Wednesday, October 10, 2012

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Impressions

Yesterday, XCOM: Enemy Unknown came out.  I remember playing the original, vaguely  when I was younger.  It was a MicroProse game, therefore it was awesome.  This version is done by Firaxis, the progeny of MicroProse so I have high hopes.

I picked Normal difficulty  but with an Ironman setting.  This means there is no re-loading of saved games.  It is constantly saving, so what happens, happens.  Overall, everything is nice looking and intuitive.  You do stuff and shoot aliens.  I'd rather tell you a story than drone on about details.

There was a report of abductions, in Egypt I think it was.  The team responded, as it always does.  This mission was labeled difficult, and it certainly turned out to be.  As soon as we landed, we were under attack from 3 sides.  The aliens were nothing special, so I was confident.  Maybe a little too confident.

First to go down was Sgt. Hex, my most experienced soldier.  He has 11 kills over 6 missions.  He didn't die, at least not right away.  In Enemy Unknown, they can be in a critical injury state and be saved by using a medpack.  I had neglected to give any of my soldiers medpacks.  Hex eventually bled out and died.

This caused one of the newer soldiers to panic and she ended up opening fire on her teammate.  Ironically, she would be the only one to survive this mission.  One by one, the other soldiers died.  Included was another Sgt and Cpl.  The Rookie managed to take out the last alien, a Floater, who picked the wrong time to float.

If there was a time to reload, this was it.  But this is Ironman, so that's just not possible.  My best soldiers are gone.  I'm left with an army of Rookie's and an ever increasing alien threat.