It’s been a good year for the thinking man’s action game: first “Ghost Recon: Future Soldier” defies my pessimistic initial assessments and becomes the benchmark for tactical action/stealth. And now Firaxis comes roaring through the gate with “XCOM: Enemy Unknown,” a strategy/action title so outstanding it’ll leave you in tears. It isn’t just good, it’s transcendent. Staggering depth, heart-racing action, streamlined controls (no easy feat considering the amount one has to do in this game), a gorgeous UI, they’re just firing on all cylinders here. If there is a significant flaw in this game, if there is some thing it sets out to achieve and falls short, I am not aware of what that is.
“XCOM” is an isometric strategy game that hands you a turn-based combat system and assigns you the unenviable task of going toe-to-toe with a race of alien invaders. As if these skirmishes weren’t enough, Firaxis then demands that you handle the bureaucracy of repelling extra terrestrials as well: you’ll make hard choices about which missions to accept or ignore, you’ll personally groom new recruits while building your vets, allocate resources for new research, build and maintain new facilities, balance the budget, you’re even in charge of maintaining a fleet of jets for UFO interception. The amount of power and responsibility in your hands is daunting, and XCOM more or less throws you in the deep end. I think this was probably the right call: a tutorial on all of this crap would have taken decades.
Case in point: it took me a while to appreciate why my soldiers were made up of four different classes: heavy, sniper, assault and recon. At first I thought “so what,” and then I realized my snipers could aim reliably at any target in line of sight of any of my soldiers. Intriguing. So why not have someone run ahead and scout, then let the sniper pick ’em off, I wondered? I tried that tactic, and it worked beautifully. I cleared handfuls of sectoids in seconds. Okay, now we got a ball game. As I repeated this process, I began to notice my support guy was particularly well-suited to scoping things out, as he could run farther on every turn. Okay, so I started using him for that. But there was a problem: supports aren’t built for sustaining heavy fire, and he couldn’t handle all the enemy attention he was attracting by running headlong into them. So, I began using my heavy and assault to compliment him, making sure the bulk of the enemy attacks were aimed at them instead. At this point I realized how valuable my heavies are for taking out clusters of bad guys, and how dependable assault is at close range, even when the numbers tell you he’s going to miss.
None of this was taught to me by the game explicitly, I just found my way to it. What’s more, as I read online about other people’s experiences, I realize how unique my sniper-heavy play-style is. I think Firaxis chose not to teach strategy because they wanted each player to develop naturally, to establish their own battlefield identity, sparked by whim and circumstance then hardened by battle. The first few hours of XCOM are very much like stumbling around in the dark looking for a light switch, but before you know it your eyes have adjusted, and you’re playing the battlefield like a chess board.
And of course, the let you name your soldiers and tracks their histories, which leads to naming them after your friends and becoming horrendously emotionally attached to them. When they die, or even when they’re injured, you take it personally. Those are my boys/girls down there. I talk to them constantly; when they’re under fire, when they hit a shot they had no business hitting, when I realize I’ve put them in a situation they won’t recover from. I’m notorious for sending legions to their demise in strategy games, but in XCOM I make every move preciously. I can’t remember the last time any title got me this attached to my team. There’s a memorial on my command deck for soldiers whom I was unable to bring home safely.
I visit it often.
_AA
bad day to be a rhesus monkey
