XCOM: Enemy Within

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IamLEAM1983
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XCOM: Enemy Within

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

A year ago, XCOM : Enemy Unknown introduced me to the painful world of building a team of elite soldiers and losing them to a Muton's insultingly accurate grenade throw. I'm one of those who also happened to miss out on the MS-DOS Torture Porn simulators which were the original XCOM titles, what with their berjillion individual mechanics and Skyrangers packed with fifteen bits of cannon fodder. This year, and in only a few short hours, XCOM : Enemy Within managed to do right by its new Firaxis roots, while also providing little old sucky me with a sizable edge in the fight against the aliens.

Let's do this quick, shall we?

Enemy Unknown was, and obviously still is, a relatively unforgiving strategy game. Think “Chess with Guns”, but with base-building and research segments tossed in. You start out with a bunch of borderline-naked soldiers and crappy pea-shooters, and are tasked with felling the alien menace and turning their mangled corpses and salvaged tech into additional tools and perks to turn the tide of war and ultimately save the day. As you can expect, most of the core game was an uphill battle, followed with a sort of victory blitz that had you mess around with an unstoppable team of elites. Your surviving Squaddies would eventually become borderline posthuman killing machines, depending on the XCOM Project's developed tools and gear in order to bypass Humanity's core weaknesses. With the “expandalone” offered by Enemy Within, this is made all the more obvious. It's the same Roland Emmerich-worthy plot, overall, spiced up with a few added strategic options.

Most notably, your scientists discover the awesome power of Meld, an oddly non-specific nanotechnological resource that enables human biology to interface with alien DNA, or for human flesh to viably interface with machinery. This is a huge game-changer, as the core game had you follow a very specific upgrade path up to a certain point. Now, most of the early-game upgrades are rendered optional, due to the fact that you can more or less choose to ignore the SCOPE Targeting System or the Nano-Fibre Vest, and skip almost straight to working with soldiers who heal themselves for two points' worth of damage with every turn, or who pack an additional +15 Aim bonus on top of whatever else your provided equipment might offer. You can essentially very quickly reach a point where your snipers will all have the power to leap to the rooftops of surrounding architectural features without assistance, and pick the wings off a fly from across the map.

However, there are some balance-maintaining trade-offs. Your MEC Troopers – essentially Firaxis' answer to Adam Jensen or RoboCop – are slotted into huge, hulking armatures that make it impossible for them to take cover. Of course, this is slightly compounded by the fact that MECs have a ridiculous amount of health points, when compared to early-game confrontations. Where the core game's first Terror mission was adequately terrifying, Within gives you so much breathing room and lets you level up so quickly that these pesky Cryssalids become mere annoyances.

Thankfully, the expansion doesn't break itself by throwing its candy at you willy-nilly. Meld canisters are strewn throughout the Tactical Gameplay maps, and are set on a variable timer. The earlier you find them, the more turns you'll have before they lock themselves down permanently. This encourages players to abandon Enemy Unknown's cautious forward creep, putting everyone on Overwatch every five or six steps. Instead, as time goes by, you'll be mercilessly tempted to spend both of your actions in a mad forwards dash – often in the middle of uncharted territory – in order to grasp the precious body-altering commodity before it expires.

If you want to play with the Devil's toys, you'll have to be reckless. Play it safe and you'll be lucky if you'll be able to finance one or two augmented soldiers. Considering how permadeath is still very much a gameplay factor, losing a gene-boosted or cybernetically enhanced operative can be a crippling blow. The catch is you don't really have a choice. Expect your base's Memorial to suddenly swell with hapless recruits that were along largely to play the part of the requisite Meld-acquiring Redshirt, and for Central Officer Bradford to regularly remind you that you've worn the base's roster thin. In turn, you'll have to choose where to put your hard-earned credits. Do you push base research, or do you splurge on your favourite posthuman commando? As is often the case in XCOM, you can only do one of these things, most of the time. Not both.

As Within is determined to make your life miserable and as its own name suggests, the biggest threat to Humanity might not necessarily come from Cryptosporidium's blue-tinged bros. The biggest threat to Humanity might be Humanity itself. After all, what's a good disaster flick without the usual guiltless one-percenters being ready and willing to sacrifice everyone else so they'll stay on top?

The Polygon review of the game called EXALT the “Sandinistas of the One-Percenters”, and that's pretty much what they are. Picture Mad Men's Don Draper or Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, give 'em some snazzy orange handkerchiefs, pocket squares or bandanas, and toss a reverse-engineered Plasma Rifle their way. These are James Bond villains in the purest sense of the word, seeing as they're out to co-opt the invasion as a means to seize control of Mankind. You'll initially run into one of their wounded operatives in a Council-mandated mission, but soon you'll realize these snazzy mofos are well and truly determined to bring you down. EXALT has the means to mirror your tech tree's progression in the slightest of details and can blithely hack into your Situation Room's global panic assessments – pushing Council-supporting nations to leave the XCOM Project far earlier than they would in the base game. Staying operational means you'll have to manage the satellites-and-fighter jets tango while simultaneously ferreting out EXALT outposts using simple logic puzzles.

All you have to do is pay a small fee to start a scanning routine, which reveals to you the vaguely approximate location of an EXALT outpost. “The base is in the Northern hemisphere” says one clue, while another might say “The base isn't in Eastern Europe”. Following fairly simple logic cues like this for as long as you want or need, it's your job to lob an accurate J'accuse at the right Council nation. Fuck it up and incriminate an innocent country, and they'll retaliate by leaving the Council altogether, pulling their financial contributions in one fell swoop.

Not the smartest of political moves with Humanity on the brink, story-wise – but it poses an interesting challenge nevertheless.

The long and short of it is that you might hit a little too hard a little too soon with this expansion, but that's largely only if you crave the kind of masochistic experience an Impossible Ironman run can offer. You're still entirely free to play the way you want to play; so if you're interested in a parti-colored all-female team of wunderkind gene-modded Action Chicks, you can do that. You can still rename your soldiers to whatever you'd like, and you're now able to pick and choose their spoken language. Your Brazilian troopers will speak in Portuguese, the Mexicans and Spaniards in Spanish, while everyone from the ex-USSR will belt Russian at you. A lot of the game's offered nations didn't come with their own voice packs, however, so expect your Chinese or your Israelians to be as Midwestern as ever. It's nice, however, to play a game where not literally everyone seems to come from the United States despite the symbol on their flag patch – especially considering how XCOM is supposed to search for the pick of the litter in the internationally available armed forces.

Plus, it's a nice workout for my seldom-used Spanish. “Caminando al este llugar, Commandante.”

Uh, good job, Major Jimenez. Just don't botch your salvos too much, okay? You've got a big-ass minigun in place of a right arm, now. You have no right to miss that shot, do you hear me?!

Aaaand, of course, he misses.

Goddamnit.

Ah, XCOM. I wouldn't have it any other way.
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