[PC] Game Review - XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012)

[Tomo2000 60]

Note: This review won't be as spoiler-free as my previous one, as I need to spoil a few things in order to explain a few aspects. But all spoilers to the storyline of the game will be in spoiler tags.

Anyone ever play the old DOS Enemy Unknown? It was like the Castlevania of the computer gaming world back in those days. The aim was to make a game with good replayability, and a lot of action and excitement to really pull a player in, while, due to limited space, included a really frustrating difficulty level so that it wasn't a complete cakewalk. The original XCOM completely fucked me over. Like, I installed it and played it through DOS box when the first XCOM: Enemy Unknown 2012 trailer was released just for a bit Nostalgia hit, and it was impossible. I even hacked my money up to about ninety-million and, even with infinite money at my disposal, I still got completely stomped. It was a great game, too, but incredibly difficult.

And then the 2012 one came out. When I saw the first trailer it was love at first sight. I mean, I grew up on Command & Conquer and XCOM from about 1996 onwards, of course I had to buy this game. I'm going to be a little harsh, though, because I think that it let me down in a few places, but still retained everything that XCOM is good for. I got completely lost in it. I've never properly been lost in a game before. I booted the game up at about 8am one morning for the first time, and thought I'd play through it a little. Then, after getting my squad killed I rage-quit a little and closed the game to discover it was 2pm. Never had this before, it was pretty incredible.

The game has some really nice graphics, along with a very extensive range of weapons, armours, aliens, research, etc.. One of my favourite things about this game was that the overhead Camera would show really close to a soldier if they were to make a killing shot, which made you cheer for your soldiers when you saw the camera shift and you know they got the kill. This made a really intimate connection between you and your troop, which I thought was a really nice tough.

It has a pretty good difficulty curve, too. Even on easy it gives you a challenge, and I got pretty badly stomped up until my third complete restart. Most of how you progress in the game is judged upon how lucky you are, too. For example, by my second mission, by luck, a UFO landing. There are a lot of different missions you could do, which was new and exciting. These missions were;

• Escout Mission: Occasionally you were given a mission by the 'Council', which is just a united council of all nations that fund you, to locate a VIP in an alien-infested region and get him out.
• UFO Crash: If you shot down a UFO with one of your interceptors, it would crash, and be rather badly damaged. Then you could send in a squad to pick off the survivors and obtain whatever was left of the UFO.
• UFO Landing: This is where a UFO landed to, I assume, abduct humans. It's never really told why it lands, but, if you're good, and don't fire plasma weapons everywhere, you can end up with a completely intact UFO for your team to salvage.
• Abduction: A lot of the time there will be simultaneous Alien Abductions where you have to enter one of the three areas given to you (where you will get a bonus for doing one, while panic raises in the other two) and eliminate the aliens there.
• Terror Attack: Now, this is where you start getting completely wrecked. A terror attack is an incredibly challenging level where your goal is to get out as many civilians as you can. Usually there's about 18 civilians, and the aliens prioritise killing civilians over your squad. However, if you go and kill all the aliens, any remaining civilians count as saved.

Now, the Council was your lifeline, pretty much. If you lost 8 different member nations from the council, you would lose. This can happen by a countries panic level being on the highest when a council meeting came around. There would be a council meeting each month in the game, where they would grade you on your effort, give you bonuses, as well as a monthly 'allowance', as such, and this would be when majorly panicked countries would leave. You can reduce this panic level by assisting those countries in abductions or Terror Attacks, which greatly reduced their panic level.

Now, back on the topic of luck, by the second mission, and completely by luck, too, there was a landed UFO, of which I got an intact power source and navigation system. And, of course, back at the lab, these things can get you some serious technology. And, being on my second mission, I advanced pretty quickly. The difficulty curve is pretty good, too. Not until the end are you really in a situation where you'll dominate the aliens. And, if you think you are, then something will rock up to wreck your day. For example, your regular firearms will take down weak aliens easily, so they throw in, at the first terror site, some pretty 'tank' aliens. Then, when you get to Laser weapons, these tank enemies become not so tank, and a new, tankier enemy approaches, and this process is repeated until the end of the game.

For your troops, you can customize them with weapons, armour, equipment and secondaries. Secondaries are pistols; from your normal pistols to laser and plasma (or a rocket launcher for heavies), armour being, of course, armour. Equipment is usually things like stun-guns, grenades of health packs. Now, there are four classes of soldiers; Heavy, Assault, Support and Sniper. Assault was usually shotguns, and was the front line. Heavies were for really wrecking their day, and explosives. Sniper was, of course, sniper, and assault was really medic and smoke grenades. Your soldiers would gain ranks as they got kills, and the higher their rank was, the more abilities they had, and the less chance they had of freaking out mid-battle (which was terrible... They'd freak out and either shoot randomly, do nothing, shoot at the enemy, or shoot your allies..). This was pretty nice. There's another customizable aspect that I'll get to later (it's a bit of a spoiler).

In this one, your main limitations lay around money, and number of scientists and engineers. No doubt you guys remember that, in the original, you could just buy a tonne of engineers and workshops if you needed a lot of engineers. Well, this isn't the case anymore. Instead of buying them, they can be bonuses at the end of the month if you have a number of satellites over specific continents (will go into detail later), or by selecting the abduction sites where the bonus is 4 scientsits, for example. I liked this feature, since you'd have to pick whether you'll sacrifice some cash or let a higher-panicked state grow more panicked for the sake of a few engineers or scientists.

Now, choosing the location of your base is sort of crucial. Instead of placing it wherever you want, you can choose a continent to place it in (Australia counts as Asia, sadly ), and each continent has a different bonus. For example, North Amerca has 50% reduced cost on maintaining and building aircrafts, while Africa has instant disections and interrogations.

And the whole multiple base building, which, in my opinion, was the most painful aspect of the original, was completely scrapped. Instead of having small bases in different places to look over different places, you have one huge base, and you can buy satellites to place over different countries. Now, you'd gain bonuses (and eventually the continent-wide bonus) dependant on where you put your satellites. However, to limit you just spamming satellites, each satellite takes 20 days to make, and you have to construct satellite uplink buildings within your base to communicate with said satellites. There was an upgrade which states something about stealth satellites so aliens will have a harder time locating them... Never happened to me, but perhaps in a harder difficulty aliens could shoot down your satellites?

There are a few little nice aspects in the game to assist you making money, too. Occasionally some countries would request items for you to make; which was really anything from alien SCOPEs to Heavy Plasmas, and would usually give a cash reward in return for said items. Most of the time, if you had the equipment and money to construct these items, you'd make a nice little profit. There is also a place known as the "Gray Market" (Yes, like Gray aliens, since the Grays are called Sectoids now), where you can sell any type of alien artifact from nav consoles to corpses to private collectors within the council. Now, near the end of the game, once you end up near the end of the game, and just want to give your team the best weapons and armour, you're going to need some cash. I think I had, like, 80 Sectoid corpses by this point, along with who-knows how many other corpses of different aliens. So lots of easy money right there.

Now, research and engineering is a huge aspect of this. There are a few different paths you can research;

• Xenology; Which, I guess, is everything from the initial study at the start of the game to autopsies and interrogations. Interrogations are where you capture live aliens, and use technology already at your disposal to find patterns in their thinking and such, which gives you Research Credits, which greatly reduce the amount of time to research technology. These Credits can be in the form of, for example, basic armour, armour, laser weaponry, plasma weaponry, aircrafts, etc..
• Weapon Technology; Of course, if you've got aliens shooting plasma at you, you're going to want to shoot some plasma back. The basic weapon tech tree goes from your average weapons to Laser weaponry, then Plasma (and the plasma shotgun is an Alloy cannon, since a plasma shotgun is stupid).
• Armour Technology; You can upgrade the armour your troops wear. This goes from general health-increasing armour to armour that is specialized for different troop types, for example (and you would have seen them all in the trailer), cloaking armour and flying (Archangel) armour.
• Aircrafts: And, as you learn more about alien ships, you can eventually mount alien weapons onto your interceptors, and eventually reverse-engineer your own UFOs.

Now, there were also another aspect, which you would have seen in the trailer, but I'll put it inside spoilers in case you guys want to keep it a secret. If you guys are tempted to know what it is, inside the first spoiler is another spoiler and the topic.

Psionic abilities for your troops

Now, you'll notice early on that Sectoids have a bit of psionic abilities, where they can look through each others eyes and such. This is all dandy, but you eventually get to the point where you can build psionic laboratories, and see whether some of your soldiers are potential psionics. Now, there is also Psi Armour, which increases the power of these abilities, and by killing enemies with these abilities in combat, you can rank it up much like your abilities.

However, my main rant about this is that, although awesome, you don't really have time to do much with it... I managed to rank up one soldier (as the process to discover if they are psionic takes 10 days, and that's 10 days your best troop cant be in combat) completely in the psionic field before the end. Just one. I was hoping for more abilities and more oportunity to psi-out your entire squad.

Now, there is a building known as the Foundry, where you can do some pretty cool projects. The first of these that you should do is the SHIV, a mobile weapons platform that can be in the place of a soldier. I love SHIVs... They're so cool. You can upgrade them to Alloy SHIVs (armoured) and Hover SHIVs, and upgrade their minigun weaponry to laser and plasma weaponry. Eventually, by the end, I had a squad of 6, 4 soldiers and two plasma hover SHIVs, they're so fun and tank.. In this building, however, you could upgrade your shitty pistols so they are half-decent, and upgrade medkits, SCOPEs, etc.. It was a nice little addition. There was also an officer training school, where you could give global soldier perks, like faster healing outside of combat and larger squad sizes. This was also kinda nice, gave it more of a realistic feel.

However, my main problem with this game is in it's storyline. And, I mean, it's a great storyline, minus a cliche ending. However, I felt that the limitations of the engineers and scientists kind of... Made a very odd curve in terms of advancing in the storyline. This is where games like the recent Castlevanias fall flat on their face. The curve starts out pretty hard, where you are assigned to capture a few live aliens, and then you have to build an item to get into an alien base. This item costed 20 engineers. So, of course, that takes a lot to get up to, since you only have 8 to 10 by the time you get this mission. So, this is where the curve started to steepen upwards. Once I actually got to the base, I was pretty decked out with decent armour and laser weapons for my entire squad, and my first Alloy SHIV, so the base wasn't so much of a challenge, just time consuming. Then, from there on, the curve steepens more, where you start running through the story pretty quickly, but you're advancing too fast at the same time. By the time I managed to shoot down a ship you had to near the end of the story and assault it, it wasn't so much as difficult, as I was decked with tank armour and plasma weapons, it was just tedious to go through the ship and find all the aliens. Then theres a few more tiny parts in the story, which results in building a chamber to store a device, and BAM. You go to use it, and you're told that, using it activates a mission, and that's the last mission of the game. No more research of engineering, etc..

So, I did this mission, won the game, cliche ending, and I'm left with this emptyness. It was a fantastic game, don't get me wrong. But I just flew through it by the end. The last mission was long and tedious because there were a lot of enemies but it wasn't really a challenge, but place your troop strategically and you'd win by sheer firepower. The last boss I got in my second try, which I got him before he even had his turn to move. Maybe it's because I was on the easier difficulty? But, none the less, it wasn't a satisfying end. What I found truly satisfying was facing a a few powerful aliens back when I only had firearms, and how good it felt when I killed 5 aliens, didn't damage the crashed UFO, and lost no teammates. That was challenging and satifsying. And I loved going through all the research to find whats next. In total theres 50 different objects to research and I have no idea how many projects to manufacture. But, in terms of armour, it was a bit of a let down. The specialist armours didn't really have much of a function that made it stand out, and outweigh the lack of health when you get up to plasma-based enemies that were dealing 8 damage. That's an Archangel Armour's bonus completely gone in one turn. By the end, I had my entire squad with the 4th armour you research, which was the tankiest. The other armours bonuses and abilities were nowhere near that to outweigh the tankyness of the tankest armour when you got to the last missions, where you'd be up against tank units with tank guns. This was a bit of a let down, along with the curve in how quickly you could ravenge the storyline.

However, all in all, I think XCOM was a great game. I was addicted to it for 4 days straight. I'd wake up at 8, start playing, go to bed at 11, and repeat. It was a long game, and I think that's why it's not to satisfying when you get a cliche ending and a fast storyline to run through. It's a fantastic game, though, don't let the little bad parts of the game take away from the games brilliance. My curious nature latched on to all the unknown aspects of this game and that's what really pulled me in, the pursuit of knowledge and what alien I'd verse next, what weapon type next, etc.. In the end, after I mourned its attrocious ending for a little, I found myself starting a new game on a harder difficulty. And that's what's great about it; it's so replayable, you'll never play the game the same no matter how many times you play through it. Hope you guys enjoyed the review, and reply with any questions you may have. Take care guys.
~Tomo2000.

My Rating: 9/10
Next Review: Dead Space 3