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Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis
System requirements: Windows Vista/Win 7, 2.0 GHz dual-core CPU, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8800GT/ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT or better graphics card, DirectX 9.0, 20 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Strategy
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now
In 1994, Mythos Games and MicroProse released XCOM: UFO Defense, a game regarded even today as the best of all time. It was simple and frustratingly difficult, all at the same time, and PC gamers loved it. After 18 years of waiting, gamers of all platforms (it would be rude to let PC players have all the fun again) have the chance to see what all the fuss was about with XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
If you boil XCOM down to the basics, it becomes a simple proposition of Us vs. Them. Aliens have begun an invasion of Earth. You are tapped to command a secret international combination of military and scientific assets to eradicate the invaders. You do this by leading a squad of up to six soldiers in turn-based strategic combat in various places around the globe.
 But there’s far more than just pointing and shooting to be done. Success in XCOM depends upon how you manage the XCOM Circle of Life. Completing missions generates income. You use the income to hire more soldiers (you can have as many as 99 on your roster), build facilities in your underground base (there are five from which to choose, spread out on five continents), research new technology, and most importantly, build and launch new satellites and maximize and upgrade your squadron of fighter planes. Satellite coverage keeps the various member nations happy and locates alien ships. Fighters shoot down the alien ships, leading to more missions for your soldiers, bringing things full circle. Unless you want to spend 50 or more hours on one playthrough, you should keep these facts firmly in mind.
Developer Firaxis brings a wealth of strategy experience to the table (XCOM is their first game in 15 years that doesn’t have strategy legend Sid Meier’s name in the title, although he did contribute to its development), and it shows. They’ve given you the tools to play this game almost any way imaginable. You can bull rush the aliens, or you can go for a more subtle approach. You can use Batman-style grapples and jetpacks to gain the high ground, you can become invisible and gain great tactical advantage. Or you can be more conservative and use ground cover to flank your enemies and catch them in a crossfire. But be warned: permadeath is in play here. Once one of your soldiers dies, he’s dead forever. This can become a major factor in your strategic planning. You could spend most of the game leveling a soldier to maximum, only to see him cut down by friendly fire from a panicked squadmate. And then there’s Ironman mode, in which the game autosaves after every turn and doesn’t allow you to reload an old save point, making your personnel decisions all the more important.
 XCOM has a cartoonish look that fits with the action, but it does have some glitches. Heroes and enemies both have the ability to fire their weapons through solid objects without damaging them. Touchy mouse controls make it occasionally difficult to line up shots from projectile weapons. Voice acting is borderline bad, and the script can be puzzling; a soldier can say that the enemy is pulling back when it’s actually advancing. Your soldiers are such bad shots that you wonder how they managed to graduate from boot camp; I had an alien surrounded by all six of my fighters and it took almost all of them to finally bring it down, since half of them missed their target from close range. There are only three mission types (search and destroy, escort, bomb disposal) and a limited number of maps, which start to repeat if you play long enough. Soldiers with heavy weapons such as rocket launchers aren’t allowed to move and fire in the same turn until they reach a certain rank, something that can be very annoying if you forget it. There are five bases spread out across the globe, so why is my base the only one sending troops out to fight? It would seem a waste of resources to create the other four outposts and not use them. Once you find a strategy that works, you can use it throughout the game and be guaranteed success; at that point, victory is denied only by bad shooting and/or your mistakes, since the aliens’ tactics never evolve. And the biggest missing piece: there’s no undo button. Once you click that right mouse button, you have to live with what you’ve done. More than once in my 56-hour playthrough I sent a squadmate to his or her death by a mistake that I couldn’t take back.
It might seem that I’m being unnecessarily hard on XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but it’s tough love. It’s like a favorite old car — you can see the flaws, but that doesn’t stop you from driving it until the wheels fall off. XCOM‘s one of the deepest, most involving gaming experiences out there now, with a retro visual style and gameplay mechanics that challenge you to think beyond your trigger finger. It has quite a few nagging problems, but none of them prevent you from having an enormous amount of fun playing it.
Our Score: 
Our Recommendation: 
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“Your soldiers are such bad shots that you wonder how they managed to graduate from boot camp; I had an alien surrounded by all six of my fighters and it took almost all of them to finally bring it down, since half of them missed their target from close range.”
Its called random number generator and, in this case, you just happen to roll several misses in a row.
Contrast that with the times that you probably, or at least I have, have cleaned out a supposed “difficult” UFO crash site with first shot from each solider on each alien. Overall it does balance out.
Typically you will take maybe two solider’s attacked on most aliens which seems fair from a strategy planning aspect.
Great Game, Cannot reccomend it enough for fans of the original. There are the limitations that multiport force on it of course, Smaller maps, Maximum 6 men in a squad but for all that there is still a wonderful experiance in the mechanics of this game.
Kudos , but then i shouldnt be THAT surprised, It was made by Firaxis after all.
Love tactical games like this. Top 5 include this, the original and Silent Storm.
X-COM 2012 was a huge letdown for a bunch of reasons, a couple of which the reviewer touches on (single XCOM base, broken cover mechanics, etc). Here are some others:
* As was mentioned, the alien AI is pitiful. Like most games nowadays it relies solely on extensive cheating and absurd handicaps on your soldiers to provide a “challenge”. Limiting you to a single grenade, for example, is laughably bad game design.
* A Captain in an elite military unit shouldn’t even have the world panic in his vocabulary, let alone succumb to it. This by itself was nearly enough to make me quit playing.
* The bugs..my God, the bugs! And I”m not talking about the crysalids (although they are ridiculous in every respect). The multi-level viewing bug, the cannot-give-orders bug, the UI window bugs, and on and on..and Firaxis either doesn’t care or doesn’t even acknowledge them.
Then there are the reviews themselves. Its obvious that 90% of players, probably including the reviewer, have only played on easy mode. On higher difficulties there is precisely one path to victory. Yes, you can change the order of the steps you take slightly, but there’s still only one team mix and loadout that works and everyone knows it. And that brings up perhaps the single biggest failing of X:EU – you play one campaign and you’ve played them all. I really, really wanted to like this game, but Firaxis dropped the ball completely.
“I had an alien surrounded by all six of my fighters and it took almost all of them to finally bring it down, since half of them missed their target from close range.”
That happens more in reality than you may realize. Adrenaline makes a person’s dexterity based skills null or useless. One either has to control adrenaline or train to compensate for its effects.
“There are five bases spread out across the globe, so why is my base the only one sending troops out to fight? It would seem a waste of resources to create the other four outposts and not use them. ”
user design interface issue. At the end game in XCOm, managing 2+ bases, plus alien assault defenses, got to be quite a big chunk of time investment. Firaxis put a lot of work modeling the one base, and just put everything there. They already said this in an interview that making more bases to clone the base UI, would just mean more clicks to do the exact same thing. Those who played XCOM for 5+ in game years can pretty much understand how a lot of the fun is in the tactical combat, not the base micromanagement. The base micro is for realistic atmospheric value, certainly.
This was a relatively simpler, easier to play game than XCOM Enemy unknown. I liked the actual story line and personalities involved. I sort of already knew the technological path I needed to go on from Enemy Unknown and they faithfully reproduced the strategic consequences of not being able to capture enemies to unlock new tech. Without new tech at a certain point, your interceptors do not have the capability to shoot down battleship class enemies, thus those enemies start taking over your allied nations funding you, sending you on a death spiral basically that could last 1-3 years depending. It just reminded me a lot of the old XCOm, but with a newer, more efficient UI. I think I find the new one more fun to play, if only because I didn’t have to do all the load ups and setups every time I wanted to play a combat mission. But that also means some of the depth and difficulty is lost. The lower we go emotionally, the higher we climb in victory.
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