X-COM: Enemy Unknown went on sale over the Thanksgiving
break. Being the weak-willed charlatan
that I am, I bought it right away. I
bought it thinking that, hey, this couldn’t do that much harm right now. I’m so busy, how could this one game really
draw me away from all of the student papers I have to grade, the assignments I
need to prep, the readings I need to complete and the pieces I need to write?
X-COM answers all these questions with a hulking, brutal
lizard thing covered in armor, clutching a plasma rifle, thumping its chest
after each successful shot, each blow survived.
There’s something delightful about X-COM’s mentality,
because really the mentality is the strongest holdover from its
predecessors. This X-COM isn’t really
too much like the X-COMs of old in its play: it’s tightly racked in its focus
where previous X-COMs were meandering and procedural. In the original X-COM games you’d wait for
something to go wrong somewhere in the world and then tensely try to run it
down. You’d almost always fail, and
you’d be engaging in a process of constant discovery as well as a hopeless
battle against a vastly superior foe.
Most of the early fights in the old X-COMs became bloodbaths, and not in
your favor: even the most basic operations will probably end up losing you a
decent portion of your squad early in the game.
And the curve is punishing. It
isn’t long before sectoids turn to septopods, and when they do you might as
well be right back at square one. If not
for obsessive-compulsive saving, I’m not sure X-Com is a playable game. If certainly isn’t a game for everyone.
The obsessive level of detail, punishing difficulty and the
desire to leave you in the dark, not just about what you’re doing but about
what you should be doing, is a huge part of the original X-COM’s play. Its constancy, paired with an unforgiving
approach to tactics and an obscenely complicated system of unit and base
management made it the sort of game you needed a thick, dedicated manual to
play with any kind of realistic understanding of how your actions influenced
outcomes.
The new X-COM abandons these deviously complicated component
parts in favor of a broader appeal in its second to second play. You have four units at first, and you’ll only
be able to field six units at a time as the game progresses. X-COM the first depended on your fielding
collections of units four or five times that size, and had you fighting well
above that number of X-rays in each encounter.
That number has been reduced considerably as well in this newer, kinder,
gentler X-COM. So far I’ve never seen
over a dozen enemies on a single battlefield, with the exception of one
particularly long, grueling mission, which culminated in one of the more
interesting reveals (and fights) that the game has proffered thus far.
The whole game has been streamlined, in fact: you only have
one base, fighter combat is a great deal simpler (fighters will use their
weapons correctly by default, instead of wildly charging in instead of holding
back with avalanche missiles, or waiting dumbly at a distance while the enemy
pegs them with lasers) and production and research is extremely easy. You can only research one topic at a time, so
there’s no micromanagement of scientific research (a frustrating prospect, in a
sense, since there’s really no way to boost research through the application of
more materials) and the majority of the things you really, really need, like
armor and guns, are produced instantly.
The items that do require time to be built, from what I can see, aren’t
effected by queuing up multiple items at once, and base development, in keeping
with this simplified ethos, occurs more or less in a vacuum, presenting you
with space to build but never splitting resources, rarely demanding special
resources to satisfy the conditions of construction and tremendously
simplifying the asymmetrical base development game that the first X-COMs
insisted on.
Even the tactical combat has been streamlined. Instead of limited, persistent ammo supplies
for all your guns (ammo that come with the guns, so supply micromanagement
outside combat impacts the tactical play) you’re presented with guns that have
to be reloaded every few shots, but never permanently lose ammunition. Characters are given pre-determined roles
centered around equipment types, so you don’t even really get a choice about
who to leave that medkit with and who should carry the rocket launcher. And the turns have been solidified into a
single round for blue troops (your friendly squad) and red troops (the enemy
squad) instead of drawing off of an abstract, stat and clock based timer. And there’s no reaction attribute, so your
soldiers won’t become capable of a great deal more movement and/or action as
the game continues. You’ll always be
able to tell each unit to do two things per round (with a handful of
exceptions).
The game is also decidedly easier. There are “tough choice” moments presented
regularly, wherein you are asked to defend one of two cities for a pre-stated
award, but these represent the only “forced loss” scenario you’re pressed
with. All of the other fights, even the
fighter-dogfighting, is pretty easy. I
haven’t lost a single soldier playing on normal difficulty. In the original X-COM, I’d have to cycle in
new troops regularly due to losses, even when I saved and reloaded the game
like a teenager with OCD washing his hands.
Here, even when I run up against some pretty extreme enemies I’m still
pulling victories off, often despite some pretty brazen tactical decisions
early in the encounter, stupid choices that put me at a disadvantage without
really costing me. I am, of course,
still compulsively saving and reloading whenever I lose a unit or have a bad
day or hear a child’s laughter from the street (they could be laughing at
me). But I’m doing it less often than I
ever did in the original X-COM, and I find that the equipment I’ve been able to
produce for my troops is giving me much more of an advantage than the gear I
found in the first X-COM ever did – excepting the introduction of power armor,
a huge game changer in the original X-COM which barely makes a difference given
the cost-benefit ratio in this latest X-COM iteration.
Despite this eye towards streamlining play and reducing the
difficulty of the original game, which could justifiably be categorized as
infuriating, there’s still a punishing sense of permanence constantly present
in X-COM. Each time you get into a
fight, there’s a chance your troops aren’t coming back. If you don’t save your game, you take a
serious risk of losing your progress. If
you research the wrong thing, your fights will grow considerably more
difficult. Once something is lost, it
cannot be regained. Ever.
The ethos of the original is thus preserved: there are real
fucking consequences to your actions and choices, my friend, and the way you
deal with these consequences is what really shapes the game for you. Will you treat them as alternative futures,
learning scenarios that permit you to return to the game later, older, wiser,
like me? Or do you play the game on the
iron-man setting, which prevents you from ever re-loading or restarting and
presses you constantly forward, into hellish conditions where you must contend
with every loss, mourn every fallen comrade, choose every shot carefully and
never slip up. Ever. Not if you want to win.
It’s a kinder, gentler kind of harshly unforgiving gameplay,
but it remains intense. And startlingly
addictive in its execution – I’ve lost an astounding amount of time to X-COM in
a very short time, time I can’t afford to lose right now. But it does seem like it’s likely to end
sooner than the original X-COM, at present.
I can’t say for sure, I haven’t finished it yet, but I remember being
just barely halfway through the game at around 80 hours while playing the
original. Right now I’m running out of
things to research, making me think that the endgame loometh.
I look forward to seeing it through, if only because it’ll
lose its grasp somewhat once it’s done.
Maybe. I’m not
entirely sure. It’s pretty fucking
addictive.
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