Here, I’m given my first priority objective. The outstanding presentation zooms and swoops the camera around the “ant farm” base, turning fundamentally menu-driven strategic tasks like setting research priorities for your scientists and submitting fabrication orders to the engineering corps into pleasant (but thankfully quick and skippable) interactive vignettes with full voice acting. Back at XCOM’s secret headquarters (I choose a European base, which makes labs and workshops half as expensive to build and maintain), a quick tour familiarizes new commanders with the critical areas: the research lab, engineering bay, situation room, council room, hangar, and barracks. A nearly combat-free mission ends with three rookies dead (and the last one promoted to squaddie) while showing off the slick interface for commanding the turn-based tactical battles. The tutorial quickly accommodates players with everything XCOM’s first hour has to offer. I played through a second time without the tutorial and was pleased to find that the game takes off running immediately, presenting maps and enemy force compositions I hadn’t seen in my first game. Instead of the pre-set missions and dilemmas -described above, you face randomized situations from the start. Skipping the tutorial Those who would rather poke around on their own than have the game hold their hand can skip the tutorial entirely. Australia may be more or less on fire, and the memorial in XCOM’s barracks may be well-lit by remembrance candles, but that’s a small price to pay for having laser shotguns rolling off of my assembly lines. Put in charge of the small organization at the heart of humanity’s defiance of an overwhelming alien invasion, I gave those aliens what-for until 2K pulled the plug on my hands-on session.
Killing one alien is a remarkable achievement, but XCOM’s commander must somehow build on that tiny victory until the monsters from beyond the stars tremble at our approach instead of the other way around. Emerging victorious from this unfair fight seems like a miraculous outcome, given the aliens’ advantages of advanced weapons and psychic capabilities. Merely catching the aliens in the act is an unprecedented victory. In the middle of this whirlwind of death and terror, a small squad of human soldiers has caught up to an extraterrestrial landing party before they could complete their grim work. They kill and abduct innocent humans with impunity, engulfing the nations of the world in tidal waves of panic.
The aliens go wherever they want, whenever they want.
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