Great tactical gameplay - especially at the start, it can feel really stressful in a fun, tense way. Eventually (at least on lower difficulty levels), you can reach a point where you're sufficiently ahead that you can just keep playing indefinitely. I like that the game has real stakes with permadeath, even if I don't always like it in the moment! The new technologies / facilities give a real sense of progression across the game, and the combat has a decent level of variety with the different classes, so you can create a balanced squad to take out to the fight.

XCOM was a popular turned-based strategy game back in the ’90s and everyone was surprised how well this game turned out. Enemy Unknown keeps the series vibe and atmosphere while updated to today’s standards. Enemy Unknown is one of this year’s best strategy games, but there is one reason why most people will never complete this game: It is too damn hard. Not the fun and challenging type of hard, but the kind that makes it impossible to move on no matter how well equipped your soldiers are.

The game does a very good job introducing new things to you as you move on. The UI is very simple and uncomplicated but pretty deep. You get to see a cut-a-way of a military base and you can click on each department. Research is where everything starts. By gathering all intact materials from missions you can research new things like weapons, armor, satellites and various other things. Engineering is where it is all made and upgrading as well as keeping track of other buildings. Workshops, Laboratories, generators, hangars, all these things determine how fast you can upgrade and how you become more powerful. The barracks are where you can equip your squad’s loadout, upgrade soldiers, hire new ones, etc. Finally, there is the situation room and the command center. Here you can advance the days until you run into missions, trade alien parts on the black market, and view how in distress the world is. It is all very simple and almost revolutionary design because most strategy games are Excel sheet based and are pretty complicated and hard to navigate.


Once you assign things to engineer and research you can advance the days until you run into something such as a UFO sighting. When this happens you scramble your jets and depending on how good the equipment you gave them is they’ll take it down. Most of the time you will run into abduction scenarios where you eliminate all hostiles or have to rescue someone. When this happens you get a choice as to what country to help. Each one gives you a reward such as money, scientists, engineers, or other items. Usually, you pick the one that’s in distress the most because if you don’t they will remove themselves from the XCOM operation, and if they all withdraw it’s game over. Once you go into battle this is where you see how hard this game gets.

Each soldier gets two moves. The area around them is blue which means that’s one move, and yellow means it takes both moves to get there. Performing an action takes one move, and that is usually shooting alien scum. All soldiers start out as regulars with assault rifles until after their first mission and they rank up. The class is chosen randomly which I really hate because you can be stuck with 5 snipers and just one assault guy. When you are ready to shoot you will see how accurate your shot is. Once all turns are taken it’s the alien’s turn. This back and forth is normal for strategy games, but the objectives you are given, or the difficulty of aliens, is absurd and completely unfair. You will shoot down some small grays, get through a few thin men. Maybe you will lose 2 or 3 guys in the process, then four freaking Mutons will show up and wipe the rest of you out in one turn. Or don’t forget the damn spider things that can turn your squad mate into a zombie in one hit. This gets frustrating because every mission is like this. I rarely got through any unless it was on an easy difficulty mission.


This would be ok if it were during main missions and you could go back and grind a bit to get better equipment, but you have to do that with EVERY single mission. You fail almost more than you succeed, such as losing so many soldiers. Once a soldier dies they are dead forever and won’t come back. Once you lose a fully ranked soldier you have to start from scratch again with a new guy. Completely unfair in a game this difficult. Most missions you will be lucky if you get out with 2 or 3 guys, but you are probably thinking that’s because I suck at the game. I would restart and try all different strategies and nothing would work. The whole point of the game is to take cover and NEVER be out in the open. Once you advance and are just standing there you’re dead. The fog of war doesn’t help when you run around the map trying to figure out where all the enemies are. Forget rescue mission where you have to save a certain amount. Saving 5/25 people is a lot harder than it sounds. All 20 will die before you get to your third guy. This game is just a nightmare and not in a fun way.

That doesn’t make the game bad though. There are a lot of great research projects that make a huge impact on everything you do. You have to decide carefully about what you want or you’re screwed. You get a very limited amount of money every month and you have to stretch it. I found this a bit unfair as well because there’s no compromise. Even if just one element was easier it could make this game more tolerable. As it has I had this game for over a month and barely got 25% through the game before I gave up. Spending 45 minutes on a mission and then dying at the end is just ridiculous. Reloading quick saves doesn’t always work either because you realize you forgot to equip someone with a medkit, or you need to be more accurate on certain missions and forgot to equip scopes. This game is just a pain.


The production values are at least nice with great looking aliens and some decent voice acting, but overall this game requires extreme patience more than skill or brainpower. The game is well done with intense battles, but maps repeat often, the camera is screwy where it zooms out of buildings, and the graphics are a bit underwhelming. The main thing is the extreme difficulty which practically ruins the game. I have never played such a hard strategy game before, but there’s someone out there who will like this.

I like the basic premise of this game, but the tatical combat is just so frustrating. As one quickly figures out, the optimal strategy is to slowly inch forward across the map, in order to only trigger one alien group at a time. This is very, very boring. Of course, you could charge ahead and 'take risks', but this usually just punishes you really hard by putting your soldiers out of position and giving a timing advantage to the enemy. This gets your soldiers killed, which loses the long game. So you either have a bit of fun and lose, or you bore yourself to death and win.

Played this bad boy with the Long War mod, they weren't lying it is RATHER long. After a month of almost daily consistent play I made it to the alien base assault which I think is like halfway through the game? Dense, fucking dense. Makes for a good podcast game.

Mainly judging my experience with the Long War mod rather than base game here (base game is great, an all time classic, five stars easily), I thought it was.. good! I think my experience would've been much better if I wasn't such a proud young man and played on Iron Man mode, reloading saves would've been a god send.

As a game that fulfills the fantasy of blowing up a little grey alien's head with a shotgun, it's excellent, seeing those little freaks ragdoll never gets old. As a tactical experience, a couple of pain points make it feel flat out bad. One thing is that you do not know where enemies are positioned when you start a mission. This isn't bad, it creates a nice early game tension, it feels like a decision based on atmosphere. The really bad thing is that, when you do spot an enemy, it is not just one or two, it will typically end up being a group of like, 4 or 5. And when you spot them, they will all move for free, and will get to move whenever it's their turn as well.

As a game that wants to fulfill the fantasy of being a little squad overwhelmed by an insurmountable threat from outer space, it's fine it's cool it's not a big deal. As a tactical game, where you are often encouraged to play slowly, carefully, and live with your decisions both good and bad, it's a feature that gets more and more grating as the game progresses, doubly so in Long War. You do not just encounter and alert one squad of aliens on a map, you encounter and alert several alien squads in a map. In late-game missions, it feels like the objective is to just feel around and tryyy to only fight one squad at a time without alerting and dragging in other squads to a fight to avoid getting overwhelmed, it doesn't make me feel "tactically smart", it makes me feel like I'm gaming the system to have a chance to keep playing the game.

The thing that ends up killing you is that, on a given mission, the enemy is going to have a better turn economy than you, an army of 12 getting to move and shoot is going to get more opportunities to do so than an army of 6. The enemy is going to get more chances to roll the dice to kill you, while you've got to manage your own dice rolls against them. The big thing is that oh haha xcom soldiers are bad at aiming, which is absurdly true, even with the second wave option to improve soldier aim. I cannot tell you how many times I flipped a coin and lost like 4 times in a row.

There is a bit more to manage in Long War, the "air game" is more important, because the game is so long resource management and basebuilding can have cascading effects. If you manage your resources well, you can try to build yourself back up again from lost soldiers, battles, lost jets, etc. It just takes time, it takes in-game days to do that. Days that are going to be spent fighting more aliens, having to bench soldiers due to fatigue/injury for even more days, etc etc.

This is where the gameplay loop tickled me, the resource management and "air game" feels great, it feels like the game is giving you answers for all your woes as you progress. Do your soldiers have shitty aim? Try out these shotguns instead. Do your jets keep getting shot down? Here's a research project that could help with that. Ohhh you're really close to being able to afford this new weapon that melts alien-eyes, but you'll probably need to scavenge a UFO to get the resources.

Maybe I should've looked into playing an easier difficulty and chosen more modifier to give me an edge due to the "tactical fighting" feeling like poop and butt to play, they felt like a chore to get back to managing research projects, construction, keeping countries happy, espionage, etc etc. I prefer when strategy games aren't THIS reliant on random numbers, it feels cheap most of the time. If I make a mistake and get punished for it, that's fair. If a little grey takes the shot of a lifetime and hits a 10% chance shot, I just don't know. I just don't know.