izigame.me

Rarely do I read up on a gaming franchise, look for it's origin game, play it and enjoy it a lot. Like there's the good, like Fallout, and the terrible, like the Elder Scrolls, then there is X-COM. I've never played an X-COM game before, so I finally saw the original on sale for $3. Best money I've ever spent.

I'll admit I'm not the best at turn based strategy, I've slowly been dipping my toes in the water with both the original Baldurs Gate and Fallout, but now that I'm familiar with it all, I believe it really unlocked this games full potential. It also made me realise that this must have been the inspiration for another favourite game of mine, C&C Kane's Wrath's conquest mode. The fundemental gameplay of a having a Battlescape connected to an overarching Geoscape is such fun gameplay to me.

Granted the game does start off confusing, but I attest that to the fact that older games came with 100+ page manuals that we no longer have get the privilege of enjoying. So I took to sourcing one which made life a whole lot easier. I still played on the lowest difficulty because I didn't know the flow of this game and didn't want my experience ruined by getting rolled. But now that I've finished it I know I'll be coming back on a way harder difficulty, especially now that I know the proper optimisation of research, manufacturing and capturing of aliens.

Which fundamentally is what this game is about. Building and managing a base, curating a squad of soldiers, designating loadouts based on their strengths and weaknesses, scanning for and downing UFO's, assaulting the crash sites and capturing as much alien tech as possible to research. All of this while sacrificing every last soldier in the process. At first it was kind of sad but once I realised how often the 40% chance shots killed, and the 90% ones missed, every troop was treated like they were a pump and dump. Which didn't really help me in the end as I didn't have many fully skilled troops but we got there just in the end.

Aesthetically this game has a timeless charm, it's crazy that the maps are like randomly generated and come out so good every time. I love the differentiation of the regions too, city, country, desert, snowy it creates great diversity in the levels and combat. Same goes with the multiple alien races and ships no two fights are the same. The combat is just done so right, the perfect blend of frustrating and forgiving. My only issue was not researching better weapons sooner, I was so interested in the world and lore I kept researching corpses and captured aliens to learn so I stuck with standard rifles and auto cannons for way too long.

Overall though, every aspect of this game, from the combat, gameplay, story, style and soundtrack everything is just perfect. I really don't think I can fault this game at all, of course this is in reference to the openXcom version of the game, I heeded all the advice and didn't touch the standard steam version. Which I'm glad I didn't, not a single time was I frustrated or disappointed, this game is proper amazing once you get into the swing of things. It's perfect.