XCom has been one of the most difficult game franchises I have ever played, and has been since 1994. The high level premise is that the Earth is under attack by aliens, and you are the chief executive officer of a shadow organization that responds to the alien threat, keeping the public blissfully unaware that the world is under siege. To accomplish this task, you need to manage all aspects of your enterprise, including your base, satellites, soldiers, researchers, engineers, crafts, and budgets (including one time costs and monthly burn against monthly budgets of the nation states).
The game style itself actually breaks down to two+ modes. The first mode is the day to day operations of your base, funding research, bolstering your troops, and expanding your capabilities. The tutorials for this mode are crucial, as it's not a very fun mode and easy to downplay the importance of it until it's too late. The second mode is the turn based combat mode, in which you spend the majority of your game play. This mode is the strategic movement of your troops to gain higher ground, shelter behind objects like trees, cars, and mailboxes, position for breaching doors, and general kick-assery. And you don't know what you're up against or how many there are until you stumble upon the enemy and kill them all.
How does one compare an 18 year old delta in graphics? Do the people who frequent this site even know what EGA is, or the genius that was required to transport people to a dream world with the limitations that it enforced? It is unlikely so let me simply state that the game went from barely discernible blobs of pixels to something that looks along the line of unreal due to the engine used for the game. There is a glory cam mode for end of turns and kill shots under which the graphics are somewhat disappointing given the age of the Unreal Tournament engine, but for the turn based game that it is, it totally cuts the mustard. Game engine effects are also increased with support of NVidia PhysX, which is a plus.
The difficulty of the game is now select-able at the beginning of the game and changeable mid game. Whereas the original game was just so painfully difficult at the beginning, this game leads you in pretty easy and breaks it down for you nicely. I've just finished the single player game on normal mode, which despite the warnings of the higher difficulty levels, is just too easy and worth playing the classic difficulty instead your first time though. Under the normal play style you can save all you want and go back to it but there is an ironman mode where there are only auto saves throughout and only 1 save game slot to go back to.
The hardest part of the game for me was to accept that soldiers die. You control a squad of 4-6 guys per mission and upon successful completion of a mission your most effective squad members may get a promotion. Promotions bring new abilities that drastically improve your overall game, so losing one of the more senior members makes the game an up hill battle. On top of that the game is constantly upping the ante against you in the difficulties and abilities you face off against.
Scratch that previous paragraph because the real hardest part of the game was dragging myself away from it. While playing it I kept questioning myself if it was worth the $50 price tag; Then the next thing I know it's 3am or 4:30 am.... consistently, or at least 4 of the past 7 days. And there is the whole multiplayer side to explore yet. I've definitely had more fun playing XCOM: Enemy unknown then I would have had 1 night at a bar for the same money, and about the same chance of getting laid. I'll update with another post after a bunch of multiplayer games to see how that changes things and adds extra value, but I would definitely say the single player game is worth about $35.
