XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review
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He awards the game 4 stars out of five, but I can't help but feel that just pointing out the score would be extremely reductive so here's a generous snip:
1994 Tom: Please. You played the original X-Com. You know what I'm saying. X-Com played out in large areas where you didn't always have the luxury of putting your back to an inviolable map edge, much less the luxury of knowing where the aliens will be waiting for you. That uncertainty, that expanse, made X-Com X-Com.
2012 Tom: I have a feeling a lot of your reservations about this XCOM involve specific ideas about what made X-Com X-Com. I'd rather talk about what makes XCOM XCOM. The frequent discrete choices. The boardgameyness.
1994 Tom: Boardgameyness? What does that even mean? Like Monopoly?
2012 Tom: Like Shadow Watch.
1994 Tom: What's that?
2012 Tom: Really, you don't know Shadow Watch?
1994 Tom: Not for another six years.
2012 Tom: Well, you're in for a treat. But in terms of gameplay, XCOM owes more to the great boardgames of the 21st century than to the original X-Com. This is a design about establishing simple rules and then breaking them. For instance, a soldier only gets to do two things a turn. Simple rule. But a heavy soldier with bullet swarm gets to fire before doing its two things, or an assault soldier with run-and-gun gets to move twice and then fire. Simple rule broken.
1994 Tom: Time units were better. You could do more things.
2012 Tom: More isn't better. Has Sid Meier said that thing about good games being a series of interesting choices yet? Because this is that. Spending eight turns deciding who's going to move next while you're going down the street isn't interesting. Why not compress that street, and those turns, into one important decision? Why not get down to brass tacks?
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2012 Tom: Look. In six years, you're going to write an article for IGN in which you list the four things that made X-Com great. You don't know what they're going to be yet, so I'll tell you. One, the sense of attachment to your troops. Write this down. Two, the way the gameplay unfolds in the campaign. Three, the atmosphere. Are you getting this? And, four, the way you can break stuff. This new XCOM gets all four of those things right, even if it does some of them in different ways. It knows. It understands. But not blindly, not slavishly. More than a fan of X-Com, this game is a fan of the tenets of modern game design. It's doing exactly the right thing, in exactly the right ways, at exactly the right time.
1994 Tom: What's IGN?
