XCOM: Enemy Unknown

I started my XCOM experience by watching XCOM 2 on YT. Curious as how predecesors presented themselves, I decided to watch a bit of them on YT as well. Then I decided to give them a try and my first title was XCOM Enemy Unknown. The game delivers a very climactic tutorial, that teaches you some useful info and bad habts as well. XCOM is a game of chance most of the time. But there are options guaranteeing a certain outcome. It boosts the value of tactical plays a lot, which I found to be very enjoyable and rewarding. I was surprised how simple the math for determing a hit chance was. It made playing around increasing your percentage for a succesful hit much easier and noob friendly. What was not easy to understand was how sightlines work. After playing lots of runs, understanding them is one of the most crucial parts. It allows you to have a better control over the battlefield. Planned and controlled engagement can turn the tide in your favor. Besides that, everything is usually clearly described and understandable. Utilizing offered tools, items, weapons and such is up to the player. And when in doubt... Play ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The aliens, as antagonists pose a serious threat. They look intimidating, advanced, or in case of Floaters, straight up ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. Too bad only Floaters and Chryssalids were the only non-humanoid, organic units. AI depends on the difficulty settings. When you play on Classic, or Impossible, the AI will exploit every possible chance to shred your soldiers. And sometimes that include teleporting, shooting off screen, triggering on the other side of the map, or bombing that one guy in the smoke with ♥♥♥♥ tons of grenades. Fighting the aliens, especially during early game, feels like your enemy always has an upper hand. Their aim and weaponry is on par, or outclasses yours. Their numbers can quickly overwhelm you. Their grenade throwing range is 2 times yours. And then... There's a Sectopod... An always ready to fire mechanical menace, that shreds through everything, fires at walls, even when you're out of range and should be the final boss of the game. Design-wise I love mechanical units. Cyberdisk being my favorite. But... The game has its problems as well. One of them is sightlines are inconsistent. You can spot a group of aliens and not trigger them, then you end a turn and all of a sudden, they activate, then scatter, then make a move and then kill 2 of your peeps. The other one is hardlocking the UFO doors by placing a SHIV in front of them. It happened to me on a Battleship wreck assault and stopped me from getting out of the starting location. The other one is lifting off a ghost mode, when the user is in sightline of untriggered enemies. After triggering the pack with another soldier, the cloak just turned off and my soldier was exposed to 3 aliens without any action to hide his ass. I have a HUGE issue with 'Psi Panic" ability. If you succesfully pull it off, there's a high chance the target will open fire at the soldier, that performed it. Usually resulting in a serious wound, or a straight up kill. The aliens NEVER shoot at each other, while panicking. Rarely, if ever, they hunker down... And that's it. Useless. All in all I sinked in deep into the XCOM EU/EW. The climat is great. The gameplay is simple, yet fun and customizable via "Second wave" options. The soundtrack delivers. Especially combat music (on YT indexed as 6 and 7), the permadeath of your units really brings out emotions, while playing on Ironman. And I still find little details, that add to the depth of the world of XCOM. Vigilo Confido!

I'll divide my review into each section of the game. Early game: Can be absolutely miserable if you're going in blind. You'll breeze through the first few missions, then suddenly get hit with a more complex one that wipes your entire squad. That first major loss will likely spiral into a restart if you don't know what you're doing. Mid game: This is where the game really shines. Your soldiers become much stronger, your base starts coming together, and the missions feel challenging without being unfair. It's easily the most enjoyable part of the game. Late game: Mostly as good as the mid game, except for one section near the end where you have to shoot down a UFO to progress the story. This is probably the worst part of the game because the aircraft you need take around two weeks to build, and during that time the strategic layer can completely fall apart while you're forced to wait. I'd still recommend the game. The story is a bit thin, but the gameplay is excellent. Just know that some of the design choices will punish you with zero remorse, and the game expects you to learn from your mistakes. That's just part of the experience.

have you ever gambled on a 99% hit with your life on the line? even after more a decade, this game still holds up and a excellent reboot its nice

Pretty engaging and fun tactical game. The campaign isn’t too long (a little over 20 hours for me), and it doesn’t get boring. My main caveat is that the amount of RNG is insane, and sometimes it feels just plain unfair. On the other hand, landing a 20% shot in a life-or-death situation feels exhilarating, so I guess it’s a double-edged sword.

i played this to death on the xbox 360. love this game and recommend it to anyone who likes tactical RPGs like fire emblem

🖤💙💙🖤🖤🖤💙💙🖤 💙💙💙💙🖤💙💙💙💙 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙 🖤💛💛💛💛💛💛💛🖤 🖤🖤💛💛💛💛💛🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤💛💛💛🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛🖤🖤🖤🖤

XCOM: Enemy Unknown — это эталон того, как нужно возрождать старые хардкорные серии. Игра умудряется держать в постоянном напряжении, заставляя ценить каждого бойца и продумывать каждый ход. Плюсы: Глубокая тактика: Бои на картах сделаны шикарно. Система укрытий, разрушаемость, уникальные классы бойцов и разные виды пришельцев заставляют постоянно шевелить мозгами. Ошибка стоит дорого — смерть оперативников здесь перманентная. Развитие базы и менеджмент: Строительство подземного комплекса, менеджмент спутников, исследования и крафт пушек/брони — экономическая часть затягивает не хуже самих боев. Атмосфера: Отлично передано ощущение глобальной угрозы. Ты реально чувствуешь себя командиром последней надежды человечества. Минусы: Слишком высокий темп угрозы: Игра слишком часто находит новые миссии. На геосфере постоянно что-то происходит, из-за чего игра постоянно гонит тебя в бой и банально не успеваешь нормально поразвиваться на базе, спокойно достроить модули или дождаться окончания исследований. Хотелось бы чуть больше времени на менеджмент между вылетами. Итог: Великолепная пошаговая стратегия, которая затянет на десятки часов. Если любите умные игры, где нужно думать над каждым шагом — брать обязательно. Оценка: 8.5 / 10

The game is extremely buggy, it constantly freezes, crashes, or softlocks, and the gameplay is incredibly frustrating. The challenge of XCOM is managing risk. Hedging your bets, and making sure the infamous "Missed 99% shot" doesn't result in a game over. In practice, this doesn't matter, because the REAL challenge is how well you can game the enemy "pod" activation. Enemies don't do anything until they enter your line of sight, so instead of trying to keep eyes on all the important chokepoints or get a clear view of things for your sniper, you want to instead make yourself as blind as humanly possible to mitigate the chance of activating multiple pods. If you get dogpiled, you are probably going to wipe. So gouge out your eyes and minimize the amount of map you can actually see. The gameplay itself is also extremely jank. Entire sections of wall can be removed by a missed pistol shot, leaving you exposed to instant death from a flanking attack. Overwatch sometimes just doesn't work. Getting wiped because my sniper refused to take a pistol overwatch shot against a 1 health chrysallid coming around the corner is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I put them there to handle that exact thing from happening. The glitches and jank decided my strategizing meant nothing. If you're playing EW, be aware that throwing a battle scanner and revealing a pod of seekers before activating them with your troops will result in a softlock. The ability I explicitly took to deal with seekers actually just makes the game literally unplayable. INCREDIBLE. Nothing I do matters because the game is a janky, glitch filled mess and no amount of risk management or strategizing or positioning will ever fix that. And then there's the freezing. If I let the game finish the cutscene for the skyranger landing back at base, the game freezes my computer. I have verified file integrity, uninstalled and reinstalled the game, updated my drivers, and every other thing I could think of and it still happens. Overall, while the game is fun when it isn't bugging out, its almost never not bugging out. Because of this, I cannot recommend this game.