XCOM: Enemy Unknown Previews
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GameInformer:
As promised, aliens have no qualms about murdering your troops. Leaving a squaddie in the open when aliens are about is all but a death sentence. Even worse, most cover doesn't last long against alien weaponry nearly everything is destructible, and even if a shot misses it's likely to blow a hole in something. On the plus side, even the basic human weapons that XCOM operatives start with are more than capable of taking out whatever the bad guys are hiding behind as well. The first time you fling a grenade at a Sectoid and don't just kill the malevolent little bugger but level the shack it's hiding in, you'll never want to go back to a game that lacks destructible terrain.
GamerNode:
That global conflict is where Firaxis put me when I returned to see how XCOM was doing against the extraterrestrial foes. Now out in full force, the enemy had brought its heavy hitters to the battlefield. This is not a good situation for rookies to be caught in, but unfortunately a fresh batch of recruits was all the organization could send as this city burned. Up against insane odds, the soldiers fought on despite injuries.
Destructoid:
What we're first shown is a point later in the game where a small squad of standard soldiers walk into an utterly decimated city that the invading aliens have ultimately taken over.
The soldiers move into an area that contains beaten-down cars and an empty building to the right. They notice a few aliens, which turn out to be horrifying re-imaginings of the Chrysalids. One by one, the marines become sliced up by the legendary foes, but not before a call for back-up can be made.
SPOnG:
Visually the game is very much a homage to the original; it has a cartoon like quality to it. The developers have also exploited the fact that when executing an action, a more interesting camera view can be shown as the action unfolds each turn. It's a nice touch and one the original could not hope to replicate.
GameRevolution:
As a great joke, the Firaxis development team made the Reaper Squad commander Sid Meier, with a detailed character model. The Meier-commander uses mind control to take control of one of the enemy units to force him to drop an armed grenade at his feet, exploding himself. A jet-packed Sniper floats high above the scene to take out one chryssalid, and then with a bonus shot for delivering a critical hit, takes out the second. The final Reaper uses Ghost Armor to make himself invisible, zip up to the top of a building to take out the last alien, a Berserker, finishing the fight. Tit-for-tat, a turn later the enemies have been reduced to nothing by a tight tactical offensive.
And Ars Technica:
Those newcomers to the series might be a little shocked, though, when they realize that every character in the new Xcom is constantly at risk of permanent death if you're not careful. To a generation raised on more forgiving games with frequent checkpoints and low penalties for failure, the prospect of losing advanced, heavily upgraded characters for good might be a bit jarring. But Deangelis said that he never really considered removing this key element of the Xcom series.
