Thursday 15 August 2013

Welcome to Earf!

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
I know Will Smith actually says the line correctly, but it's standard greeting for aliens coming to earth. In this case, the aliens are from the X-Com franchise dating back to the mid 90s. First of all, I must preface this review by saying I was a HUGE fan of the original (not so much the sequel). And after playing this game, I think the developers were fans too. There were a ton of homages and nods to the original. What they did was take the original game, beef up the graphics, streamlined the gameplay a lot and delivered one of the most satisfying and original games I've played in a while. Original may be a strange choice of words considering it is a sequel in a franchise with lots of entries. I say original because the gameplay is so unique. I don't think I've played another game with the same mechanics. The first X-Com comes closest, but that was released almost 20 years ago.

When I first started playing , I encountered a serious bug. Occasionally, the game would crash during a specific cutscene. This happened even if I exited the game and reloaded my previous saved game. This essentially corrupted my save game file. I had to restart all over again twice! I finally figured out the Steam cache was getting corrupted. After refreshing it, the game was fine.

Aside from that bug, the game was a fantastic experience. Lots of fun, strategy and satisfying alien murder. The bug keeps this from being a perfect 10. 9/10.

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