never in my entire life do i feel like i've wasted my time harder than when i try an I/I run and this game just RNG trolls me. oh these enemies you had no ability to see spawned on you and the entire game is fog of war with no ability to improve your vision and the earlygame is insufferable from how little strategic options you have. look this game is really fun and enjoyable on normal when these stupid objectively bad game design decisions don't result in you losing a several hours run. but this game literally cannot hold up to its own difficulty. it implodes and becomes one of the most miserable luck-based tactics games i've played.

it's extremely telling how the game refuses to tell you what the enemy hit percentages when they attack because they hit improbable 360 no scope shots when you're behind full cover but you miss point blank "you have no cover" shots. i want to like this game i really do but this feels like the type of tactics games only fucking morons are capable of enjoying. when luck is the ultimate deciding factor in your tactics game, you have not made a fun game based on strategy. sorry, this isn't disco elysium, i can't forgive the excessive dicerolling you're expecting players to do.

i'm saying nothing new here but holy shit this game is not optimized well for PS3. literally why even release it on console if it's gonna chug this bad and have this bad of a cursor. there's nothing wrong with tilesets. i miss them dearly.

Obviously a great achievement for how it brought the tactics genre to a new generation, but playing it in 2022 wasn’t as enjoyable or fun as I expected.

I loved the tension and atmosphere of most missions inside a city. Slowly dissipating the fog of war of the suburbs knowing that discovering a new group of aliens at the end of your turn could mess you up extremely bad is one of the best things the game offers. I also enjoyed how different the classes felt and getting attached to my top officers and bringing them all the way to the last mission.

What I didn’t enjoy is mostly the pacing, the repetitiveness of missions and a very poor job of stoytelling and progression. There are bullshit difficulty spikes, plenty of bugs that will make you lose progress and overall a lack of polish that always prevents you from fully trusting the game.

Overall I enjoyed my time with it but around the 20 hour mark I was ready for it to end. It has some great ideas that I haven’t seen anywhere else but I expected more from one of the classics of the genre.

[Played with Enemy Within, of course]

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a must-play Tactical Strategy game. If you enjoy the genre, XCOM has to be on your list. It's just so iconic and does so many things right. There's minimal story here, and the systems aren't as in-depth as they may seem at first glance, but Firaxis just knows how to make strategy feel fun, rewarding, and engaging. Somehow even outside of Civilization, they give you that "One More Turn" syndrome yet again.

I'll never trust a percentage again either.

Score: 92

Narrative: 4 - Gameplay: 4.5 - Visuals: 3.5 - Soundtrack: 3.5 - Time: 4
Stars: 4
The strategy games have a special and complicated spot in my heart. I can say with a lot of energy that I love those games and that I’m always up to play them, but… They, just like the open world genre, are in the highest tier of unfinished personal games. I guess that happened because in the very essence of those games lies real challenges, punishing experiences and – therefore – frustration. A strategy game usually takes about 30 minutes to go through a level. In most of them, this number can easily make an hour and, eventually, up to 4 hours. For any casual, or even hardcore, gamer that’s a huge investment of time. The frustration of losing after that kind of sacrificed time isn’t an arithmetic progression but a geometric one. If you add a perfectionist mindset and an urge to play a lot of different games to the equation, you have the “special and complicated” thing I was talking about. It won’t come as a surprise that it took me 5 years to finally finish this game. But, boy, it is worth it.

To set the stage I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I like the more Fire Emblem side of the genre and didn't enjoy Mario + Rabbids that much, but hey like 17 euro for everything in a bundle why not? I also have not played much western games and XCOM is my most western feeling game I ever played.

Even if the game can encourage you to play extremely slow and my fe experience makes me wary of permadeath, I adored the tension these two things create, especially with the sound design of ambient music and alien noises.

XCOM's story leans way more in to vibes then a linear defined experience. It starts with the stark , but let's be honest accurate trope of Earth's nations only being able to come together and set aside their differences only due to an extra-terrestrial threat. It asks us to ponder what it means to be human as you repurpose more and more alien tech etc... and you start to wonder where is the line between human and alien.

Just amazing. I was so worried when I saw the other xcom being developed by 2K, changing a turn based strategy franchise (which admittedly became a air combat and then terrible 3rd person before it died) into a FPS set in a totally different time period.

The guys here did it right and I know purists are going to argue about squad size and blah blah, but to be honest, the old game get VERY boring when you were moving 14 people around the screen and your soldiers not having peripheral vision would make me rage-quit the old game. It's not like if you're in a combat situation you are just going to be staring forward into a blank wall.

That said, this game has a lot to offer and how the aliens change tactics and behave intelligently (depending on difficult) makes it for a fun replayable game, not to mention pitting yourself against friends or random players to see if you win the combat or not. The team have worked very hard and have DLC lined up for the future.

In the battle between turn-based and real-time strategy games, I am on the side that gives me at least a minute to decide how to move forward. Turn-based it is then!

XCOM is only the second strategy game I’ve played on the PS3, the other was the real-time WWII themed R.U.S.E. which had a lot of potential but was too fast paced for my liking. On normal difficulty my forces would be overwhelmed by those pesky Nazis in minutes not giving me enough time to do anything. It was too hectic and did not feel ‘realistic’. As in, if I were really a commander, surely I’d have more than thirty seconds to decide where to move a battalion.

XCOM is not afraid of overwhelming your ground forces with alien Nazis but once they’ve shown up you’ve got all the time in the world to think about how you’re going to deal with them.

Likewise outside of the battlefield, you can think all you want about whether you should pump funds into researching a weapon or direct the science lab’s efforts into an autopsy, to build a workshop or a laboratory, to spend money on training soldiers in how to heal faster from their wounds, or to perhaps buy more fighter jets to fend off invading UFOs.

There are choices aplenty in this game, and though it can feel overwhelming, the fact that there’s no timer counting down putting me on the spot, gives me time to breathe and almost relish the predicament I’m in, the joy in figuring out how to get out of it.

So your battle against a cheekily-designed alien menace is on two fronts, from a literal turn-based 6-man battle in various Earth-bound locales, and from the XCOM headquarters, managing your funds in powering up your force with better weapons and equipment, and progressing the story. One plot point might require you to capture a live alien in the field, another expects you to get the science labs to research a special item, etc.

All the while, the 16 countries that take part in the XCOM initiative are suffering attacks, which raises their panic levels. If a country’s level reaches high enough, they’ll leave, so you’re constantly having to appease them. It’s the most annoying part of the game, as if I see a country going into the red there’s nothing I can really do about it unless I get a request to deal with aliens there. The only way I can alleviate the situation is to send up a satellite above the country, but that’s easier said than done, if I don’t have enough money, and the monthly pay check is still a while away.

The ground battles are addictive stuff, and very well thought-out. You end up ‘leap-frogging’ your soldiers in a realistic manner, move one dude to cover, then his team mate to another slightly ahead. If you run too far ahead by ‘dashing’ you may alert aliens too soon. The more battles your soldiers survive, the higher they level up in rank and ability, and you end up mentally assigning personalties to them. Life histories. When they fall in the battle field, it’s forever. You grieve, and then move on.

I played this game on easy mode as I’m new to the franchise, and my first loss occurred midway through the game, when after an intense alien base assault, I lost one of my guys who’d only been on a handful of missions, and who I’d only brought along because the rest of the veterans were recovering from previous wounds, and also because he was South African. I saw poignancy that he should be in the team to vanquish this particular base which was in his country.

Well, the dude got killed by an insect variant of the alien race, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, he then turned into an evil zombie, so I had to kill him again. The easy thing would have been to simply load up an earlier save, but other than the fact that that would be cheating, I think it made the game more ‘cinematic’, that this rookie didn’t make it from this mission, and it keeps the game tense and entertaining.

I’ll try the game on a higher difficulty one day, but I can already foresee the panicking countries giving me headaches. I know that the priority should be to send up satellites over countries as soon as possible, but it’s always easier said than done!

So I’m probably not cut out to be a leader of nations, that’s fine. But I know that most of my soldiers will always have my back, I’ve kept nearly all of them alive during this war. Hoorah.