XCOM Enemy Unknown Review

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I am disappointed to say this but I have never played an XCOM game in my life. I had never even heard of the series until this title had been presented at E3, but boy do I regret not knowing about it. With the Earth about to become dominated by an unknown alien race, could XCOM Enemy Unknown be humanity’s saving grace?

XCOM: Enemy Unknown sees you the player become the ultimate armchair commander as you oversee the management and offensive capabilities of the newly created XCOM Project. Through the lengthy 20hr+ campaign you will find yourself build a living and breathing base of operations, while also training an elite squad of counter invasion soldiers.

The galactic clash of two races starts with an unknown alien race launching a massive cloak and dagger invasion of our beloved planet. People are dying and being abducted from all over the globe and all of Earth’s leaders know that conventional military strength will not win this war. Thus they begin the XCOM project, a secret military operation that hopes to study and defeat our alien oppressors.

XCOM could in some way be seen as the ultimate defence strategy game. Within your underground base of operations you will be building and maintaining a rather large assortment of research, construction and finally military prowess. When you aren’t overseeing the research and funding of your home turf, you are out on the battlefield commanding a team of up to six unique soldiers that will fight for you and even die for you. It has been a while since we have been graced with a war game that allows for some many creative options but XCOM gives them out in buckets.

The home base consists of a research facility, engineering garage, soldier barrack and aircraft hangar. As mentioned you will be spending a lot of your time in all these different areas of your base, while carefully choosing what research to fund, weapons to build and soldiers to train. After your first few missions you will experience the true genius of this game’s AI invaders and thus head off to your labs to do some careful thinking. Should you research certain alien technology to improve soldier armour? Should they get jetpacks for each terrain movement? Should our men and women’s guns shoot plasma based explosives that will blow an alien’s head out of their butt? All of these things will come across your mind one time or another during your campaign and all of these things are incredibly useful. Not once did a research or build a piece of equipment that didn’t help me and my team in some way.

This means that what you create and what you use will ultimately be based on your own personal play style. This becomes even more apparent with your own personal army that can be made up of snipers, heavy weapon specialists, psychic commandos and stealthy assault units. Every battle will help tone and strengthen your forces and later on in the campaign you won’t be able to help but gaze upon your platoon of total badasses as they cleave through the alien invasion like a hot knife through butter. That doesn’t mean that the game is easy though, it is actually rather challenging; even on the lower difficulties. You will discover earlier on that this game is out to make you lose, so many things can go wrong in your campaign that sometimes defeat may shine brightly on the horizon.

You may have a team of highly ranked up soldiers that all get murdered in a single mission from poor tactics, or lose a countries funding to your war effort from the inability to protect them from the ever increasing destruction of the invading aliens. This allows XCOM to be quite the tense and dramatic experience. One thing that I loved to do was name all my soldiers after friends and family, and I am sure you can understand the sheer sadness of seeing my girlfriend’s video game persona gunned down in a blaze of burning plasma fire. This means that making sure you have a back up army is always essential. It is complete suicide to send a fresh troop of rookies into the later missions and so planning who needs focused combat training is essential. Funding this training and research is an expensive task though and so you will be relying on the world’s governments to give you the cashola to upgrade and buy what you feel you need. In return you must give them protection, but sadly when multiple abductions are happening you must pick one ally over the over depending on the benefits you will receive for helping them out. Straight up fights with aliens won’t be the only types of battles you will be doing. Sometimes I found that I was required to disarm bombs or help evacuate civilians from an invaded area. This helps bring a very nice level of variety to the types of skirmishes you will experience.

One of my all-time favourite types of missions are the UFO capture operations. After your satellites pick up a UFO, you must scramble your fighter jets to attempt to shoot it down, if lucky the ship will crash and you must send you team to go secure the wreckage. The great thing about this is the feeling of unknown fear about your enemy’s positions. For all you know they could be flanking you in the darkness in the surrounding forest of the crashed vessel. This sometimes ends up turning from a simple clean up mission to a heart pounding chase as you try to bunker down in the enemy ship, not knowing what dangers await within its halls. The fear of the unknown is a great aspect in XCOM and probably why it sits proudly in the title line.

XCOM does come with a few problems though. It is rather apparent that the developers didn’t feel the need to properly play test the game, so players may come across a few game breaking bugs that will force you to shut down the game and restart from a previous save. This means that hours upon hours of time can be lost because of a few interface glitches that should have been easily fixed before release. Another problem I found was with the game’s camera angles while fighting in indoor environments. At times if you were wanting to get to the second floor of a building, you would zoom out only to be presented with the structures roof which would ultimately cut you off from seeing where you could move your people. The unhelpful camera only happens in the UFO crash site levels generally but it is still an annoyance and can even mean the death of your soldiers through accidently placement of been camera blocked.

Visually the game is quite the gem too. While not jumping leaps and bounds like other games of its genre like the Total War series, it still brings in a rather tasty cartoon-like style that allows these characters and creatures to come to life in a very appealing way. Not only do the aliens consist of a very large palette of different species but they all blossom from a great deal of conceptual love and attention. The same can be said about XCOM’s excellently done electronic soundtrack that obviously borrows from other excellent video compositions like Deus Ex Human Revolutions’.

This all ultimately revolves around a rather paper thin story as you experience the banter between your cast of XCOM home base characters. The great thing is though that while its story and ending may be that of an anti-climax, it is the journey from start to finish that allows you to create your own personal story within this war. This is also apparent if you are faced with the prospect of a looming campaign defeat. Sure you may have lost the war, but the thrill of starting from scratch and trying new ways to save the world is an addictive aspect to XCOM’s overall core mechanics.

XCOM Enemy Unknown is available now for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

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