I Want To Believe
When it was announced that the next XCOM game would be a first-person
shooter, the series faithful flipped out, and the game was delayed. But a
second XCOM title is also in the works, and it's sure to please those
fans who hope the franchise never departs from its strategy roots.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake—and a re-imagining—of a 1994 PC classic
that has been released under a whole slew of names, including UFO: Enemy
Unknown, XCOM: UFO Defense, and even XCOM: Enemy Unknown. In the
original game, a plotline that is now familiar to all gamers unfolds: An
alien race slowly starts to take over the Earth, and you, our hero, are
assigned the task of beating back the threat by controlling a bunch of
beefy space marines. Eventually, as the leader of the paramilitary group
XCOM, you're responsible for building and deploying a team to Mars to
eradicate the threat once and for all. The original game won a loyal fan
base not only thanks to its compelling gameplay, but also because of
its fear-inducing X-Files vibe.
Throughout the game, players need to carefully budget their money, keep
track of UFO kidnappings, intercept alien ships with jet fighters, keep
the civilian population satisfied, and even reverse-engineer alien
technology. Research is handled at the "ant farm," an XCOM facility
featuring top-of-the-line scientific equipment that you can improve as
you work your way through the game. Further complicating matters are the
facts that you need to suck up to the world's nations if you want them
to provide XCOM with funding, and that the aliens are divided into
numerous races of their own.
You also have to make sound tactical decisions in battle—and you'd
better be careful, because you won't start with a blank slate after each
checkpoint. Dead units stay dead, the technology you research can
affect your ability to win, and the original was notorious for its high
difficulty. It's actually possible to lose the game for good, and many
players never finished the original at all.
From the beginning, XCOM has been known for blending different types of
gameplay; the 1994 version featured two different views, one that
allowed you to make overall strategic decisions in real time, and a
close-up view that allowed you to make tactical decisions in turn-based
squad battles. (Oddly enough, this is the opposite of the system that
would prevail in modern strategy games like Total War: turn-based
activity on the world map and real-time battles.) There was also an RPG
element, in that winning battles allowed you to improve your skills. All
of this will return for the remake.
The new game is careful not to stray too far from what worked
before—after the announcement of the franchise's FPS, fans can't handle
much more. But the developers are taking a few liberties. For starters,
the game is set in the 1960s instead of the 1990s, making way for a
graphical style that's "retro" (in the sense of "recreates an old world"
rather than "looks like it was made with ancient game technology").
Cinematic cutscenes will advance the narrative over the course of some
70 missions, and it's not yet clear whether the new story will end up on
Mars like the old one did.
Judging by the most current set of screenshots, the graphics are
modernized and sometimes manage to create a creepy vibe, but they're
hardly top-of-the-line. The game will appear on consoles in addition to
PC, so we're bound to see streamlined menus and perhaps some
dumbing-down of the more tedious mechanics (such as "time units," which
have been simplified into a "move-action" system that allows you to move
a certain distance and then take an action each turn).
