XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

Posted By Johnny Maloney about 7 months ago

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

Surely remaking media must be a profitable enterprise. You’re dealing with subject matter that’s new and also familiar at the same time. People LIKE familiar things, and they pay for stuff that’s new. We like cover songs, sequels, re-imaginings of cult classics, and fresh takes on old standards. Remaking video games seems to me to be the most drastic genre of entertainment to remake, with technological limitations and audience demographics changing vastly in the past twenty years, going back to old standards will bring a lot of new options to design, and a lot of new fingerprints on the controllers. But when the people who reboot franchises can’t seem to agree with the fan base on what makes a certain classic valuable and timeless, we get ill-conceived disaster or mediocrity. Thankfully, Firaxis Games appears to have sidestepped this pitfall entirely in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

We could spend all day talking about how close XCOM: Enemy Unknown is to the original, or how insane it is that they could POSSIBLY miss one game element or another, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere. Just because they’ve rebooted XCOM doesn’t mean that the original suddenly ceases to exist; I’ve double checked to make sure–it still works, it’s still fun, and it will still kick your ass clear across the solar system. We wouldn’t want a proverbial shot-for-shot remake of the original anyways, would we? We’d all get up in arms and complain about how it’s unimaginative, unoriginal, and derivative of itself. Yes, they didn’t include base defense missions, but that’s hardly a reason to be upset here. As I’ve mentioned before, if you want to play X-COM (or UFO: Enemy Unknown for the Brits), it’s still there. It’s really good too. But if you were going to re-make something, wouldn’t you try to improve it? Or at least do your best to contemporize it?

The good news is that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is really good. They seem to “get” it over at Firaxis and have made sure that the franchise’s most distinguishing characteristics remain intact, such as the difficulty. In case you didn’t know, X-COM was hard (it should be mentioned that the classic game was hyphenated. That’s how you tell the difference). It was balls hard. It was slap you in the face, call you sugarpie, put a bridle in your mouth and ride you around the town in front of all your friends kind of hard. People would die, equipment would get blown up, money would disappear against increasingly bigger budgets, and your best friends would get cut down in front of you only to rise again and kill more of your best friends before exploding into a fully grown alien who would just do the same thing over again.

Jenkins always waits until we get into the Skyranger to gas it up. Man eats too much chili.

XCOM gets that. It understands at its base that failure was a fundamental element of the original. It helped to form narrative in a game that largely eschewed narration of any sort. Close calls and narrow escapes became stories of their own without any writing to speak of. Ballsy tactics that worked out became events worth shouting “Hurrah!” over, gaining you a few choice looks if you happened to be playing it during lunch hour in your high school’s computer room. On the other hand, it also somehow managed to make you speak in hushed tones to your friends to let them know that they’d gone down in a blaze of glory close encounter with a Cyber-Disc, and that your ground missions just wouldn’t be the same without them. That self-creating story is here, and it is good.

For the neophytes, XCOM is a game about an international organization formed by the UN to understand, defend against, combat, and ultimately defeat an extraterrestrial threat that happens in the not so distant future of 20XX. Alien activity (which is apparently a more common thing than we’re aware of) shoots up like a geyser and the nervous people in power put guns in the hands of meaty soldiers, hammers in the hands of hardy engineers, and erlenmeyer flasks in the hands of the scientists and say “deal with it.” So, you do.

They call him Brick because of the size of the things he pulls out his nose. Nothing worse than a Heavy who is also a nosepicker.

As the commander of XCOM, it is your duty to manage base facilities, research projects, supply production, training, and response to aggression. The game more or less divides into two portions: base management and ground missions. I have to say too, that the base management in this reboot might actually be better than the classic X-COM, by way of being less fiddly. In the original, placing bases around the world and manually constructing every detail could mount up in end-game, forcing you to spend much more time managing a business rather than playing a game. Here, you instead manage one base, but increase coverage around the world by launching satellites. They’ve made your finances a touch more manageable too by moving the decimal place a little to the left, so that you’re dealing with slightly more comprehensible amounts of money.

XCOM Enemy Unknown Review - ZGR

By ZGRDaniel

XCOM was one of Daniel's most memorable gaming experiences as a teenager. Does the reboot stand the test of time?

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

By Johnny Maloney

In the near future, a world torn apart by invaders, society on the brink of collapse, ONE man will rise above and review a game that won't really make that much of a difference to the unrest around him... but you should read it anyways. It's Johnny with the official XCOM: Enemy Unknown review.