PAX East 2012: XCOM: Enemy Unknown Preview

XCOM: Enemy Unknown gives you the opportunity to save the world from aliens through turn based strategy gameplay. In this reboot of the original XCOM series improvements have been made in every way. With a redefined experience that still offers the gameplay which made it famous this new title will capture a new generation as well.

This game puts you in command of a state of the art base. While on your base you see things in an “ant farm” like view. As the game progresses you must make decisions on what additional features you would like your base to have, such as additional research labs, power generators, or something entirely new. However time and money are essential, and you will not have unlimited access to either.

As the commander you choose soldiers to fight alongside you. These soldiers level up through experience in the field with you. It is important to note that once these soldiers die in combat they are dead permanently. There are various classes of soldiers and it your choice on who to bring, these choices can be the difference between life and death. During our walkthrough we were shown the major differences between these classes and how important each move you make is.

For those of you unfamiliar with the XCOM series it is a turn based game where strategy plays an important role. For every teammate on your squad you get a turn. During this turn you have the opportunity to just move, or to move and shoot. Snipers are good to have on your squad, but this is the only class that cannot move and shoot, on a snipers turn they can either shoot or move. Shooting does not necessarily mean that your objective is to kill the enemy. During our walkthrough we were shown a few different suppression options. And although this is a turn based game the environments are destructible. This means that you may not need a great view of the enemy by a car at a gas station, if you know what I mean.

Firaxis Games has done a great job of keeping the integrity of a classic series during this reboot. For fans of the original XCOM series we did see a couple of original aliens. These aliens have the same basic look just improved graphically. The developer dodged questions relating to additional aliens from the original XCOM as well as questions relating to multiplayer. However he did hint that this information may be coming in the near future. Overall this looks like a very fun strategy game with endless opportunities. It is exciting to play a game in which every move you make is important to the success or failure of your mission; saving Earth.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6QDYZK5L6IW5CAMNRRHBPZSCZA Preston Spold

Nice job deleting my comment on you thinking the underground base was a spaceship.

This game still looks dumbed down as hell compared to the original game, though.
- http://www.vgrevolution.com John L
  
  Thanks for clarifying in your original comment. I don’t know why she messed up originally other then the fact that two people are trying to process all these hands on articles, and bouncing around at these conventions your ideas get all jumbled late at night.
  - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6QDYZK5L6IW5CAMNRRHBPZSCZA Preston Spold
    
    If you say so. Just reminds me of those thinly-disguised PR pieces that came out in regard to that terrible-looking moneygrab of an XCOM FPS a while back, the ones that were obviously written by people who’d never played the games – making basic mistakes like blanket-labelling them RTS games, or stating that the FPS was “faithfully sticking to the original series’ 1950′s setting” (when the originals were set anywhere from 1999 to 2084) and, intentionally or not, misrepresenting the FPS as a simple continuation of the series. I dunno which saddens me more, really, that stuff like that happened, or the fact that that none of their regular readers knew enough to correct them (and I wasn’t bloody well signing up with a million unique registrations to do so, so kudos on using the whole OpenID thing on this site, I guess).
    
    By comparison the new turn based game is a step in the right direction, but they’re making the classic and irritating mistakes of, on the one hand, attempting to change the formula (which has always been the biggest criticism of games trying to emulate X-COM and even of the first game’s own sequels) and on the other, and in a more general sense, trying to market this to the masses (and I can see why they’ve done so, because the company that they work for apparently doesn’t understand the phrase “Small Budget Game” so they’re trying to get as many people to buy it as possible to recoup their investment. That doesn’t stop me thinking it was a stupid move to make or criticising it, though).
    
    The result is a game that contains multiple changes that, despite strained attempts by the developers to justify them, have pretty transparently either been inserted to cater to new and more casual players outside the original target demographic (ie: hardcore tactics/strategy and micromanagement nerds) at the expense of gameplay elements, layers of depth and flexibility that the old fans liked, or that have been put in simply because the developers don’t possess sufficient humility to create the updated remake that fans have been asking for for over a decade – they keep stressing they’re “re-imagining it for themselves”, which would be fine if they’d created the franchise to begin with and if it didn’t spell trouble for future entries in the series returning to their original form, a-la Fallout 3 and its transplanted-from-Elder-Scrolls fanbase.
    
    I guess the most depressing thing about this game is that it’ll probably be designed around its “Easy” difficulty mode (which they’ve admitted will do its best to keep your troopers alive) for mass-consumption – you can see evidence for this in things like not being able to move after you’ve fired, which is pretty obviously there to stop newbie players from taking risks that veterans might be happy to, yet as far as we’re aware cannot be turned off if one *is* a veteran player (the best you can do is wait for class-specific perks which’ll force you to do weird things in order to be able to accomplish movement that would be standard in other games), and you might have noticed that the game looks set to force players to choose between missions on the globe by only allowing them one Skyranger dropship, when the original allowed you to have as many as you could get space and money for. While it sounds cool and avant gard and whatever when they speak about it as game designers, in reality it means that everyone will be locked to the same level of achievement when it comes to numbers of crash sites/terror missions/landed UFOs addressed – even if you’re a great player who should by rights be able to afford another dropship and an extra hangar, you’re still held back to the level of everyone else because a designer decided everyone should be artificially equal in this situation. Or maybe they just get some kind of thrill from imposing unnecessary limitations on players, like the way you can’t grab comrades’ fallen weapons in battle like you used to, not being able to build multiple proper bases (instead you’re limited to one fully built up base and multiple interceptor hangar stations, probably because marketing decided people would be too confused by having their little dudes stationed between multiple “ant farms”), or throwing soldier flexibility out the window and saddling us with rigidly-defined “classes” that are forced upon the player randomly.
    
    All in all, it just sucks. I kind of wish they’d held off on bringing back the series until they could do something like the Wasteland kickstarter and create a proper low-budget, damn-the-graphics-and-up-the-gameplay remake. Well, at least there’s Xenonauts.

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