Tag: XCOM

2157: Enemy Unknown

0157_001

On something of a whim, I decided to fire up XCOM: Enemy Unknown this evening: a game that I have owned since 2013 and never even installed, let alone played. (Damn Steam sales.)

Regular readers will know that I’m quite a fan of the board game of this, with its interesting blend of cooperative action and real-time strategising overseen by an app that acts as both timer and gamemaster. The original video game it’s based on is a somewhat different experience, but having finally played it a bit today, it’s clear that the board game very accurately captures the atmosphere and overall “feel” of the source material.

For those unfamiliar, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake of a much older PC game called UFO: Enemy Unknown, in which the player was tasked with overseeing the top-secret XCOM organisation in its attempts to repel an alien invasion of Earth. Rather than being a linear story-based affair, both UFO: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Unknown are somewhat more freeform strategic affairs in which you’re tasked with making the tough decisions as you go along — and dealing with the consequences of those decisions.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is immediately more accessible than its much earlier counterpart, however. Since it was designed to be playable on console with a controller as well as with mouse and keyboard, the interface is simple, intuitive and easy to use with either control scheme. It also kicks off your first game with a selection of cutscenes and story missions introducing you to the various aspects of gameplay, which is a good way to ease you into what you should be doing. Over time, the game gradually stops holding your hand until you’re running the whole operation, prioritising tasks as you see fit until Earth is either overrun by the aliens, or you successfully complete the final mission and humanity lives to survive another day.

Despite its new-found accessibility, XCOM: Enemy Unknown remains remarkably true to the formula set by its predecessor. You survey the world — initially a small area, but your coverage expands as you send more satellites into orbit — and respond to alien activity, be it UFO sightings, abductions or news of important people who might be able to help your war effort. Should a situation come up that requires the direct intervention of XCOM, the game switches to a tactical turn-based strategy game, in which you take a small squad of soldiers into battle against the alien menace.

Being a Firaxis game — they’re the folks who made Civilization, for those who don’t know their strategy classics — XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a game that expands in scope as you progress. Your squad members level up and learn new skills, allowing you to specialise them into various roles. Your research branches off in a number of different directions, allowing you to produce new equipment and items. You build up your base with new facilities to boost your overall capabilities. And along the way you need to make sure to keep the mysterious “Council” happy along with ensuring that the various regions of the world don’t fall into panic.

The game is set up in such a way that you can’t do everything. When alien abductions are reported, inevitably they’re in several places at once, and you can only make it to one of the sites in time. The region you assist will reward you; the regions you leave to suffer will start to panic more at the horrible things happening to them.

The board game reflects all this really well with its inherent scarcity of resources. You never quite have enough soldiers or Interceptors to deal with all the shit that is happening in the world at once, so inevitably as you play through the game, various regions will start to panic more and more. It’s essential to manage that as best you can; you can’t prevent panic from mounting, but you can do your best to try and control it, and to prioritise tasks that will help you keep everything under control.

I’m interested to continue playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown, though. I’m playing on the Easy difficulty at the moment because I’m generally absolute crap at strategy games — particularly those by Firaxis — but I’m open to the idea of another playthrough on a harder difficulty if I make it to the end. So far it seems like an exciting and challenging but accessible strategy game, and I’m keen to check it out some more in the very near future.

#oneaday Day 997: Rally the Troops

While the world and his dog is playing XCOM (which I fully intend to at some point — just not yet) it’s been quite interesting to contrast the experience of playing Aselia the Eternal, which I first mentioned a few days back. At first glance, you might not think there’s much to connect these two games, but after about 6 or 7 hours of Aselia’s visual novel stuff (which is good in and of itself — but more on that in a future READ.ME column on Games Are Evil) you get into a surprisingly hardcore strategy RPG type thing, where you have a big scary overworld map, squads of warriors, buildings, resources and a need to actually think about what you do.

But there’s an interesting side-effect to the fact that you’ve spent 6 hours reading before you get to pick up a sword and start twatting things — you develop an emotional investment in these characters. And this is where the XCOM comparison (or, more accurately, contrast) comes in. In XCOM, people typically rename their characters to customise them and feel like they’re playing with people they “know” or have designed. The simple act of renaming a character, in most cases, is enough to develop a degree of “attachment”.

In Aselia, meanwhile, you don’t get to rename the characters, but you do get to see what they’re like off the battlefield — and not just in a training room sort of scenario. No, a big part of Aselia involves having conversations and seeing these characters going about their daily lives. We learn a lot about their attitude towards combat, and even more about the game world’s social hierarchy.

This means that when you go into battle with Aselia, Esperia and Orpha, you know who these people are, you care about them and you want them to succeed. You want them to come back safely — and not just because in most cases allowing one of the main characters to die causes an immediate Game Over. You’re cheering for them as they take on increasingly-improbable odds, and you nurture them, training them up to be as badass as they can possibly be in order to take on these rising challenges. I can only assume this feeling of attachment will increase as the game progresses and the romantic subplots start.

It’s one of the most interesting things about Aselia the Eternal, in fact. Like most visual novels, it’s primarily been designed as a storytelling vehicle, in which the gameplay serves the narrative. The “battle” gameplay will frequently break for the characters to have a moment of soul-searching (or, more often, the protagonist to have some sort of at least partially-justified mental breakdown). Between battles there may be several hours of sitting around talking, drinking tea and bouncing underage-looking girls on your knee. But there’s a great feeling of coherence to the game, helped partly by the fact that even though the strategy component is broken into discrete missions, there is persistence in the game world — any character improvements, buildings and other business you did in a previous mission will still be there when you next hit the battlefield.

It’s clear, in short, that the game is someone’s vision rather than something that’s been focus-grouped. While this means it undoubtedly won’t be universally appealing — not everyone enjoys spending six hours reading before they get to “do” anything — it makes for an experience that is dripping with personality and a feeling of authorial ownership. Someone wrote this as a story rather than designing it as a game, and it’s a very interesting contrast to titles where the lines between narrative and gameplay are more clearly demarcated.

Further thoughts as I continue — it’s a lengthy game, so expect at least one or two more posts on the subject.