vulnerable alien and somebody else nearby who can step in if things go wrong, then go for it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t risk it. All it means is that your research will be a little slower and you won’t be locked out of any items by not bothering.

The Grey Market.

The Grey Market is a source of much confusion about precisely which items it’s a good idea to sell and which you should be keeping hold of. Certain items recovered from UFOs will have a YES YOU CAN SELL THIS sign in green text, but everything else has some application to the research/manufacturing side of things. At the same time you probably don’t really need those forty Sectoid corpses in your meat locker – certainly not as much as the cash you’d get for selling them.

Things you should never, ever sell:

• Weapon Fragments, Elerium, Alien Alloys. These three resources are required to build pretty much every single item in the game, and the quantity of Alloys in particular will be the main thing limiting how much equipment you can build at any one time.

Things you should only sell if you absolutely have to:

• UFO Flight Computers and UFO Power Sources. You need one of each of these to research the Firestorm, two flight computers and one power source per Firestorm you build, and then the Stealth Satellites project in the Foundry and the Satellite Nexus improvement both require flight computers as well. Your only way of getting computers and power sources is from downed UFOs, so you shouldn’t part with them unless you’re in particularly dire need of cash. If this need does arise, get rid of the flight computers first as they’re easier to find than power sources.

Things it is perfectly okay to sell as long as you have enough to be getting on with:

Corpses. Of course it can be hard to gauge just how many corpses is “enough” so I’ll break it down a bit. All corpses should be autopsied as they open up new items and Foundry projects, but autopsies do not use up a corpse so as long as you have one in your inventory you can do the autopsy and then sell it.

• Muton corpses – Six required for Ammo Conservation in the Foundry.
• Thin Man corpses – Four required for Improved Medkits in the Foundry.
• Floater corpses – Three required per Interceptor dodge boost. I’d keep a dozen or so of them around since Floaters are replaced with Heavy Floaters in the late game and so this particular brand of corpse can become rather hard to find. Sell the rest.
• Sectoid corpses – Three required per Interceptor aim boost, four needed to research Alien Containment. Ditto Floaters; keep a dozen, sell the rest.
• Cyberdisk wreckage – Two needed for Advanced Flight in the Foundry,  two required per Interceptor speed boost. I’d actually keep all of these if you can; the Cyberdisk is a fairly rare enemy.
• Drone wreckage –Four needed for Improved Arc Thrower in the Foundry, four needed for Drone Capture in the Foundry, two needed for Advanced Flight in the Foundry. Fortunately you tend to run into a lot of drones and they’re not required for any equipment, so once you have 9-10 you can sell the rest.
• Chryssalid corpses –Four required per Chitin Plating. Keep them until you have enough to make two Chitin Plates.
• Berserker corpses – One needed per Combat Stims. Depends on how much you like Combat Stims; personally I’d dump the lot.
• Heavy Floater corpses –Two needed for Advanced Flight in the Foundry, four needed for Advanced Repair in the Foundry.
• Sectopod wreckage – Two needed for Advanced Construction in the Foundry.
• Ethereal corpses – Required for the Mind Shield, keep them.
• Elite corpses, Sectoid Commander corpses – Useless, sell them off.

 Manufacturing and Equipment.

Largely this is done on an ad-hoc basis of “What do I need right now?” and arming and armouring your troopers obviously takes priority, but it’s good to know how much of each item you should be building. The most important thing to know is that you don’t need more of a thing then you can use in a single squad of six troopers; equipment is never consumed in the XCOM update so you don’t need to mass-produce medkits or grenades or anything.

• Nano-fiber vests – Don’t bother. Two more HP may seem like a lot in the early game but any soldier who is wearing a vest isn’t carrying a frag grenade, which are absurdly useful for guaranteed hits and removing cover, not to mention free.
• Medkits – No more than two unless you really like the idea of a squad full of medics.
• SCOPE – One or two depending on how many snipers you have in the squad.
• Chitin Plating – Four bonus HP sounds awful considering what I said about nano-fiber vests; however Chitin Plating also reduces any incoming melee damage to five, which basically lets your assaults laugh off Chryssalid and Berserker attacks (bonus if they’re immune to Chryssalid poison through Titan armour). You want at least one, possibly two depending on how you like to roll with your assaults.
• Interceptor Powerups – These are only required in very specific scenarios, like when you send your Firestorm out to attack an alien Battleship. Laser-armed interceptors do fine against all smaller UFOs. Plasma-armed Firestorms can take out anything that isn’t a Battleship and survive. Have a couple around for the rare occasion when you really need to take something out with the guns and aircraft you have (and you will need them if you go after a Battleship) but if you’re obviously outclassed then the big red ABORT button will be far more useful to you.

• Combat Stims – I never found a use for them.
• Mind Shield – REVISED OPINION Eventually you will have a Support running around in Ghost armour as your recon unit. He will have two equipment slots. Put the Mind Shield in the second one; Ethereals like to MC the nearest trooper they can see, which will inevitably be Mr. Recon if his ghost field isn’t up. I don’t rate it taking up the only equipment slot on a trooper, but if there’s a spare going then why not?
• SHIVs – Oooh, this is a tricky one. SHIVs are not the Heavy Weapons Platforms from UFO. SHIVs will not babysit your rookies until they transform into big beefy alien-killers. The only reason you want a SHIV on your squad is for the same reason bomb disposal robots exist: to take the hits and die first, sparing an XCOM trooper a messy death. The big problem with this is that having the SHIV in the squad means booting a leaving, breathing human squaddie out of it, and SHIVs don’t accrue experience like they do. SHIVs will never get better at killing aliens except through a line of weapons upgrades to lasers and then plasma. Having a sixth human on the squad is a better idea in almost every situation I can think of, with the sole exceptions being a) you’re doing something particularly dangerous, your sixth squad member is dead and you don’t have time to train up a rookie, and b) as an anti-psi measure.  Certainly I never stopped during a mission and said “Man, I really wish I had a SHIV on the squad.” They have their uses, but if you play the tactical side of things properly you should never run into a situation where you have to.
• Skeleton Suit – Most troopers can climb up ladders/drainpipes just as easily as they run along the ground, so this is only useful when there’s a spot of high ground with no easy access. Still, I’m not going to tell you not to put one on your sniper; the only reason I never used them was because there was always something more important to research, and by the time I got around to them they’d been superceded by…
• Archangel Suit – Yes. Get this for your Squad Sight sniper. It will turn them into the fist of God. As with UFO’s Flying Suits this is not for general issue, but it’s excellent for snipers.
• Ghost Suit – Can work well in tandem with an Archangel sniper, as the Ghost Suit lets you sit in the middle of a bunch of aliens without them ever being able to shoot you. It’s basically a piece of recon equipment, but since it only has four charges you have to be careful not to exhaust it before the end of the mission. Get one, stick it on a support with Sprint, everyone else gets Titan.
• Psi Suit – Boosts Will and the likelihood of psychic attacks connecting. Whether you go with this or Titan on your psionics will largely depend on how many you can make before the end mission.

Managing panic.

If you’ve gone for satellites this shouldn’t be too hard, but you have to accept that you will lose countries, especially during the first month or two. There’s too much going on at the start of the game and you don’t have the capability to deal with it all yet. Later on things will stabilise as you start to get more on top of things, so don’t worry if everything looks like it’s going to pot in month two. You’ll bounce back. Probably.

As far as tricks for managing panic go there isn’t a huge amount you can do aside from expanding satellite and interceptor coverage. Completing terror and council missions will provide a panic reduction but you don’t get to control where those crop up.  Otherwise, these are the main panic factors:

• Abduction missions – Almost always crop up in threes. The country and region you select will experience a reduction in panic. The countries you don’t will gain two panic points, and the rest of the continent they’re located in will gain one. You should always pick the abduction mission with the highest panic rating as it’s by far the easiest way to tip a country into panic level five; you should also have a mind as to the continental panic levels due to the knock-on effects.
• Unopposed UFO overflights – This is why you need to expand your interceptor coverage along with your satellites: if you can see a UFO and you can’t do anything about it it increases panic. Always shoot them down, if you can.
• Failing missons – Try not to do this.

Shooting down UFOs and clearing the wreckage will reduce panic in the host country. Storyline missions will reduce panic worldwide. It’s a good idea to save the assault on the Alien Base until you really need to do it; not only will this give you more time to prepare but you’ll get more benefit from completing it if worldwide panic levels are high overall. Launching satellites will reduce panic in a country by two, so try to do that in the last week of a month (while the panic reduction is instant they take 4-5 days to reach orbit, and if they’re not in orbit they won’t get you your funding bonus at the end of the month) and try to save them until the panic level is three or more. It’s always a good idea to have spare satellites on hand regardless, especially since you can build more than your launch limit. Apparently the aliens attempt to shoot them down but I’ve never seen them try.

Managing alien progress.

Dr. Vahlen shouts at you to move the plot onwards by doing whatever the objective of the moment is. Ignore her. Don’t do plot-critical stuff until you’re ready. All alien types will show up eventually if you just leave the plot stuff forever, but doing it too early will bring very strong aliens into the game you might not have the ability to cope with. For example, assaulting the alien base will replace all Outsiders in UFOs with a brace of Sectoid Commanders, who are much tougher. Shooting down the Overseer UFO will introduce Ethereals, Muton Elites and Sectopods into your game whether you’re ready or not. Believe me when I say that trying to take on a Sectopod with laser weapons is not something you want to be doing. It’s perfectly possible for you to sit back and research Titan armour and plasma weapons before assaulting the alien base, making the subsequent stages of the game far easier.

Tactical combat.

Is actually not that big a deal just so long as you’re super-cautious. Keep the following points in mind at all times.

• Dashing into the fog of war is really dumb. Really dumb. Moving into the fog of war with your last move of the turn is likewise really dumb. Most alien groups will not attack you until you activate them by moving into line of sight, and if a patrol stumbles upon you during the alien turn they’ll scatter to cover first and won’t start shooting immediately. If you dash into the fog of war and activate a group of aliens your trooper will be left high and dry wherever he is and he’ll have to take a turn of fire unless his squadmates can kill them all first.  If you activate aliens with your last move they’ll start shooting immediately upon the transition to the alien turn. You always want to take the first shot in a fight if you possibly can, and XCOM is remarkably accommodating in this regard so long as you play it right. Advance slowly and cautiously, even if it means moving only a couple of squares at a time, and try never to dash if you can help it; you always want your guys either Hunkered Down or on Overwatch if possible.

• Cover is very important, but it’s not magical protection against alien attacks. Low cover in particular becomes useless as soon as you start fighting Thin Men, so your only real options are to a) be in high cover or b) be somewhere where the aliens can’t/won’t shoot you (this means out of LoS). Only use low cover if there are absolutely, positively no other options. Never get caught out of cover or flanked if you can help it, as this will massively increase the chances of a critical hit and a one-shot kill on your soldiers. If you’re flanked and you can’t be certain of killing the flanker before the next alien turn, retreat. If you know you’re going to be taking some fire next turn, pop a smoke grenade if you can even if you’re in high cover.

• Use explosives liberally to remove enemy cover. This is why frag grenades are so useful at the start of game; not only are they one of the few weapons that will go exactly where you aim them, but they’ll strip aliens of any nearby cover and make them much easier to kill. Heavies are similarly very useful for precisely this reason. Vahlen will complain because you’re destroying alien artefacts. As with everything Vahlen says, do not listen; getting kills and keeping your troops alive is far more important than getting some extra weapon fragments at the end of the mission.

• Having to take cover next to cars is inevitable, but always keep your ears and eyes out for cars that are on fire because they’ll explode the next turn, dealing severe damage to anything within a one tile radius. That goes double for petrol pumps – literally, as they have a radius of two. I once saw a berserker get killed from full health because he was standing too close to a petrol pump. Don’t take cover next to petrol pumps.

• Stunned aliens can be killed by explosions. Don’t stun them next to cars.

• Pistols. Don’t forget they exist. Low level assaults and snipers should advance with their pistols out as default as shotguns and sniper rifles are specialty weapons that are only good at short and long range respectively. Pistols won’t kill aliens, but they’ll let you do at least some damage. And if you’re out of ammo and in serious trouble, switching to pistol can sometimes get you out of it.

• Never assume there’s a shot a Thin Man can’t make. Not only do they have a high base accuracy but they use Light Plasma Rifles which confer a +10 bonus to the hit roll. If they think your cover is too good they’ll hit you with their poison attack instead, which always hits and is perfectly capable of killing a wounded soldier unless they’re treated with a medkit. Their only weakness is their extreme fragility; kill those assholes as soon as you see them otherwise you’ll be in for a world of pain.

• Remember that Chitin Plating turns Berserkers and Chryssalids into a joke as long as you can bait them into attacking the person wearing it. They’ll one-shot anyone without it, mind, so try not to let that happen.

• If someone gets critically injured kill the threat first before getting them back up, as they’ll be standing out in the open on sod-all health once they’re revived.

• Sectopods have a super-duper Overwatch ability that lets them shoot at anyone  who moves in their LoS; you’ll know when they’re using it because they’ll spend a turn activating a weird scanner-type thing. You have two options once this happens: either shoot it till it dies, or get a sniper to hit it with Disabling Shot. Disabling Shot is similarly quite useful against other HP buckets like Cyberdiscs.

• When you’re on a terror mission don’t bother trying to rescue the civilians. A good terror mission rating is not worth sacrificing your XCOM troopers for. Just treat it as any other mission, but with added zombies.

And finally: Blaster Launchers are in the game, but you need to shoot down a Battleship to get them. Have fun with that one!

REQUESTED EXTENSION:

Class Warfare:

Thanks to the weapon/skill limitations every class in XCOM is insanely specialised at one role and useless at others. Here is what you should and shouldn’t be doing with them.

Snipers – Two viable builds here; either you take Squad Sight and Double Tap and park them at the back of the map to provide long range supporting fire on hard targets, or you go more combat oriented with Snap Shot and In The Zone, flanking and wiping out entire groups of aliens at once. The problem with the latter build is that unless you’re working with a heavy that can remove cover or fighting melee aliens that can’t take over, what you have most of the time is a gimped Support/Assault trooper. In The Zone is very situational while Squad Sight/Double Tap is such a great combination that on outside maps the rest of the squad basically exists to provide LoS for the sniper. I dislike having more than one sniper on the team anyway since they’re very kill-greedy and keep everyone else from levelling up.

Snipers are less great indoors. In fact they’re practically useless if they can’t shoot into a building/UFO from outside, as they get a to-hit penalty if they fight at close range. Keep your sniper outside, keep them back, and keep them safe, and they’ll get you out of dozens of tight scrapes. It’s comforting knowing that if your Heavy fails to kill a bad guy you can always call in a round from your sniper that has a 100% chance to hit and 65% chance to crit with Headshot. Disabling Shot is also excellent for mechanical enemies, although using it against Mutons often just prompts them to chuck a grenade in your direction. Give them Archangel armour as soon as you get it, as it will give them ridiculous line of sight as well as a bunch of height bonuses to every shot.

Supports – The underappreciated heroes of the team, Supports are bloody awful at killing anything because they lack the accuracy or the punch to do so reliably. What they’re great at is keeping everyone alive. The triple-medkit skill is so useful I don’t even know why they gave you a choice as it lets you soak up so much more damage. Sprinting gives them the mobility to get to wounded/critically injured troops and patch them up. And smoke is useful for discouraging attacks, especially when you get the wider area of effect/more bonus defence skills. I wouldn’t build a Support around throwing multiple smoke grenades since the missions don’t last long enough, but boosting the one they already have is very worthwhile, especially since your alternative is Rifle Suppression. *spits* Keep Supports slightly back from the front line where they can provide a little extra fire without being a target, and never send them in first. That job goes to…

Assaults – Assaults are the only class with an actual choice of weapon, being able to pick between a shotgun and a rifle. This along with their default skill of Run and Gun makes them flexible; either you can build them as riflemen with Flush for the outdoor maps, making them more generally useful while diminishing their specific utility, or else you hand them a shotgun and Rapid Fire. All Assaults should have Lightning Reflexes as it will save their lives sooner or later.

Now, shotgun Assaults can be tricky to use as a lot of the time they’re just sitting around with a pistol unable to really contribute to any long-range combat. That’s fine, though; that’s what you have everyone else in the squad for. Shotgun Assaults have three jobs:

• Taking out hard targets.
• Taking out melee aliens.
• Storming UFOs.

Your rifle-armed troopers will not be able to kill the late-game aliens effectively. Hell, they’ll be lucky if they can even hit them most of the time. If a rifle-armed trooper does manage to score a hit/kill you consider it a happy bonus; if you absolutely, positively want something dead this turn you either call upon the services of a sniper (if available) or else you send in the Running and Gunning, Rapid-Firing shotgun Assault. They can take out anything that isn’t a Sectopod with near total reliability. If you have two of them even the Sectopod isn’t safe. Just make sure not to expose them when getting them close for the killshot; you don’t need to be standing right next to your victim to get a decent hit percentage for the shotgun since it’s good out to four or five tiles or so.  Try to get the rest of the squad to clear out some of the chaff so that they’re not exposed to too much return fire, and have a sniper standing by in case it all goes Sectoid-shaped.

The skill which lets them take a free reaction shot at anything closing inside four tiles is compulsory, as it means bumrushing Chryssalid/zombies/Berserkers usually don’t even make it to melee range. And if they do? Well, that’s what Chitin Plating is for. Assaults should take the brunt of the hits for the squad, as they can have up to 30 hit points with Titan armour and Chitin Plating.  They can afford to. Others can’t.

Heavies – The utility of a heavy will largely depend on what they’re equipped with and how late in the game you are. The main thing you should know about them is that the huge gun they carry around is basically a less accurate shotgun; never rely on it for kills. Bullet Swarm improves your odds slightly and makes kills on close-range targets more certain. I wouldn’t build a heavy around suppression/targeting as it’s so ammo-hungry (at the start of the game, anyway) and it would mean ignoring the Heavy’s raison d’etre: rockets. Lots and lots of rockets. Shredder Rocket and Rocketeer are things you absolutely have to take on your heavy, as having both of them will give you three rocket shots per missions, and rockets are so good for breaking up hard clusters of aliens in high cover, especially if you can boost their radius. It’s the cover destruction you want; six damage sounds like a lot but it becomes trivial during the lategame unless you can get your hands on Blaster Launcher tech. If you can, then having two fully-levelled heavies on the squad is arguably more overpowered than a Squad Sight sniper as everything single piece of terrain the aliens could conceivably occupy is obliterated in a 100% accurate fusion holocaust.

Oh, and the HEAT ammo skill works with rockets as well. Blaster Launcher heavies are your answer to Sectopods. They’re your answer to everything. If you don’t have Blaster Launcher then it’s worth having them take potshots at Cyberdiscs and Sectopods anyway; a successful hit will do anywhere between 18-30 damage with Heavy Plasma. Not even snipers hit that hard.

Psionics – Are so rare that it’s probably worth going over how to build them right, which basically means “Psi Inspiration and Mind Control”. Remember all those times where a Muton used Intimidate, and one of your soldiers Panicked, and took a free shot straight at the Muton killing it stone cold dead? That’s what the aliens will do to you if you try and use it on them. Psi Inspiration is very situational but it’s a damn sight better than Panic. As for Mind Control, it’s not that Telekinetic Shield is bad, it’s just that a successful Mind Control basically kills the alien you use it on. MCed aliens can be sent to scout out enemy positions, draw reaction fire and – if necessary – suicide into aliens with primed grenades. It’s a disposable extra trooper for the duration of the ability. The only problem with this is that losing the MCed alien can send your squad into panic, which has to be a bug of some kind.

The exact number of each class you have in your squad is down to personal preference, but you should have at least one of each. An extra support will cover you in case you need to do a lot of healing, while an extra assault will give you more hitting power. I wouldn’t take an second sniper purely because you don’t need more than one, while a second heavy is game-breaking after you get Blaster Launchers and a waste of space before then. The good news is that thanks to their ridiculous blast radius a Blaster-equipped Heavy is absurdly easy to level if paired with a second, more experienced one; the veteran weakens up a group of aliens with a Shredder Rocket, then the rookie blasts them to kingdom come, getting 3-5 kills in one shot and their promotion for the mission. I experimented with a lot of setups during my Classic Ironman game, but I found the most efficient one – the one that resulted in a string of eleven missions where nobody even went to the hospital – was three Assaults (one rifle, two shotgun), one Heavy, one Support and one Sniper.  Once I got Blaster Launchers the second shotgun assault was replaced with a second Heavy, and I ran with that till the end of the game.

Ah yes, the last thing is the thing that I forgot to mention all through this guide: when you have an alien targeted, pressing F1 will give you a complete breakdown of everything affecting your chance to hit/crit. This is invaluable for understanding what will and will not work when trying to kill things.

The post XCOM 101. 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.

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