The GameOn Magazine - Free Special Editions XCOM: Enemy Within Special Edition | страница 15

122 Years of Extraterrestrial Combat

game, soldiers you’ve trained up yourself, you’ve
given them names and care for them, only to move
them a square too far and have him vapourised
by a Blaster. This is what you’re fighting for. Yeah,
Earth’s population is in danger, but your downed
comrades are who spur you on. They are the ones
who make you want to beat the game and destroy
the supercomputer controlling the alien menace,
and take down the Martian base.
As rewarding as it is unforgiving, X-COM: Enemy
Unknown is one of those gems that was ahead of
its time in terms of scale and gameplay, one that
fused stats-laden tactical turn-based warfare with a
management sim that relied on each other heavily
to progress.

The story is familiar territory, but now the public
are aware of the Outsiders. Attempting a global
invasion this time around, the world is in chaos
and citizens are panicked. The Council of Nations
gives you, as leader of XCOM, funding to research,
create, abduct and destroy the aliens who begin the
war with the human race with vast technological
superiority.
In a very filmic showdown aboard the mothership,
the Ethereals reveal humans are more subject
to evolution than their own species, and can
prepare better for the future. What will happen in
the future is not revealed by the aliens, but they
want to control the human race and harness our
abilities to adapt and evolve for whatever it is that
‘lies ahead’... very ominous indeed.

But Jesus, was it hard!
But more cannot be gleaned before the mothership
By 2010, the alien threat makes a comeback in the is destroyed by your valiant troops and the world
rebooted XCOM: Enemy Unknown. One of those can live in peace once more.
rare things in a reboot,
Enemy Unknown keeps
the core gameplay in
tact but makes it much
more accessible to a
wider variety of people
with advanced interfaces,
easily traversable maps,
full rundowns of AP usage,
etc, but never feeling like
it’s dumbing down. It stays
true to the core elements
of the original Enemy
Unknown, and creates an
incredibly popular turnbased game in a time
when turn-based games
had all but been given up
on.
XCOM: Enemy Within Special Edition 2013

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