XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake of two very old games that were known very well for their length, difficulty, and detail. Fortunately, all of those elements make an astonishingly satisfying return in this very fun and intuitive game. Now, anyone who knows me also knows that I love RPGs but I absolutely abhor turn based games. I find them boring and I feel the need to be right in the action instead of going turn by turn giving each character on the battlefield one slow moving action, it just has absolutely no appeal to me. Despite this, XCOM was able to capture my heart on the game play front. If you wanted me to truly describe what sets XCOM apart at its core combat from all other turn based games, I really could not do it, it is very clearly a turn based game. I suppose there is just something about the difficulty, strategy, and overwhelming tension that you could permanently lose your best soldier with one wrong move or even the support of a full country if this next sniper shot does not hit its mark. I suppose I should explain all this in order to get my point across. You will have a squad of up to 6 specially trained XCOM soldiers all of which can level up to get stronger, be heavily injured and taken out of commission for a few days, or be killed permanently. Like I said, there is a strong attention to detail and RPG elements in this game. When combat begins each of your soldiers will have two actions and their turn will end after you use both of those actions or after you attack. Soldiers can be moved into areas that provide full cover, half cover, or no cover at all which is a terribly unwise choice to make as you have no idea which aliens will appear where even if you are well into a fight. There are various classes, weapon types, and armor types for your soldiers to wear and the way you have them play together will mean life or death for the rest of the world. You definitely do not want to use all rocket launcher loaded soldiers because they do not move very quickly and are not good for support. You also cannot use all snipers because although they are usually accurate and they do a lot of damage, unless you level them up correctly they cannot move and attack on the same turn. It is this really cool dynamic of combat with your classes of soldiers working their skill against a plethora of different aliens that is really alluring in XCOM. However, XCOM's most addictive element does not come in until you have left combat and return to HQ. You are the XCOM commander and as thus it falls on you to make various decisions that will ultimately determine whether we survive this alien invasion or not. You receive a monthly revenue from each country of the world and you must use this revenue to fund the XCOM project by paying for new armors and weapons for your soldiers, satellites to protect your countries and interceptors to protect those satellites. There is so much going on at HQ it can really make your head spin at first. You cannot spend all of your time at HQ though because every time you commission building or researching a new item you must wait for the day counter to go down. As the day counter goes down there is the possibility that you will run into a random alien threat and if you are not prepared to face it before you set the day counter off you may be in some real trouble. In this aspect XCOM shines. I have never seen a game that is so strategic and tense in every single way even when your at your home base you are never safe from the consequences of your own second to second decisions. I would suggest saving often because you are going to want to go back to an old save more than you know, its also a good way to adjust yourself to the game before you take it on seriously. I have friends who have gone thirty hours in and their best soldier was still in the hospital when they had a high alert alien attack and because of that one soldier being out of commission they lost the support of three countries after one mission and then they didn't have enough support money to help the countries they had left. XCOM can be incredibly unforgiving at times but it is almost always fun.