Moving along our #8 game revitalized one of the most classic franchises on the PC.
#8 – X-Com Enemy Unknown:
Despite X-Com’s reputation, the series has been on the backburner for a long time. Many sequels and games inspired by it just couldn’t live up to the classic. And after the attempt at turning X-Com into a first person shooter, people weren’t exactly excited about a new game in the series. But this year thanks to Firaxis, X-Com got another shot in the spotlight for a new audience and surprised a lot of people with how well it worked.
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: X-Com Enemy Unknown is nowhere near as complex or deep as the original X-Com. Firaxis was not striving to take the original and throw a slap of paint on it and release it for today’s audience. Instead they took the design and concept of the original and streamlined it with today’s audience in mind.
What we got was for the first time an attempt at moving the X-Com design into the future and for the most part it worked. Being able to customize your troops made each individual stand out that much more. The combat system was interesting enough to offer some choices, while being simple enough that someone new could jump in and start playing.
The biggest concession to making the game accessible would have to be the switch to a board game design philosophy. The original X-Com was more akin to a stat heavy RPG, adding depth and raising the learning curve. By keeping everything streamlined made X-Com Enemy Unknown easier to understand.
Having multiple difficulty options to appeal to old and new fans was one of the smartest things Firaxis did with the new design. The lower levels were great for someone new, while playing on classic and impossible provided a decent challenge for veterans.
Now with that said, X-Com Enemy Unknown did have some problems that kept it from ranking higher on this list. First was that the game was more linear compared to the original and I don’t just mean because of having set maps. The game lacked the ability for the player to define their own strategy for dealing with the alien menace and instead made the player follow a specific way to win. Once you found the optimal way of playing, the game became easy with exception to playing on impossible difficulty.
After beating the game once, there was no reason to replay it again as the game would just play out the same way. You’ll have to fight the aliens in the same order, design your base the same way, and even know when terror missions would strike. The promise of ways to add more randomization has not panned out and instead we got a DLC that missed the point with a set mission chain.
Since the last DLC pack, Firaxis has gone dark on what’s next for X-Com Enemy Unknown and I hope that doesn’t mean that they are going to leave the game in this state. While I can’t argue that the game was good, having finished it I can say with complete certainty that it doesn’t come close to matching the classic status of the original. As I said in my analysis, what we have is a good start, but it still needs more for the game to stick around, or score higher on my list.
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