Reliant121 wrote:I've never even heard of XCOM...can we have a run down on what it's about?
No surprise, as it came out before you were born.
The original had you as the head of a secret multinational organization tasked with defending the Earth from an increasing number of alien attacks. To that end, you would pick a site for your first base somewhere on the globe (the earth was divided into a bunch of regions), and receive a starting amount of weapons, soldiers, scientists, and funding from the 16 member countries. At your base, you could research new technologies, equip soldiers and fighter jets, build new additions to the base, and order existing earth-made equipment, or more soldiers/scientists/engineers.
When a UFO is detected by your radar (depending on how good your radar systems are, this may take some time), you can launch your interceptors to engage it. If it lands, or you manage to shoot it down, you send soldiers to the site, and a turn-based squad-level combat mode starts. The maps are randomized, based on terrain type, so you might end up fighting on a mountainside, a farm, a shopping center, etc. Day and night also come into play, with your soldiers not able to see aliens as well at night (there are portable light grenades you can purchase and use). The environments were all destructible, so if you fired, say, a rocket launcher at an enemy in a second-story window, you'd blow half of the building away. Gas pumps were especially funny, unless it was your soldiers standing next to them.
Civilians were also present on most maps, and you'd be penalized if they were killed (or transformed) by the aliens. You'd get a score for each mission and each UFO shot down, and a score for how much alien gear you recovered (which you could reverse engineer), and at the end of each month, the member nations would revise their funding based on how high of a score you got, and which regions you protected.
Unfortunately, your base could only cover a certain region, so eventually, you'd have to save up to build more bases and staff them, placing them strategically to cover as many (high-paying) countries as possible. If you failed to protect a certain country, they might reduce funding, or withdraw from the program altogether (they could also be infiltrated by the aliens, and withdraw).
You could find alien bases ranging from supply depots, entertainment centers, to full-blown military bases. There were at least two dozen different alien races (some of which you might not see on a single playthrough; it was random as well), with their own rank structures, weapons, and abilities (a weaker race's engineer might panic and drop their weapon before trying to run, for example).
This really is a simplified description; the game was highly replayable, and hard to beat even on the easiest difficulty setting.
Even though it's 16 years old at this point, I still have a copy on my computer. It's widely considered one of the best games ever made, and with good reason.
Actually, I just found a copy of the
manual.
I hope they keep at least the "home base", financing and research and recruitment aspects of the original. That would make this new game great, rather than just good.
