Rekindling the Geoscape: XCOM Enemy Unknown Review

You’d be hard pressed to find a motivator in nerd cultures stronger than nostalgia. When Firaxis announced XCOM: Enemy Unknown as a spiritual successor to the X-COM series of the ’90s you could hear strategy gamers’ collective frothing. Does XCOM honor its predecessor? Does it file down the teeth that the original series had? And does it stand on its own as a good game?

Greetings, Commander

XCOM: Enemy Unknown did not shy away from the brutal template that was established in ’94. You are the commander of XCOM, the only organization standing in the way of mysterious world-wide alien invasion. Starting with nothing but assault rifles and a half-built underground base, you’ll manage resources, reverse engineer alien technology, and take turns trading bullets with a wide array of aliens to stop the invasion for good.
The game’s turn based tactical combat is as fun as it is terrifying. You control a team of 4-6 soldiers across wilderness and urban environments. Positioning is supreme; fights are won by utilizing cover and flanking your foes before the aliens can do the same. The soldiers that manage to survive will gain power and special abilities over time, but so will your enemies. (The first time you run into a cyberdisc is particularly terrifying.) I was impressed by how clearly the game communicated the information I needed to make good tactical decisions. The over the shoulder “action cam” really made the fights seem more visceral than any grid-based combat has the right to. Even after 40 hours of gameplay the fights never grew old.

The resources you gain in the tactical fights fuel the strategy side of the game where you manage research and world-wide panic. XCOM has mastered the art of dangling carrots in front of the player’s nose. Most everything you research and build will take a few in-game days or weeks, creating an all too familiar “just one more research project before bed” scenario. The strategic choices are fairly straight forward, but it’s up to you to decide whether or not it’s time to build that new experimental fighter or to equip your men with better armor. Cross your fingers that you’re making the right choice!

By following a series of story missions hung together by delightfully cheesy cut scenes, you’ll unravel the mystery of the invasion and find out what the future has in store for humanity. Failure to contain the alien threat will cause countries to pull their funding from the XCOM project. When all of the countries pull out, the game is over.

XCOM is fun and refreshingly unforgiving. The game won’t hesitate to kill your men for a single bad tactical decision, nor will the game give you any warning that your terrible strategic choices are making you fall behind. Success in XCOM hinges on the player’s ability to think tactically, predict threats, and to snatch victory from the hands of ever-unfavorable odds. If you’re looking for a game that as rewarding as it is ruthless, as cerebral as it is mean, you can’t choose a better game.

Not Quite Perfection

Unfortunately, XCOM is plagued by persistent bugs.

You’ll regularly experience groups of aliens that pop into existence in the middle of your team thanks to a pathing bug, an event that will more often than not result in a soldier death. Navigating tactical maps with a ceiling (such as the missions that take place entirely inside of an alien base or ship) is guaranteed to cause headaches as the ceilings will be drawn over the terrain you want to move to. Movement in maps such as these is a tedious game of trial and error, experimenting to see which camera angle will allow you to move your soldier to the desired position.

The calculation of line of sight is also comically inconsistent  Sometimes a soldier ducking behind cover won’t be able to see the muton that’s 3 squares away, wasting the soldier’s movement and rendering them unable to fire. Other times your men will be able to shoot clear through the solid walls of a gas station to snipe a fleeing floater. The unpredictability of these bugs combined with the game’s deadliness can create some very frustrating moments. These bugs can turn a good decision into a catastrophic one.

Add to this unintuitive UI design, a save system that will occasionally eat save files, and a few common tasks that are mind numbingly tedious (equipping/unequipping soldiers) and you have a game that needs a substantial amount refinement. (As of this writing, a patch has come out to address stability issues, but these issues still remain.)

Doubling Down on Niche Games

As the Penny Arcade Report pointed out in their excellent article, the importance of XCOM’s success is paramount to the health of PC gaming at large. We’re in an era of astronomical budgets for triple-A titles; developers and publishers don’t see a cent of profit until huge amounts of units are sold. It’s no wonder that the majority of big budget titles are in the most widely popular and accessible fields: FPS war games, sports titles, microtransaction social games, and games with the word “Assassin” in the title. The tactical/strategy genre is the definition of not-so-popular and not-so-accessible, making it nearly exclusively the purview of the indie scene.

Firaxis had the balls to create a title that not everyone would enjoy and then charge $50 for it. XCOM can’t be for everyone: the game’s intensity hinges on its ruthlessness. (One can hardly blame someone for not wanting “ruthlessness” when they sit down to relax with a video game.) But Firaxis gambled on fans of the tactical/strategy market to come out of the woodwork to support a triple-A title made specifically for them.

Thankfully, it paid off. XCOM is an undeniable hit, keeping up an impressive Metascore weeks after release and keeping the #1 Top Seller position on Steam for four weeks after release. (Even now it’s still #7.) Firaxis showed us that big-budget games for niche markets can work.

Looking to the Future

XCOM is a flawed game. It has bugs that range from quirky to immensely irritating. It has very real interface design issues that make basic actions you’ll need to do many times a chore. I am looking forward to future XCOM patches and perhaps even a sequel to address the flaws that prevent XCOM from being the most enjoyable tactical RPG experiences ever created.

Despite these flaws, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a great game and a monument to this hobby’s past and future. It honors the memory we have of its predecessors without resorting to simple imitation. Somehow, it allows us to both relish our shared nostalgia while enjoying a fresh title that stands on its own merits  Firaxis succeeded in doing something very special for fans of XCOM, fans of tactical/strategy games, and for the gaming industry as a whole.

I look forward to Firaxis’s next mission.