K-SCORE: 63
Developer: Firaxis Games
Publisher: 2k Games
Creators: Jake Solomon, Ananda Gupta, Casey O’Toole, Scott Wittbecker, Liam Collins
Spoiler Level: Minor, difficult to spoil
“Unless you don’t mind either A) constantly reloading, or B) permanently losing, XCOM probably isn’t for you.”
Area-51 style aliens have invaded a world that is panicky, cheesy, and really rather dark. A council of nations has convened to finance the XCOM project to combat the violent threat. Squads of elite soldiers, equipped with the latest products of top engineers and scientists are ready to hunt down the extra-terrestrial lifeforms that for some reason perfectly match the kinds of aliens drawn by ten-year-old boys in their math notebooks when they’re not paying attention in class. Presumably these insidious invaders from outer space are spread all across the planet, yet because of the value of each individual mission and the indispensable lives of XCOM’s battle-hardened veterans, the fate of the Earth hinges on not missing this 90%-hit-chance rocket blast. … GOD DAMNIT!!! What the hell Major White Russian!? You had one goddamn job to do?! Now look, you’re going to get slashed up by that big muton there and bleed out all over the sidewalk next to this grocery store because I can’t kill off three heavy floaters with my snipers alone and my support class can’t get to you because your body is next to that about-to-explode truck! Shit!
“The luck factors are everywhere... bad luck compounds”
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is frustrating. It’s frustrating to play and frustrating to review. The game is very close to being brilliantly designed, and yet a few failures on the part of the developers means that, after having sunk hundreds of hours into the multiple campaigns, I have to come to the conclusion that it’s essentially a broken experience. Unless don't mind either A) constantly reloading, or B) permanently losing, XCOM probably isn’t for you.
It has a good concept for a turn-based strategy game. Sure the aliens have cliche designs, the dialogue is awfully written and delivered by talentless voice actors, and the story is brutally nerdy at best and mind-control gobbledygook at worst. It’s unlikely you’re playing this cerebral tactical combat and resource-allocation game for those reasons, though. One half of the game is a base where you allocate multiple types of resources to expand your organization, develop new weapons and armor, research alien technology, and train soldiers so they have better chances in the field. The second half is playing as those soldiers where you kill aliens in various maps and bring home aliens alive and dead as well as their technology to utilize as salvage and to research. So the first half supplements the second half and vice versa, and through your incremental efforts in each area and with careful planning, you can gain stronger positions in the world and take on more serious threats
The base is boring, but well-designed. You have to prioritize, at least at first. Expanding your satellite coverage means your soldiers won’t have all the crucial tools they might want at the beginning in order to maximize their survival chances, but it means that you’ll have more money, scientists, and engineers later. Picking and choosing what to build has no random factor, so if you lose a vital mission as a result of not having something you really need, then it feels fair, and on your next attempt you can consider getting that thing earlier. But just scrolling through lists of facilities to build and technologies to research, micromanaging ship lists and gray market salvage, remembering the number of days it takes to complete satellites or satellite uplinks, or the satellite nexus, or the power stations that you need to have to build those satellite facilities, is pretty lame. The less Googling you have to do on your phone while playing the better, and though you don’t have to do a ton, you do have to do some in order to thrive on higher difficulties. Also the advancements tend to feel either like necessities or simply too insignificant to really turn the tides in your favor. Laser weapons, sure. Plasma weapons, okay. But things like the armor don’t sweeten the deal when your soldiers still often die in a single hit. The SHIV is meaningless. Half of all the research tech isn’t used. Spending time to develop things like combat stims doesn’t help because you can’t possibly afford to waste a single turn applying one. Choosing to leave behind a grenade for a scope that increases your accuracy by some not-mentioned percentage (10, I think) is frustrating when you still miss that 75% shot.
The worst element of the base, though, is the fighter craft that you have to build and maintain in order to not have your satellites shot down and to be able to go on UFO missions. These things are strong enough to shoot down the UFOs alone, but every once and awhile fail do to bad RNG. The items to increase their effectiveness are far too costly, and equipping them can create insanely frustrating timing situations. If you push through this bad phase, you eventually can develop ships called Firestorms that win every time, but that just eliminates this bad portion of the game, so isn’t really an asset so much as a painkiller. It feels lazily tacked on.
A lazily tacked on random component is absolutely the last thing XCOM: Enemy Unknown needs. The fun part of the game is also the part that will make you wish you could enter the digital battlefield yourself, rip the sniper rifle right out of your incompetent sniper’s fingers, and take the shots yourself. At least then the fate of your game’s world would literally be in your own hands instead of the hands of vindictive dice-rolling computers.
Controlling four to six XCOM soldiers is fun. The simple tools let you set up cover points to take shots at aliens that move into your field of view, flank aliens, hide behind objects of varying protectiveness, and employ special skills to tip the odds in your favor. Six is too many soldiers. There aren’t enough strong points on the map for you to move all of them around safely, but if one’s just lagging behind, not doing much, it’s not that bad, so that’s a minor point. The four classes compliment each other fairly well, except that the assault class can’t be employed properly on high difficulties because it’s almost always too risky to run right up next to an alien. The maps are well-designed, cool to look at, fun to explore, and satisfyingly destructible. My favorite tactic in the game became throwing a grenade at an alien’s cover point to expose that alien to a volley of unobstructed fire. Winning missions is satisfying, and having the materials brought back to your base gives you a sense of security that next time you’ll be even better off, so the really bad stuff is behind you.
Now, there are two ways to play XCOM. My first playthrough, I played with saves. The game allows you to save any time, at the start of missions, during missions, at the base in between missions - it doesn’t matter. Consequently, choices you make on the battlefield don’t matter. If you decide to run some soldier out into the middle of nowhere and draw a lot of attention from aliens as a result, you can just reload. If you cluster your soldiers too close together so you can get hit with an alien grenade, you can just reload. If you gamble on a low percentage shot to save that extra civilian in a terror mission and miss it, you can just reload and take it again. Playing this way isn’t terrible because you still get a sense of the tactics and you can feel like you’re doing better or worse based on how often you have to reload, but if you go this route, the game drags horribly. The maps get bigger, the aliens have more life, and there’s more of them as the game goes on. Yet, like many games, the real challenge is in the beginning when you have scant tools to help you out. So playing with a well-equipped squad of fully-leveled soldiers when the outcome of the mission is predetermined to be a success is boring. Running slowly across the whole map searching for that one sectoid that decided to cower inside a semi truck is really stupid.
The other way to play is to play on Ironman, where you can’t manually save. If a soldier dies, he or she is dead permanently. If you fail a mission, chances are all your soldiers are dead and the world has descended into panic. It’s far more rewarding to succeed while playing on Ironman, since you had to make a lot of smart moves to do so. Yet ultimately, and this is why I’ve wrecked a good chunk of XCOM’s K-SCORE, winning on Ironman is a matter of not getting brutally unlucky for a long period of time. When that moment comes where something very unlikely happens in the aliens’ favor, it’ll cost you your entire game. You lose. Start over. And because the campaign from start to finish is so long (easily thirty hours of gameplay, more if you’re being extra cautious, which you have to be) when that moment comes it means you’ve lost hours and hours of progress.
The luck factors are everywhere. Where the aliens spawn is luck, what types spawn is luck, if you hit them is luck, if they hit you is luck, your base’s steam vent locations is luck, where the UFOs spawn is luck, if they’re successfully shot down is luck, what terror missions pop is luck, what abduction sites are selected is luck, what rewards from those sites is luck, what gray market requests is luck, whether your soldiers crit or get crit is luck, who gets shot at is sometimes luck, if they start to bleed out versus just die is luck. So some amount of bad luck is inevitable, but too much is insurmountable. See, the bad luck compounds. If you’re on a mission to decrease panic in Asia and you miss a shot and then one of the aliens crits a soldier in full cover and he dies instantly, well then you don’t have that soldier to fight back next turn, so you can’t kill as many of the aliens as you planned, so another soldier dies when the enemy gets more shot attempts, which means you have to retreat, which maybe means the cryssalids turn more civilians into zombies, which means there are more cryssalids on the level in a couple turns, which means you can’t win that mission, which means panic spreads throughout Asia and you don’t get the salvage, which means Japan and China withdraw their support from the council, which means less money at the end of the month, and it means you don’t get the bonus from having their full support so the Officer’s Training school bonuses cost too much, and you have fewer resources anyway, which means the next mission you go to, which has tougher aliens, is even harder for you because you have to use rookies, which means two or three die, which means you don’t have enough guys to even attempt the following UFO mission, so you lose - all because you missed that one shot and your guy, who was as defended as you could make him, took a hit that happened to crit and happened to kill him instead of critically wounding him. The game needed to input a way to recover from disaster, an emergency tool you could employ that, yes, would cost you some vital resources, but would mean that you didn’t lose the whole game as a result of a single stroke of misfortune or a single mistake.
I tried Ironman - Classic difficulty a few times. Most of the time I didn’t make it more than a few missions before I had to restart. Once, I made it very far. I had full satellite coverage over the entire world, could build anything I wanted, had Firestorm defense over the continents, had the best possible armor for that stage, and had even advanced the story and captured a few aliens, which requires making your soldiers terrifyingly vulnerable. There were some hiccups, sure. My best soldier died despite being armored and at full health and in cover because I missed five 80% or better shots on a single alien, the chance of which was less than 2 hundredths of a percent. But I recovered a bit, mourned the loss (and the 56 kills of wasted experience) and moved on. Then I played a later mission where, in a single turn, two patrolling alien groups came into my view at the same time (which should never be allowed to happen - one feels like cheating), I missed four overwatch shots, then my 90% rocket went off course, then one fully-leveled sniper missed back to back 85% shots, and my assault failed to crit a point-blank shotgun blast. The resulting alien attacks from all that bad luck killed my entire team, my six best soldiers. My game was over.
“You had one goddamn job to do?!”
“it’s impossible to engineer a situation where everything has a 100% chance of success”
I played XCOM: Enemy Unknown and researched it online enough that I was really quite good at it. The game is so punishingly difficult because the aliens start with better aim, better weapons, and greater numbers. You can do everything in your power to tip the odds in your favor, but ultimately, you’re going to have to take chances. You have to kill the aliens, and it’s impossible to engineer a situation where everything has a 100% chance of success. If Ironman mode let you make a couple emergency backup saves at crucial points, or if they implemented an emergency evacuation tool - sacrificing a soldier for a big bomb or to let the others escape, less chance of outright soldier death, something - then it’d be far more fun and just as rewarding. Instead, it’s a luck-dependent experience. I was unable to orchestrate a gamemode that I found satisfying and brutally disappointed when all my careful planning was wasted because of an extremely unlikely event. I don’t need that in my life. I don’t need to feel like I burned hours of my precious time as a result of not getting lucky. Unless… maybe XCOM: Enemy Unknown is trying to teach me a lesson about how hopelessly out of your control everything is. How life, in the end, is just a bunch of random numbers pulled from garbage code. If that’s really how everything works, I hope I’m not put in charge of fighting back against invading aliens when they come.