XCOM: Enemy Unknown

I can’t even recall the last time where I was really entertained by a strategy game, not really. But if my memory is a credit to anything, I think it was maybe two years before this 2012 and the game was a little thing called RUSE, which was of course developed by EUGEN SYSTEMS. Much like RUSE, I stood or rather sat in one of my early morning marathons and was stuck looking at the marketplace for which Microsoft has utilized on their console. I came to XCOM, which I had heard of but knew absolutely nothing about other than my memory reminding me of a first person shooter.

This was not a first person shooter. The demo that XCOM ENEMY UNKNOWN gave me got me immediately interested, hooked, and dying to play it; so with what little change I had on hand I decided in favor of wasting it on this game and I will tell you right now I have no critical regrets about the decision, though I imagine my stomach will soon disagree. XCOM is a turn-based strategy that smells of the golden era of strategy gaming, which was in my opinion between the age of 12 and 16 for my experience. That said, XCOM is atypical of alien invasion science fiction and pulls out quite a few tropes.

XCOM is separated into two main sections; management and combat. The management section is divided between manufacturing items and upgrades through engineering, researching viable technologies and mission essential equipment, maintaining your infantry in the most basic way, responding to council requests for items or aid, and intercepting UFO’s. I may say that responding to aid from council nations can be the most taxing as do you really want that paycheck from China or those engineers from Russia? The catch though is if you ignore one or the other their stress rating goes up and if it hits the maximum there goes your funding for the project. It’s fun, but sometimes I feel the stress levels go up way too high, way too quick.

In the combat section, you have your squad in a turn-based scenario where you try to complete the objective of your mission. This usually ends up pretty vanilla; I do have to say as it’s usually one of four situations in my personal experience. Defeat all enemies, escort a vital civilian, rescue civilians before the aliens annihilate them, or my personal least favorite… disable the bomb. On the 360, the controls stick where they probably shouldn't as well, which is honestly the biggest complaint I have about XCOM. As I try to move an individual into cover, the analog likes to decide that person should die and be sent to an open area with no cover and just standing around like an idiot.

As for story, from what I've felt from owning it for like three or four days is pretty much simple and coasting. Alien invasions and abductions start happening and you are designating with finding out why and how to stop it. This ends up leading you out of the tutorial and into the bulk. I do like story in my strategy, but for some reason this doesn’t bother me.  The graphics are also simple but up to spunk as far as my tastes go and the voiceover work by the cast is just as well.


The game doesn't ask much out of you, except maybe to not die. Actually that is probably the polar opposite of what this game wants out of you as when you play this game you will die. Especially if you are not a veteran strategy gamer and coming from me who played difficult matches on games like Age of Empires II, Stronghold, and the Hearts of Iron series, I would say even the easy difficulty provides enough challenge at times for me. I love this game though, despite the tiny things like sabotaging my squad on the rare mission and having really no easy mode (easy is disguised, disguised as normal!), not to mention it has the most imitating score of “awesome”; to put it bluntly, the soundtrack pretty much sounds to me like Mass Effect, which is good. In the end, this is a good… maybe great strategy game and if you like alien invasion science fiction or turn-based strategy this is a must have in your collection.