XCOM: Enemy Unknown (A review)

XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN

Spare a thought for the lonely life of the video game military commander, the ones besides commander Sheppard that is, who missed all the important lessons about delegation because he was off sick with the alien clap. First of all, you can’t even get the job if you don’t sound like you do movie trailer voice overs in your spare time and then you get to spend your whole time trying to wrangle up the acts of desperate lone renegades with poor anger management, who think that if they boggle their eyes hard enough and purse their lips like if their daughter’s fiancé just left the bathroom without washing his hands, then their orders can be regarded with the same amount of respect due to someone putting their finger in their mouth and making popping sounds.

And who the fuck do you think pay for all those helicopters they invariably crash in the intro sequence? Because they don’t give that shit away at Chuck e Cheese. Today we learn to appreciate the difficulties of command with XCOM, not to be confused with eggscom, which is a website for sharing your favourite omelet recipes.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake or a reboot or a reason to despair for the creative industries for a game in the 90’s variously titled UFO: enemy unknown and XCOM: UFO defense in a spirited attempt to confuse matters even further. In a peaceful near future in which every nation on earth has sat down and agreed to construct every building the exact same height and all speak in the same American accents, aliens suddenly invade. But despite being vastly superior they are obliging enough to start off the assault with squads of alien domestic science students wearing nappies to give the nations on earth enough time to club together for a specialized alien defense initiative and train up a squad of random inexperienced schlubs that they picked up on mass from a nearby airport departure lounge.

The player takes on the role of the high commander of XCOM, who in classic protagonist style has no face, voice or name so I chose to believe that they are somebody’s fuzzy mum who feels like she needs to micromanage every bloody aspect of XCOM’s operations, from the building of new facilities; what slimy, glowing green objects to research and what sandwiches to put in all the ground squadrons’ lunch boxes.

“Did you like XCOM?”

“What was that? Sorry, I was playing XCOM”.

I was just going to play a bit of the next mission but then I ended up playing the whole thing, and then the next too. How about we pencil in a yes. I like it because now it gives me something to rub in Syndicate’s face and say “LOOOK! Turns out you don’t have to turn everything into a bloody shooter!”

I also like that it does both base management and tactical turn based shooting without seeming like a gimmick bolded onto the other. I spend my time in the base thinking “Gosh, I’m looking forward to using these plasma rifles to shoot all the baddies” and my time in the field thinking “gosh, I’m looking forward to bringing all these alloys back to base to build more plasma rifles”.

I find it all very absorbing. I remember while playing Valkyria Chronicles thinking that I could probably get into turn based tactics if it didn’t have so many winging anime school children, and it turned out I was right, if there’s a strong sense of investment and a nebulous and unknown foe about which are constantly discovering new things, like the relationship a teenage boy has with vaginas. And if there are any anime school children they’re in the terror missions being liquidized beneath a berserker’s fist.

It’s not building stuff that’s absorbing per se. It’s the way the game teases you with it, the little harlot. It’s not enough to pay it money but you must also wait several in game days for it to be built and camp out in its front garden looking through its bathroom window with binocul… wait that’s something else. When it takes 20 days to build a satellite you might have forgotten what you wanted it for, but you’ll throw a fucking party when it does arrive, you’ll give it its own little bowtie.

But if there’s something I’m iffy about it’s the randomness of the UFO assaults, which are the only ways to get resources, so if you’ve blown all of it on new armour sets and satellite accessories then there’s nothing to do but to sit down and flick playing cards into a hat, hoping against hope that a flying saucer will invade. Preferably in one of the nations with a high panic rating that’s threatening to withdraw its support because urban sectoids are rummaging through their bins and you seem to spend all your time flicking playing cards into a hat and dressing up your satellites.

Randomness in core gameplay mechanics almost always get frustrating, I wish there was something proactive we could do, like dressing all the men in wigs and dresses and making them stand around in alien hot spots loudly repeating “I hope no one interrupts this lovely picnic”, and while the aliens kick off by recruiting their infantry units from the space day care, sooner or later they want to try out their new fancy giant spider droids and they’re not going to wait around for your pudgy arse. So the difficulty ramps up regardless of how advanced you’ve gotten.

Now, I really don’t like save scumming in tactical missions because getting through a game that way reflects on your abilities about as well as blowing a bubble with your spit. But there’s really no other option, one fuck-up can destroy this house of cards and most of them won’t land in your hat. You can survive getting one of your top guys ray gunned into sandwich spread, two at a pinch but you might as well reload if your entire super squad gets wiped up. Because the aliens aren’t going to hold back let you train up a new selection of rookies who aim like fucking octodad and go into panic mode if a wasp starts buzzing too close to their jam sandwiches.

But at least the randomness makes the game very replay able, so take comfort in that as you contemplate restarting from scratch because you didn’t research laser guns fast enough and all your best men had to be evacuated off the field with a fucking spatula.

XCOM tradionalists might moan a bit, because the original XCOM had a user interface that was about as intuitive as the controls for a nuclear submarine but fuck those people. XCOM 2012 may have some iffy design and it’s glitchy at times, soldiers on overwatch sometimes possess the inexplicable ability to see enemies through walls, and these were the guys who came back negative from the psychic testing. Shows how much that proves.

But it basically hits the right notes, like a first class bowel movement it’s solid, lasting and above all organic. One time I had a bunch of guys trapped in a crashed UFO’s central rape room with the alien equivalent of Hulk Hogan, and I only had actions left for one heavy and one sniper who were too far away from the action to help. So what did I do? I got the heavy to blow a massive hole in the side of the UFO with a rocket launcher, thus granting the sniper a clear line of sight to double tap the problem right in the tash and win the mission.

A master stroke of unconventional strategizing of which I was so embarrassingly proud that I boasted furiously about it for the last few sentences of an internet review.