Helldivers

Helldivers was a long time coming.  Originally announced during Gamescom 2013, it was supposed to come out the following summer, but its developers were silent on the status of the game until the beginning of this year, in which it was suddenly announced that the game would be out in the beginning of March.  As someone who enjoyed Arrowhead’s previous game Magicka, I was very interested in Helldivers for a number of reasons, and once it came out I delved into it.  Let’s see if it holds up.

Tales of Xillia

Tales of Xillia takes place in a world where humans are able to perform magic by subconsciously interacting with, or channeling spirits.   Some are better suited to it than others, however, which leads to the development of technology known as ‘spyrix’ that allows even people without channeling talent to perform magic.  The difference here however is that this technology kills spirits instead of simply channeling them.  Enter Milla Maxwell; otherwise known as Maxwell, the Lord of Spirits (series veterans might recognize that name).  Investigating spyrix, Milla takes on a human form and travels to the city of Fennmont, where humans are said to be developing a massive magic weapon that uses spyrix on a large scale.  It’s here that she encounters Jude Mathis, a young medical student.  Milla fails to destroy the weapon however, and both her and Jude are ousted from Fennmont.  Her resolve is unshaken however, and with Jude accompanying her, the two begin their quest to stop the spread of spyrix technology, encountering a host of companions along the way.

Xillia is interesting in that it features two different characters sharing the protagonist role: Jude and Milla.  When you first start the game, you’re asked to choose between the two.  This might give you the impression that you’re in for two entirely different stories depending on who you choose, but don’t be misled; for the most part, Xillia only has one story to tell.   The choice is less about picking a story and more about picking a perspective. Because Jude and Milla begin their stories at different points, it does dictate how you’ll spend the first couple of hours, but throughout most of the game Jude and Milla are in the party together, and thus their ‘stories’ progress in parallel.  In a way this makes the choice of who to choose feel superficial, but there are points when the two are separated, and there’s just enough content such as this exclusive to each character to make it worth playing through the game a second time if you’re invested in the world of Xillia. And if nothing else, it’s an interesting design choice.

I usually look forward to meeting party members when I play a Tales game, but for the most part the core cast of Xillia didn’t stick out for me.  Jude is, for the most part your average Tales protagonist, though I’ll give him credit for being just a bit more intelligent and levelheaded than many of his predecessors.  Jude’s biggest problem however is one you might have guessed at while reading the premise of the game; he doesn’t have a good reason to be on this journey.  He latches onto Milla initially out of some naïve crush, but for the first two thirds of the game if you were to ask him why he was there, he wouldn’t be able to give you a good answer.

Most of the others fill general character archetypes for me.   Leia is Jude’s energetic and upbeat childhood friend.   Rowen is an old, retired war strategist who is wise but can also be a bit perverted at times.  Milla is a woman on a mission, and thus tends to come off as all business, but she has a playful side and can be surprisingly narcissistic, particularly about her hair.  Alvin is just a bad character, for reasons I shouldn’t spoil.

On the plus side, I did grow to like Elize quite a bit.  A young girl with a tragic past, Elize is shy and well mannered, but that’s in sharp contrast to Teepo, her talking, floating doll.  Whereas Elize is polite and even withdrawn at times, Teepo is brash, talkative, and completely tactless.  The two are an inseparable pair, which makes for a fun and often-hilarious dynamic.

Though I wasn’t impressed by Xillia’s party members for the most part, the supporting cast is surprisingly strong.  Eventually Jude and Milla find themselves clashing with a man known as Gaius.  Though he is essentially the antagonist of the game, Gaius is not a bad person, much less evil.  A king trying to unite a world threatening to destroy itself, his goals are noble, and at times you might even find yourself wondering why you’re fighting him when you could be working alongside him.  Jude certainly does.  Gaius’s chief underlings, known as the Chimeriad, are also an interesting bunch. From Jiao--a big man with a good heart--to Agria—a young girl who’s seen more of the world’s terrors than anyone her age ought to have—they’re even more diverse and generally better written characters than the core cast is.  You’ll meet others as well, such as Driselle and Gilland, who the writers seem to have given almost as much devotion as the protagonists.

Progression in Xillia is handled by a large web called the lilium orb.  Akin to Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid or even Final Fantasy XIII’s Crystarium, you unlock stat gains, perks and new artes on the lilium orb using points gained by leveling up.  The open-ended nature of the lilium orb does give you a good sense of freedom, but each character’s lilium orb is tailored in such a way as to encourage the prioritization of certain stats over others.  For those that don’t want to be bothered at all, you can set the lilium orb to automatically develop itself as you level up.

Xillia’s themes of duality extend to its combat.  The game’s battle system--known as the “Dual Raid Liner Motion Battle System”—integrates the CC system used in Tales of Graces (and Eternia) into the more traditional TP system that the series typically uses.  What this means is that each character has a certain number of ‘AC’ (Assault Counter for those that care) to spend on attacks.  This is in addition to TP, or mana that fuels their special attacks, known as artes. Every attack, whether it’s a simple physical attack or an end-game arte, costs one AC to use.  Once you’re out of AC, you have to wait a second or two for the counter to reset before you can start another combo.  What’s interesting however is that for the first time to my knowledge, physical attacks are now completely interchangeable within a combo with artes.

In previous Tales games that used TP systems, the basic idea when attacking was to soften up foes with basic physical attacks, before finishing with an arte that consumed TP.  Fighting efficiently, the sequence was always physical attacks followed by artes.  That doesn’t have to be the case with Xillia. Here you can use physical attacks and artes in whatever order you please.  Artes are still limited by TP, but now you can start a combo with them, or pepper them throughout your combo, rather than simply waiting until the end.  And because AC fully recharges instantly after a moment of inactivity, you never have to stay out of the action for long.  Xillia adopts specific mechanics of both the CC system and TP system.   Physical attacks restore TP, allowing you to do more artes.  Hitting weaknesses and playing well nets you a temporary boost to AC, allowing you to carry out longer combos.  It’s a beautiful fusion, where the two systems meet and feed into each other in a smart and natural manner.   And the result is you have a combat system that is, in at least some ways, more flexible than ever before.

Xillia also introduces the Link System, which allows two characters to link up and fight as partners in the heat of battle.  Linking with characters has a variety of benefits.  Characters linked with you will generally stay close to you, and will either cover your back (especially useful for casters) or join you in combos.  They’ll also give you a friendly wake up slap if you find yourself stunned.  In addition to the general benefits, each character has a unique link perk. Rowen, for example will automatically guard you against magic.   Leia will steal items from enemies that you knock down.

Most importantly however, linking gives access to Link Artes.  Every character pair has a set of artes that, when used together, allow them to combine their abilities.   Leia and Elize can combine Cure and Nurse—two powerful healing artes—to use Revitalize, which bathes the entire arena, curing every party member of any ailments and healing them to maximum health.  Jude and Milla can team up to use Ruination Fangs, an aerial combo where the two attack in fierce tandem.

The Link System isn’t without its drawbacks, however. Most notably, the number of link artes that can be performed is drastically skewed towards Jude and Milla, who share more Link Artes by far than any other character pair in the game.  This is especially noticeable when most pairs that don’t include Jude or Milla only have three Link Artes, whereas Jude and Milla share nearly a dozen.

Further, the Link System simply doesn’t work in multiplayer.  The AI will always control link partners, so linking to someone controlled by another player will actually force the AI to take control away from them so they can follow their routine as a link partner.  This means that you outright can’t use the Link System with four players, and with 2-3 you’d be stepping on each other’s toes.

Overall, Xillia’s combat system feels smartly designed and fun to play around with.  More than ever before I find myself experimenting with every character because each one of them is fun to play as in their own right.  Milla is perhaps the coolest implementation of the traditional ‘magic swordsman’ (a la Zelos/Kratos or Richard) I’ve yet seen in the franchise.  She has a number of offensive spells, but she can convert them into melee attacks to use in tandem with her other artes.  By carefully timing his dodges, Jude is able to sidestep enemy attacks and move behind them to deliver fast combos that hit hard (think of it as being similar in concept to Star Ocean 4’s Blindside system).  Rowen is the party’s black mage, but he’s able to modify his artes after casting them, making each spell a tiny minigame.  Elize uses powerful crowd-control spells in addition to being the party’s main healer, but can defend herself at close range using Teepo to chomp on enemies, squash them and blast them away.  And there have been smaller, subtler improvements as well, like the way the characters control on the 3D plane relative to the camera angle, or the ability to swap characters out mid-battle, like in Star Ocean. The weakness system is also improved from Graces.

For all Xillia does right in the combat department, the game is held back by inconsistency. I already mentioned how you can see this is in the number of Link Artes (or lack thereof) available to some pairs, but you can also see it in the environments, and even in how the characters play. There are some areas in Xillia that are genuinely beautiful, such as Fennmont. But there are plenty of others that are bland and completely uninteresting.  It’s also easy to see that characters like Alvin and Leia didn’t get nearly as much attention as the others, with Alvin’s link ability being rendered obsolete by the existence of artes such as Beast, and Leia’s combat ability simply not being followed through on, to say nothing of how she’s completely outclassed by Milla as a fighter and by Elize as a healer.

The game is also simply not paced well, both in terms of story and gameplay.  The plot meanders for about two thirds of the game before suddenly kicking into high gear and stuffing most of its grand twists and developments into the back third.   The combat’s basic mechanics are interesting, but not to enough of an extent to keep you engaged until you unlock your second lilium orb—where you’ll find high-tier artes and abilities that really make the combat shine, as well as mystic artes—which doesn’t occur for quite some time.

There is clear evidence that Tales of Xillia was rushed out the gate.   It is inconsistent at times, poorly paced, and could have done with a bit more time in the oven.  But in truth, the fact that Xillia is not without its significant faults is about par for the course for a Tales game.  But generally, Xillia gets it right where it really counts, while making many positive contributions to the core series formula.  I play Tales games for the combat and the characters, and in my mind, Xillia gets above average marks in both these areas; even if the characters I ended up caring about weren’t the ones I was expecting.

Zone of the Enders

I finally got around to trying the Zone of the Enders HD Collection for PS3.  After watching a lengthy (but enjoyable) animated intro, I naturally chose to try the original Zone of the Enders first, before trying The 2^nd Runner.  I didn’t know what to expect from Zone of the Enders.  I knew that it had mechs in it, and that it was a Kojima joint.  That’s largely it.

Essentially, Zone of the Enders takes place in a futuristic setting where humanity has colonized other planets in the solar system, namely Mars and Jupiter.  Earthlings still reign supreme however, and the space colonies are largely subject to their rule.  Tensions continue to rise because of this, until all-out war eventually erupts between the two sides.  Though Earth has the initial advantage due to sheer numbers, the discovery of a superior energy source known as Metatron allows the space colonists (or “enders” as the Earthlings have come to call them) to develop powerful new weapons known as Orbital Frames.  Orbital Frames are—you guessed it—giant humanoid mechs.  The colonists create two particularly powerful Orbital Frames, called Jehuty and Anubis, but the Earth forces steal them.

Note that almost none of what I just explained is really touched on in the game.  Zone of the Enders doesn’t really do much in terms of world-building.  Rather, this is a classic game in that you’ll learn a lot more about the setting and backstory reading the manual than you will playing through the story.

Zone of the Enders begins just as the space colonists are invading the colony that Jehuty and Anubis are being stored in, in an attempt to take them back.  In the process, they basically raze everything to the ground, terrorizing the population.  Though the colonists manage to retrieve Anubis, one little boy named Leo stumbles upon Jehuty and, hoping to hide from the invasion and chaos, clambers into its cockpit.  He accidentally activates the mech and soon enough finds himself thrust into a mission beyond his understanding.

Anyone who’s seen a Japanese mecha anime will be amazed by how closely this setup mirrors that of shows like Mobile Suit Gundam; particularly SEED and 0079.  A war between the spacenoids and Earth; a super-special set of mobile suits designed to give one side an edge; and most of all, an insufferable boy protagonist who ends up with one of said super-special mobile suits.

There are some interesting things to Zone of the Ender’s plot, though.  Though the space colonists are portrayed as an entirely villainous lot in the game, by and large they’re the underdogs here.  Furthermore, Jehuty and Anubis share a fun dynamic, always ending up on opposite sides of the conflict, and seemingly fated to fight each other, despite being developed for the same purpose.

None of this is to Zone of the Ender’s credit though, because none of it is explored in the actual game.  The classic red vs. blue rivalry between Jehuty and Anubis is only hinted at right at the end of the game, and as mentioned previously, everything about the setting and premise was derived from the manual, not the game.

Instead, during the actual game you get a much more focused plot that has Leo being tasked with delivering Jehuty to the transport vessel Atlantis in one piece, encountering plenty of obstacles along the way.  Such obstacles include a large microwave barrier, an army of remote-controlled Orbital Frames, and a snooty ace pilot who is also one of only perhaps two worthwhile characters in the game; the other being Leo.  ZoE’s cast is already quite small, but most of the few characters introduced ultimately play little or no role, such as Leo’s childhood friend Celvice, and the big boss of the space colonists and eventual pilot of Anubis, Nohman.

So not only do we have a cookie-cutter plot mostly populated with empty characters, but we also have a cookie-cutter plot that ends rather abruptly.  After a little over five hours, Zone of the Enders throws you against a final boss that is unbeatable by design, and then it ends.

Zone of the Ender’s primary saving grace is its combat, which is not only fun, but at times nothing short of riveting.  The controls are a bit odd and took some getting used to for me, but at its heart ZoE is a hack and slash affair.

Each of the handful of environments in the game are patrolled by squads of enemies.  Get too close and they’ll attack on sight, and battle begins.  Jehuty has two combat modes that it automatically switches between depending on how close you are to the opponent you’re locked onto.  At melee range it uses its fold out blade for hacking away at enemies.  Backing into longer range causes it to switch to its wrist-mounted blaster.  In addition to regular attacks, you have burst and dash attacks, each with melee and long-range variants.  Burst attacks—consisting of a Spirit Bomb-like orb of energy at long range and a spinning slash at close range—take a moment to charge up, but are unblockable and do more damage.  Dash attacks—an extremely quick side swipe in melee and a burst of homing lasers at range—are quick and keep battles moving at a swift pace.  Jehuty can also guard and grab enemies, and the two abilities share the same dynamic you’d expect: guarding blocks most attacks but is vulnerable to grabs.

In addition to its standard moveset, Jehuty can also equip a variety of sub-weapons found throughout the game.  These have limited ammo, but give you a bit more versatility.  For example, Phalanx is a short-range bullet sprayer with a wide spread.  Halberd is a sustained beam attack that cuts through enemies easily, but is slow and unwieldy.  Geyser throws out a set of pods that emit lasers upwards, setting up a trap.  There are about a dozen different sub-weapons to find and pick up, some of which are integral to progression, like the Decoy ability that allows you to avoid getting killed in one shot by one of the later bosses.

Bosses aside, there are only three types of enemies in the game.  But with one exception, these enemies have a similar moveset to your own (particularly at higher levels), being capable of guarding, grabbing, and burst and dash attacks.  Initially, enemies use only basic attacks and simple strategies, but as you progress through the game, both the AI and its repertoire of attacks and strategies expand, offering more challenge.  By the end of the game, nearly every enemy encounter can feel like a dance with death, forcing you to constantly stay on the move and use each ability at your disposal to avoid being surrounded or otherwise outmaneuvered.  Zone of the Enders teases you with the prospect of exciting one on one boss battles with rival Orbital Frame pilots, but in reality this only happens three times, and only one of them is a battle in the traditional sense.

With only a few exceptions, all of the environments in Zone of the Enders look bland.  The CG cutscenes are also pretty bad, and while it’s not fair to judge them by today’s standard, I do wonder if Konami (or High Voltage, who developed the port) couldn’t have done a better touch up job.  The one facet that stands above what is mostly a visually mediocre game is the mecha design, which is interesting.  Unfortunately, as very few Orbital Frames aside from the enemy grunts show up in the game, once more I can’t give Zone of the Enders a lot of credit for it.

Overall, Zone of the Enders feels like a low key game.  I understand now why people often see it as a tech demo.  The combat is great, but outside of that there’s just not much to it.

Hitman: Absolution

I’m pretty new to Hitman.  A long time ago, I saw a lengthy gameplay walkthrough for Absolution, which honestly made the game look pretty damn rad.  So, partially out of interest in the series and partly out of interest in Absolution, I picked up Blood Money during Steam’s Summer Sale.  It’s a great game, though flawed in minor ways.  There’s something really satisfying about the open nature of Blood Money, where you’re spawned in a level and asked to seek out and kill one or more NPCs however you see fit and make it out alive.  Hitman games challenge you to be more than a simple mercenary though, gunning your way to your query.  They encourage subtlety, making your kills discreet or even look like complete accidents.  As they describe the game’s highest score ranking, Silent Assassin, the best Hitman is one who leaves no effect on the world around him.

Hitman: Absolution is not like Blood Money.  And from what I’ve seen of previous Hitman games, it’s not like Hitman in general.

Just as in all previous games, in Absolution you play as Agent 47, a top tier hitman employed with The Agency, some sort of paramilitary organization that contracts hits on the scum of the world.  47’s been tasked with killing Diana Burnwood, who has betrayed the Agency by making off with one of the organization’s vital assets: a young girl.  The problem is that Diana was 47’s former handler, and the closest thing to a friend he’s ever had.  As someone who was also raised in a lab, the normally all-business hitman takes pity on the girl.  Swayed by Diana’s attempt to save the girl from a similar upbringing, 47 goes rogue, taking her with him to safeguard her from the Agency.  Seeking to find out precisely what it is that makes the girl so important, he soon finds himself in trouble with the law and chased by a sinister industry magnate who also wants her.  What results is essentially an international manhunt, where everybody wants both the girl and 47’s head.

But let’s face it: the plot of Absolution isn’t really that good or interesting.  It does a great job stringing together gameplay segments, but you’ll never find yourself expecting much more than that.  Instead, Absolution’s narrative strength resides in its presentation.  The game takes place in a serious world filled with dark themes, touching on corruption of the law, drugs, and the seedy underbelly of industries and corporations.  This is not a cheerful setting in the slightest, and yet there is an element of mature humor that constantly permeates the game experience.  You meet a corrupt sheriff who spends his free time on the receiving end of a whip from his dominatrix, for example.  One of your targets—due to an unfortunate childhood experience—hates pigs, and has taken to doing his job testing landmines by releasing a herd of pigs to run across a fake setup and get blown to bits.

This humor is more evident than ever in the many NPC conversations you’ll overhear.  The very first one you hear is from a guard talking on the phone, overjoyed to hear from his doctor that he does not in fact have prostate cancer.  He happily claims that nothing can ruin this day before you pull him out of a window, sending him careening into the rocks below.  While on the lam, you might overhear a cop making a vain attempt to question a mentally retarded hobo about your whereabouts.  Midway through the game you’ll encounter a wrestler who fervently believes that his stuffed teddy bear is a lucky charm, and will whine and complain to his coach and managers if you steal it.

Absolution’s presentation extends to its visuals, which are phenomenal.  There is an ever so slight filter applied to the graphics that gives the world a constant and subtly oppressive look.  On PC, the game does lighting and depth of field like no other game I’ve ever seen.  When you open a door from a deserted alley and find yourself facing a hugely crowded plaza, it feels just like it would to have all this new information suddenly flooding your eyes.  There is a moment midway through the game where you find yourself emerging from a desert cave in broad daylight, and as you pass through the cave’s mouth, you’re temporarily blinded by all the light hitting your face.  Textures are also detailed and the modeling work is very good.  The only facet that is weak in comparison is the animation, which is good but not exceptional like the lighting.  It is overall a very good looking game, however.

The core of Absolution—the gameplay—doesn’t shine as brightly as its exterior elements, however.  To begin with, Absolution is structured differently from its predecessors.  Whereas in past entries you had the entire level open to you, and your only goal was to accomplish your objective and take the designated exit before moving on to the next level, Absolution is generally more linear.  Levels are fragmented, and there are plenty of gameplay segments where your objective is simply to get to the end of the level alive (and ideally without being seen).  Furthermore, levels vary wildly in their construction.  There are some levels that could have been plucked right out of Blood Money, so similar are they in structure to Absolution’s predecessors.  Some gameplay segments task you with killing someone, but many do not.  In many segments you’re simply passing by, or trying to accomplish something else, like disabling security measures or evading law officers.  This gives the game a feeling of inconsistency; like they knew what direction they wanted to go in with the series but didn’t go all the way through it.  It should be noted that I’m not really saying that the levels themselves are bad.  In fact there are some that are downright brilliant, such as one that has you hunting three targets across an entire neighborhood, or another that has you stalking targets in tall corn fields under a clear starry night.  It’s the overall structure of the game that comes off as feeling slapdash to me, not its components.

This issue is nonexistent in the game’s Contracts mode, however.  Separate from the main campaign, in Contracts all of the game’s environments and scenarios are available to play through individually.  The difference is that here you can play through them however you like.  You kill whoever you want, using whatever tools and disguises you want.  These parameters (who you killed, what you used to kill them, etc.) are then used to set up a custom mission, or contract that other players can then go through, attempting to one-up your score in the process.  It’s basically a combination of a level editor and H-O-R-S-E.  Not only is Contracts a brilliant twist on the concept of creating and sharing your own levels, by focusing on individual levels it escapes the inconsistency present in the story mode.

The game’s structure isn’t the only thing that’s changed.  The core gameplay has been refined in some ways and revamped in others.  For the most part, I like what they’ve done.  Absolution controls better than any other Hitman, for one thing.  The series has always had trouble wrapping its gameplay mechanics around a decent control map, but I think with Absolution they’ve managed to change that, and largely without relying on QTEs, which is admirable.

Furthermore, as a stealth game Absolution does a good job of keeping you informed about your situation.  UI elements like an arrow indicating NPCs that are onto you are standard, but you also have a minimap that color codes each NPC by their level of suspicion, so you know at a glance how information about you might be spreading.  You’re able to summon tooltips telling you things like the current capacity of storage containers (they’re able to hold two bodies now), the access level for areas you’re looking at (in case you’re about to cross an invisible line), and even what a disguise is, before putting it on.  The new Instinct mode—not unlike Detective Vision in the recent Batman games—allows you to see enemies through walls, and will even trace the path an NPC is walking, allowing you to immediately predict their route.  The Instinct mode also allows you to use Point Shooting, which is a feature lifted straight out of games like Splinter Cell Conviction and Red Dead Redemption, allowing you to mark and execute targets with increased precision.  Finally, Instinct mode makes you immune to having your disguise detected; causing 47 to discreetly pull down his hat or hunch his shoulders, deflecting suspicion.  This last bit is pushing suspension of belief, but alas, videogames.

Instinct mode sounds like and often is a crutch, but its use is limited.  How limited depends on what difficulty you’re playing on, but in general you’ll find the ability to use Point Shooting and hide your disguise limited by a meter, which depletes during use and is regenerated mainly by accomplishing objectives.  However, the higher you go in difficulty, the more restrictions you’ll find placed on not only Instinct mode, but the play experience in general.  The highest difficulty—Purist—does away with both Instinct mode and the UI (only the crosshair is spared), in addition to boasting the most enemies and the fastest detection rates.

Hitman has always been about a different sort of stealth than most in the genre.  Whereas series such as Metal Gear and Splinter Cell required you to hide in the shadows and duck behind walls and around corners to stay undetected, Hitman’s is more of a social brand of stealth; being invisible in plain sight.  To this end, disguises have always been an integral part of gameplay.  In past games it was pretty difficult to get far without a disguise of some sort.

The disguise system has been changed in Absolution.  You can still knock out dudes and take their clothes, letting you pose as them, but rules governing how NPCs detect you are different.  Now, only NPCs wearing the same clothes (and thus likely of the same profession) will be able to see through your disguise.  All others will be none the wiser.  As GameTrailers’ review succinctly puts it, it makes sense…except for when it doesn’t.  For example, it makes sense that, while infiltrating a laboratory using a scientist disguise, only fellow scientists would be able to see through my disguise.  It doesn’t make sense however, that a street vendor would be able to see through a street vendor disguise, does it?  Especially not when his stall is on the opposite side of a crowded plaza from my stall.  Furthermore, NPCs are able to see through your disguise from unbelievable distances.  Essentially, establishing line of sight tends to be all you need to be in danger of having your cover blown, even if someone is standing on the other side of a street.  I found that all of these changes discouraged me from using the disguise system at all.  It doesn’t help that it’s not often you encounter an area where it’s particularly difficult to just sneak through the old fashioned way.

Ultimately, I found it difficult to play Hitman: Absolution entirely like a Hitman game.  The moment I stopped trying to use disguises and just played Absolution like a straightforward stealth game was when I immediately found the game to be more enjoyable.  And frankly, as a straightforward stealth game it’s pretty great.  But the problem is that’s not how you should have to play a Hitman game.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

A city terrorized by aliens.  The report came in while I was in the middle of some important research.  I’d have preferred to ignore it, but you don’t get to choose when duty calls.  The team I deployed was a bit unfamiliar.  Lion and Buster were in Psi training, so I took to the opportunity to give some new recruits a shot, including a promising Support gal the team had nicknamed “Mother Bird” for her handy use of Medikits, and the new Hover S.H.I.V. heavy weapons platform the engineering guys had cooked up.  Sheriff would head the team, just as she always did.

It was a civilian evacuation mission; things went well at first.  A two-story building, looked like most of the action would take place inside.  Mother Bird would head around back with the S.H.I.V., scooping up any civilians they came across.  Sheriff and Ace would go right for the front doors; Sheriff in particular always had a tendency to jump into the frying pan.

We cleared the first floor with little incident.  I should have regrouped before storming the second floor, but I was confident from the mission’s progress so far.  Mother Bird and the S.H.I.V. climbed the stairwell and ran right into a squad of Mutons and Berserkers.  It would be a couple turns before the others were in a position to assist.  By then, the S.H.I.V. had been smashed to pieces, and a Berserker had shattered clipped Mother Bird’s wings.  That evening I lost a great soldier, and it was entirely my fault.

Despite the presence of an overarching plot, it’s personal narratives like these that form the heart of XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Aliens have invaded Earth.  People are being slaughtered or worse, abducted.  You are the commander of XCOM, an international coalition formed to combat the alien threat.  To do this, you’ll need to hire, train and maintain a diverse contingent of troops and regularly deploy them to various locations across the world to complete missions, while simultaneously developing your facilities to keep pace with the growing threat, upgrading your equipment, and researching alien artifacts.

Gameplay in XCOM: Enemy Unknown is comprised mainly of two aspects.  When you’re not on missions, you’ll spend your time overviewing XCOM headquarters.  From here you can conduct most of your business as commander of the base.  You can research everything alien—from artifacts and technology recovered on the field, to corpses and any aliens you manage to capture alive—in the research lab.  Research works very much like it does in the Civilization franchise, where you assign one thing for the lab to work on, and wait for it to complete before assigning another.  The fruits of your research come to life in the engineering section, which is where you’ll build and upgrade all of your equipment—including guns, armor, ships, and satellites—and your base facilities.

Your soldiers reside in the barracks.  Here you can view each of your soldiers individually, as well as customize everything from their looks and name to their equipment load out.  Disappointingly however, the ability to change your soldier’s armor colors is relegated to DLC.  Soldiers come in four classes: Sniper, Heavy, Assault, and Support.  Snipers utilize sniper rifles to strike from far away.  Heavies use a combination of a light machine guns and rocket launchers to keep enemies suppressed and at bay.  Assaults are designed to jump directly into the fray with their shotguns.  Supports specialize in field assistance with smoke grenades, enhanced Overwatch, and better, more efficient Medikits. 

The more you use your soldiers, the more you’ll find them carving out individual reputations for themselves.  New recruits will be classless, but after a mission or two you’ll discover their aptitude for one class or another.  From there, each class has a tree of perks that you’re able to progress through as that soldier gains promotions through experience in the field.  Soon enough they’ll have their own nicknames, and you’ll find yourself building a narrative and backstory for each soldier.  They become more than just units to command; they become characters in your story.  Sharon “Sheriff” Roberts wasn’t just any Canadian soldier.  She was a badass; someone the others could look up to on the battlefield.  She would leap into every battle and laugh in the face of danger.  Luck was always on her side.  Joan “Lion” McIntosh started as Kitty, but when we saw how sharp her claws really were, she was renamed “Lion”.  Everyone knew that someday she could be the next Sheriff.  Soon enough, my soldiers became more integral to the plot than any of the other characters that would appear in XCOM’s occasional cut scenes, and that’s something I really came to admire the game for.

You can view your current progress and objectives in the Situation Room.  Here, you have a world map and a listing of every country enrolled in the XCOM program.  As you neglect countries, their panic level rises.  If a country is allowed to reach maximum panic, they will withdraw from the program, taking their financial support with them.  The Situation Room also allows you to launch any available satellites at your disposal to monitor a country.  Having a satellite over a country not only increases the amount of money and resources that country gives you each month, but it also decreases its panic level.

Satellites also often pick up flying UFOs, in which case you have the option of launching interceptors to try and shoot down the UFO.  If they succeed, the UFO is downed and you can proceed to send in a team of soldiers to sweep the area.  I’ve found this metagame to be the challenging aspect of the game, however.  Just as the enemies grow in power and number as you progress through a campaign, so too do the UFOs you encounter.  Developing and maintaining an air fleet that is both large and powerful enough to consistently deal with any detected UFOs is extremely costly and time consuming, and whether or not it pays off in the long run is questionable.  I’ve had to ignore a number of UFOs, simply because I knew that my planes wouldn’t be able to down them.

Nearly everything in XCOM: Enemy Unknown takes time.  It takes time to research things, it takes time for wounded soldiers to heal and for new recruits to arrive, and it takes time to build and launch satellites, among many other things.  It even takes time to swap the weapons on your interceptors.  You’ll have to pass the time in Mission Control, scanning for alien activity.  Every few days you get an alert.  Sometimes it's a bomb that needs to be disposed of, or a VIP that needs to be evacuated; other times it's a UFO picked up by a satellite.  Whatever it is, if you’re lucky it will be only one instance.  But more often than not, it will be multiple simultaneous abductions occurring in different parts of the world.  You can only deal with one, and the countries you ignore will have their panic level rise.  Whatever you choose (unless it’s to ignore the contact entirely), you’ll then pick your squad and their loadout, and deploy to the area in question.

Combat in XCOM is a turn-based strategy affair.  Each soldier has two movements they can use per turn.  Once you’ve moved all of your soldiers, your turn ends, and the aliens have their turn, and so on.  Though you’ll most frequently just be using your movements on moving and firing, units have a variety of actions they can use; many are class-specific, others much more general.  All units are able to use an ability called Overwatch, which sacrifices your remaining actions for the ability to automatically shoot at any enemy that moves within a unit’s sight range, albeit with lessened accuracy.  Heavies and Supports can use Suppression, which pins an enemy down, lowering their accuracy and also grants the soldier suppressing a free Overwatch shot if the enemy moves.  Snipers can use Headshot, which is a normal shot with a substantially higher chance of critical damage.

Let’s get this out of the way:  XCOM is a difficult game.  You’re given all the control you’d expect from being commander, but also all of the weight and responsibility.  If you make a mistake, however slight, those are consequences that you’ll have to deal with.  Even something as seemingly minor as a soldier advancing just one tile farther than he/she should have can lead to disastrous situations.  Soldiers that you’ve grown to like and invest in can die, and at some point almost certainly will.  Missions with everything banking on them can be failed.  The game will move on.  A string of bad decisions can lead to outright failure in XCOM; the aliens will have won, and it will have been entirely your fault.

You’re frequently both outgunned and outnumbered in XCOM, which means that every move you make has to be thought out.  Every option must be weighed before taking action, lest that action be the last one that soldier ever makes.  This is a strategy game; if you don’t think strategically, you will lose.  Even if you do think strategically, sometimes you’ll still lose.  Even the best-laid plans can fail, after all.

For an internationally funded paramilitary organization, XCOM is tragically under-supported, which means this element of pressure and responsibility permeates the entire game experience, not just combat.  Though you’ll pick up some extra bits of pocket change doing missions and selling spare alien artifacts, your main source of income arrives on a monthly basis, when all of the countries still enrolled in the program chip in to send you more staff and money.  But it’s never enough.  The battlefield isn’t the only place you’re constantly forced to make hard decisions in XCOM.  Hard choices await you in the research lab, in Mission Control, and perhaps most tragically, in the ledger.  All the time you’ll find yourself presented with a choice between things to buy; things to invest in.  You need all of these things if you want to keep up with the alien threat.  But too often, you can only afford one of them.  Every decision requires you to consider the cost of each option and weigh it against how long it will take to bear fruit.  For example, it’s absolutely crucial that you regularly buy more satellites, as that increases the amount of money you get.  But satellites take almost a month to build, and still more time before they’re operational (and that’s assuming you have the facilities to maintain more satellites in the first place).  You’re throwing money at something that you won’t see the benefits from for a very long time; money that could be better used to build things with more immediate utility, like better equipment for troops, or a new upgrade that would be invaluable on the field, like larger weapon cartridges or increased squad sizes.

Despite being a game that demands a tactical, systematic approach to succeed, there is a large element of randomness to XCOM: Enemy Unknown.  Though you can customize them later on, new recruits’ names, nationality, and appearance are all random, as are their nicknames.  Mission encounters are largely random, as are the maps and their layouts.  Missions and campaigns never go quite the same way.  All it takes is a stray explosive to blow up a new path and totally change the way you progress through a map, for example.  This has the effect of keeping the experience fresh, but it also introduces a tangible element of fortune and chaos to the gameplay.  Sometimes this element works in your favor, like when you nail a shot that only had a 35% chance of hitting.  More often than not however, it tends to feel like its working against you, when Heavy's light machine gun not only misses, but the stray fire destroys the cover of one his colleagues, leaving him/her totally exposed.  It's times like that where I felt like the game was bending me over the barrel.

XCOM is, overall a pretty looking game.  Everything from character animation to object modeling is above average, and the game features surprisingly robust environmental destruction.  It runs on Unreal Engine 3, which is evident enough in its slightly oversaturated effects.  The missions start feeling a bit recycled towards the end of a campaign, but it’s mostly a non-issue.

What was an issue for me were the bugs.  I’ve had the game freeze on me, and clipping issues weren’t uncommon.  I’ve also had enemies literally spawn right in the middle of my soldier’s ranks, as well as have enemies disappear right before my eyes, ending the mission early.  Most of the time these bugs are either comical or minor, but still prevalent enough to scare me away from trying the game’s Ironman mode, which prevents you from saving.  It’s one thing, after all to fail a mission due to my own incompetence, and quite another to fail because the game crashed on me.

Playing XCOM—whether on the field blasting aliens or at base conducting regular business—often feels like balancing a series of spinning plates on your arms and head, where it only takes one movement to cause everything to come tumbling down.  Yes, XCOM is a difficult game.  If you’re not careful, you will fail at it.  You might fail at it even if you ARE careful.  But it’s also one of the most rewarding games you’ll play this year.  When you make the right decisions, and those decisions pay off, it’s a real feeling of triumph; a victory you achieved all by yourself, without anyone holding your hand.

*Note - I did not try the multiplayer, but the singleplayer alone was enough to earn the game its score.