Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

I''ll start off by saying I think this is the coolest turn based game Ive ever played. Now I like challenging games and this game is definitely hard but its the annoying kind of hard. The best way to describe this, is most of the time its very fun but sometimes you just want to grab the disc and throw it out the window. I kind of love hate this game, I'll start with the good.

First off this is one of the first turn based games I've actually enjoyed for a while. Graphically this game looks great, but i should warn, if you have an old outdated video card the graphics will turn on you like a rabid weasel. (That's only if its 7 years old like mine was.)

I liked the fact that the aliens didn't seem to have an unfair advantage on you. Sure they usually out numbered you but that made you be careful as to not alert them. For a turn based game its actually quite freeky.

The 1st aliens you encounter in the game are sectoids. They kind of remind me of E.T. and you almost feel bad when you kill one, almost. Then you have the crisalids which are basically xeno morphs from Alien. The fact they could turn people into zombies makes them kind of dangerous but shooting 1 with a shotgun is very satisfying. Then to make them even freakier a crisalid jumps out of the zombie if you don't kill it quickly.

I liked the fact you could retreat so if a mission went wrong you could still save your units. This feature is cool but it really is only used in iron man mode, because if you save before a mission you just load your previous save file until you beat the level. I always felt guilty doing it that way but after starting over twice i just wanted to finish the game.

I liked the whole base set up and how you could make the base to fit what you wanted to do. The resource management was easy to understand but didn't hold you had. I would have liked more base locations and more research option but you still have plenty of stuff to mess with.

I liked how you could customize your soldier's equipment, abilities and even their appearance. I liked how all the abilities worked no matter how you had your troops set up. I had fun with the appearance stuff i gave all my troops movie actor names so if 1 died I could say "noooo you killed Liam Neason!".



This may contain spoilers, the story is somewhat interesting so id hate to ruin it for anyone, so ignore this next paragraph if you care.

After you kill the boss alien their giant ship starts turning into a black hole and will kill everyone on earth. So the soldier that used the device now sacrifices himself, they fly the ship into space and it explodes and earn the most awesome human ever award. Now its cool that they flew the ship away but why did it explode? It was turning into a black hole, black holes don't explode. Anyway it was kind of a let down ending but its still ok.





Ok now for the annoying crap.

This game has some of the oddest non disruptive glitches I've ever seen. I like the freaky animation glitch when a soldier dies their neck stretches and they look like their becoming the Thing. I also like the weird camera view when your gun is inside of an aliens head or your guy aims the wrong way and the bullets go sideways and hit the alien.

The camera gets annoying inside of an abductor class ship sometimes. For some reason the camera goes above the ship so you can't see inside the ship. If you zoom in its fine but if you switch to another unit it zooms back out, so you spend 5 minutes trying just to see where your going. When this happens you almost just want to say "ok screw it" and abort the mission.

I only ran into 2 actually bad glitches. I'd aim a grenade or a rocket, right click to cancel the command and it would fire anyway, or if i left clicked on a different command it would still do that. I also had a door issue where I'd be next to a door click over watch or next unit and it'll open the door and do the command at the same time. I tried reinstalling the game twice and it did help, but I still have that issue. Its weird because my brother got a copy of xcom and he never had this problem, so you might have this issue. (If anyone reading this knows how to fix this besides using my keyboard please send me a message.)

I loved how creepy the game was when you were looking for the aliens in a suburb or at a crash sight. It was almost a relief to run into the aliens even if it was a very dangerous unit. This turned annoying when, you safely escorted a VIP and then you had to kill 1 remaining alien. Whenever this happened i always thought "can i just leave with the VIP?". I would then spend 40 minutes looking for that 1 alien thinking hes around every corner like the boogie man. It also didn't help i was always extremely cautious. The other thing i hated about this was how tightly packed groups of aliens were sometimes. You'd be shooting at some aliens and go to flank them and run into a room with 3 aliens in it. It would irritate me because i had shot the wall for that room and they just sat there, so i figured if it was there it would have moved by now. So apparently the aliens have horrible hearing.

I noticed something strange with the difficulty, the begging of the game is absolutely brutal. I though it actually got easier the farther into to the game i got. In most games it gets harder the farther you go or its evenly hard throughout the game. Not this game, it kind of feels like one of those drag races were a car pulls a giant weight, but instead of a weight the road had rock giant hands grabbing you for the 1st ten yards. It feels like if you make a single mistake you lose. I had like 15 save files because i was so scared i might have made a mistake a few day before. (not game days actual days).

The other thing that annoyed me was how bad of a shot your troops were at low levels. It was like XCOM got the misfits of the military when they needed Sniper Mark Wahlberg or a terminator. The aiming works weird at close range. You'll be looking right at an alien, no obstruction between you and it'll say 60% hit chance. You could spit on it or kick it in the head your so close and you still miss, so percentage is law. I took the shot and miss but i think I Ignored it because i didn't believe what the game was telling me. Another thing i hate is sometimes an alien will take cover and I'll go to shoot it but its like a 30%. Its not even that great of cover but you can't hit him for some reason. I've seen better cover give me a much higher hit chance on the alien behind it.

My last issue is the AI. I like how smart the AI is, it wont just sit there and die. (well sometimes it dose but i don't know why) The only thing i hate about it is its very good at angles. It always seems to know where it'll get a higher hit chance. I'm not talking about it'll flank me, It just seemed like it could get better shot in spots that made no sense. I don't think its anybody's fault or avoidable its just annoying. (This really is more of a game mechanic issue than an AI issue) You'll have a guy that will survive a hit as long as its not a crit and usually they'll get critically dead. I know that's going to happen but it only seems to happen at the worst possible moment.

The multiplayer was actually quite disappointing. It looked fun and it seemed there was no way it could not be fun. It was set up fine but it just didn't seem like the game was designed for it. You have a set number of points that the game host chooses, that is used to purchase units. A sectoid costs x points and a thin man costs x points. You can only have 6 units a match, in my opinion if it was like 10 units it would be fine. Me and my brother did an all sectoid match and it was fun but i never wanted to do it again. The other thing was how you could lose before the match started. For example if you brought 3 crisalids and 3 sectoids and your enemy brought 4 mutons your probably dead, especially if they knew what they were doing. (but that's just an example don't quote me on it)

Its a good game but be prepared for some frustration or to throw it out the window, which ever comes 1st.