For the last week and a half I've been having a few runs at XCOM: Enemy Within. I say a few runs because this game is HARD. I would like to say, by way of introductory remarks, that I love this game; I was so glad XCOM was re-made for the current generation and I am even happier that it found its way onto the Xbox 360. So if what I write here comes across as negative, it comes from the frustration of it being an incredibly hard game to beat.
For those of you who don't remember, XCOM was originally a series of games by MicroProse that came out in the mid-late 90's. The premise was simple: Aliens invade Earth, and as the paramilitary global organisation XCOM, you have to defend it. What wasn't so common for the time were strategy games. The idea was that you commanded the entire war, from the building of your base and its location, to the deployment of your troops and interceptors. And then when you'd done all that, you got to command your troops in a turn-based strategy game. I remember the game being very hard, and not getting all that far with it, but it was a lot of fun and very well put together for the time(1994!).
This was the case for the first XCOM game, which was actually called UFO: Enemy Unknown. I played this one a lot when I was thirteen, and for a long time after! I understand XCOM: Terror from the Deep, released in a similar manner, worked in a similar manner, though I never played it. Then in 1997 we got XCOM: Apocalypse, which was set much further ahead into the future and involved the use of different aliens, an enemy Human faction which was interesting, and for the first time a real-time strategy game. Without wishing to go off on one too heavily about the history of gaming, at that time there were A LOT of Real Time Strategy games being published and this was MicroProse's attempt at keeping with the times. I don't know why but I never really got in to this one all that much. Maybe it's my almost OCD-like need to play the games through in order, but I always found myself wishing I was playing something else whenever I gave it a go.
Then we got my personal favourite of the original series: XCOM Interceptor. This took the battle to Space, where you would build space stations and star-fighters to combat the aliens. All the trademark XCOM features were there - base management, research, defence, strategic deployment - but with one difference. Instead of the combat section of the game being a strategy game, Interceptor put you in control of one of your fighters in a space-combat simulator. While there were other games that did this particular mechanic better, it was nice to be a part of the action rather than just controlling it, and I had a lot of fun blowing up aliens and their bases - though I did find that, contrary to what I'd come to expect from XCOM games, the combat section of the game was very easy, with only the last mission of the game proving to be an insurmountable challenge. Then again, I did set the difficulty to Very Easy. I wasn't very good at games back then. I'm still not, as a matter of fact.
Sadly, Interceptor suffered three major flaws that I will now reveal to you in ascending order:
- There were only three fighters on the XCOM side and only about five for the Aliens. Apparently this was due to time constraints, but when at the same time I also played X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which were much older games and managed more ships than that for both of their factions, it was a little disappointing.
- There was no way to skip the battles. This isn't really a problem when you're at the start of the game and you're thinking, 'oh wow, I'm fighting Aliens!' but late-game when you've got eight bases and your scanners keep picking up small patrols, you find yourself wishing that you could let the AI handle small skirmishes like this so you could concentrate on the bigger picture. It doesn't break the game at the lowest difficulty level, which is how I played it, but it would have been nice to have had the option.
- The Curse of Windows 98. A lot of older games have some version of this, relevant to the operating system of the time. But for those of us who don't play games on PC, let me tell you what this meant for Interceptor: It wasn't that it wouldn't work on Windows 98. On the contrary, it worked perfectly fine on Windows 98. It's just that it absolutely refuses to work on anything else. And what is really a kick in the teeth for this game is that the problems start to occur later on in the game. It pretends to work, but then when the Aliens start sending jammer probes to block your research, you can't do anything about it. You can send your interceptors, but when you launch the mission, the probe is not there, and you can do nothing to destroy it. But I thought I'd try to live with that and manage to play through the game with this added challenge (The probes disappear by themselves after a while.) But no. At some point, you start being attacked by space pirates, and when you finally uncover their base, you find the same impossible thing happens - it doesn't appear in the mission. This one is game breaking, and the reason I haven't played it since I discovered this in 2005.
Then in 2012, Firaxis and 2K Games released XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This was a re-make of the original title and by GOD, this was good...
The basic premise of the game was exactly the same. Aliens come down, you have to defend the Earth. However, the new game did a lot to bring the game in line with the current generation. There was a graphical overhaul with the inclusion of actual characters who would talk to you in an advisory capacity. A lot of the tedious micro-management from the old games - supplies, low-level staff etc - was taken out, allowing you to focus on the game. The missions from the old game were there, but there were also some new ones - Abduction missions, Escort missons, and Bomb Disposal. And the tactical section of the game was even more streamlined.
There were a lot of changes here that fans of the originals weren't happy with. For example, the previous games had an 'action points' system, where your troops had a certain number of points to spend on their actions for that turn, and you could squeeze maximum efficiency out of your troops depending on how much their actions cost. In the new game, your troops have a maximum of two actions - you can move, THEN shoot or use an item. It has to be in that order. If you try doing it the other way around, you'll find that your shoot or item ends your turn. Your troops evolve and get more skills as you're going along - and you're going to need those extra skills and abilities, because some of the enemies you come across are incredibly hard to deal with.
I managed to finished the game on Normal difficulty after a few false starts in about a month. And ever since then I've been trying to beat it on Classic (Hard) difficulty. And I usually fall flat on my face after a few months in game time. The game is very brittle to the point where if you make a mistake and your soldiers die, it is incredibly hard to pull it back after that. Permadeath is in action here; if your most experienced soldiers get killed and you've got no one to replace them, you've got nothing but rookies to fill in those gaps, and you find yourself missing the shotguns and rocket launchers that your veterans bring to the battle. Battles become stupidly hard, and more often than not you'll find it impossible to pull a campaign victory.
Ultimately the greatest strength of the game is also its most frustrating feature: You can lose. In this Call-of-Duty-era of gaming, this is not actually all that common. In a great many shooters for example, you can play the game for 10 hours and probably win because there is no penalty for dying other than having to start the level again. It's the same for open-world titles like Grand Theft Auto; there's rarely a penalty for dying that can't be solved by buying all your weapons etc back. In XCOM, I have definitely lost the game more often than I have won it, or even done reasonably well. If you run out of money, you can't hire more soldiers. If you can't hire more soldiers, you can't fight battles. If you don't hire engineers, you can't build satellites that stop the world going mad (usually how you end up losing.) If you don't hire Researchers, you will fall behind in the technology stakes. Get even one of these things wrong and you could potentially de-rail the whole game. Do this enough times and it does get quite frustrating, and that is why sometimes I put the game away for a couple of months - I'm just not getting anywhere!
That having been said, I would normally come back to it after a few months. Just one more go! Until XCOM: Enemy Within came out...
So the game I'm playing at the moment is Oblivion and this one is going to take me ages. I've always got things to say about XCOM so I'm going to leave Enemy Within until next week. I'll see you then!
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