X-COM Firaxis - XCOM: Enemy Unknown + Enemy Within Expansion

[spectre]

Fusion lance can only be used on a firestorm, and the weapons can just sit there useless until I build one. Fuck you game, just fuck you.

Holy carp, is this shit for real? (in all fairness, you go do by the name Zero Credibility

 

[knightley]

hahahahahha

 

[Zero Credibility]

Fusion lance can only be used on a firestorm, and the weapons can just sit there useless until I build one. Fuck you game, just fuck you.

Holy carp, is this shit for real? (in all fairness, you go do by the name Zero Credibility

Oh, it's for real. There is one way and only one way this game is played, and no deviations from that linear path are possible. This is especially painfully obvious when it comes to tragically stunted tech tree. This game need more content - lots and lots more. More technologies and more things to build. More and diverse maps - there are only what, 50 (and that's me being way too generous) maps in the entire game? And most of them use recycled parts themselves. It needs more variety in missions. It needs more and divers enemies that don't just randomly teleport around the map until you find one group, then you are treated to a cutscene of them moving to a cover, and then you can shoot them. It needs to have enemies that can ambush the player (and no, enemies randomly teleporting in the middle of my squad doesn't count), and they themselves can be surprised. It needs actual inventory for your soldiers. It needs more soldiers in the squad - 4 to 6 max soldiers on a mission and only one troop transport, is that a fucking joke? And it needs a proper action point based combat system and fuck retards that can't figure it out. Bah, I'm done with this game, done. So much fucking potential, all pissed away to streamline the game for the morons out there.

Edit: Oh, and nice job with making the game modder friendly, guys. You have those txt files with all those nice variables that could make the game slightly more interesting to play in the game directory, but then decide to hardcode them all anyway in the game executable?! It's like they sat down and thought long and hard on just how they could fuck over the modding community the best so that they could sell their own dlcs without the modding competition getting in the way.

 

[spectre]

It needs more soldiers in the squad - 4 to 6 max soldiers on a mission and only one troop transport, is that a fucking joke? And it needs a proper action point based combat system and fuck retards that can't figure it out. Bah, I'm done with this game, done. So much fucking potential, all pissed away to streamline the game for the morons out there.

You're late to the party mang. My bile gland went dry a few months back.
No battleships in the two games I played, so I never really saw the fusion lance thingy.

I agree though, my two playthroughs basically differed in one thing: in the first I went with the full tech tree, upgraded to lazors then plasma, in the second I focused on capturing aliens and skipped laser altogether.
Yeah, that's basically it when it comes to variety in this game. I managed to get bored with it quick enough so was late for the second wave thingy being unlocked. Not sure if it makes enough of an impact to warrant a reinstall.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Yeah, I only recently actually played this thing, so the disappointment is still fresh to me. Lasers first or plasma directly is really the only decision I too can thing of, but even here going for lasers first is obviously what the player was supposed to pick. Plasma research goes so much slower (with sniper, heavy, shotgun and cannons all researched separately after light and normal plasma rifle) that the clear optimum is to just go with lasers first. Otherwise you get stuck with conventional weapons for half of you team when mutons roll up regularly.

Oh, and in my experience if you found the game boring already, second wave is not going to help much. It's still the same gameplay.

 

[Sranchammer]

Frankly, I'm shocked this reached 100 pages

 

[spectre]

Yeah, I only recently actually played this thing, so the disappointment is still fresh to me.

I'll give you a treat then, in case you haven't seen it already:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/xcom-enemy-unknown-or-what-couldve-been.80462/
The butthurt must flow.

 

[Zero Credibility]

On the love side were hardcore fans of the original XCOM, who shared Solomon's affinity for the complexities of the game. On the hate side was everyone else, who couldn't understand what they were even looking at.

Oh, for fuck sake.

 

[Bony]

100 pages and I still don't know if I should play it. Should I ?

 

[Zeriel]

Do you like turn-based squad-level tactical combat? Despite all the shitty parts of the game, it's still fairly unique for having that nailed down solid. (For good turn-based combat that moves more quickly than a lot of real-time implementations I've seen, it's probably unrivalled.)

 

[Elim]

It's good for a 60% playtrough, then the game gets boring, because there is simply 0 suspense. It's...an entry title for TBS games.
I play X-Com even today, after all these years. This game couldn't even hold my attention for a month.
I hope Xenonauts will be good...

Edit: X-Com, not XCOM...god, it feels awful even implying something like this, thanks Morgoth. *Shudders*

 

[Zewp]

It's the type of game that popamoles play so they can feel 'sophisticated' and 'smart.'

As Elim said, xcom is still played up till today, but this new one has very little reason for you to play again once you've finished it once. Halfway through the first playthrough you've likely already seen everything the game has to offer, whereas the original xcom has so much variety you can play it multiple times and still find new things and ways to approach situations.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

100 pages and I still don't know if I should play it. Should I ?

there's plenty of better games like x-com (the true one, the one with the - in the name), jagged alliance 2 or ja2 1.13.

 

[Morgoth]

I play X-Com even today, after all these years.

Fixed for avoiding mass panic and confusion.

 

[Marobug]

If you can forget for a second it has the xcom name and if you can look past some questionable design decisions it's a decent squad based tbs actually.
Probably the best to come out in years though that's not necessarily saying much.

 

[Morgoth]

I want them to make a sequel with their own in-house engine. UE3 was a terrible choice for this kind of game, as it is tailored towards shooter.

I hope the console sales were abysmal so that a possible sequel can be made PC exclusive.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

If you can forget for a second it has the xcom name and if you can look past some questionable design decisions it's a decent squad based tbs actually.

no it isn't. it went full retard under every aspect. every single aspect.

 

[Misconnected]

100 pages and I still don't know if I should play it. Should I ?

Are you familiar with Basic D&D? If so, imagine how it would play if you down-scaled ranges & such to be suitable for 28mm gaming on a coffee table. That's FiraXcom on normal difficulty.

Oh higher difficulties FiraXcom becomes a sucking hole of boredom, because every mission is like running the exact same gauntlet, in the exact same way:

Every 2-3 turns you use 1 trooper to reveal a little bit of terrain.
If no enemies pop, you spend the next 1-2 turns positioning the unit to reveal more terrain.
If enemies pop, you spend the next 2-3 turns maintaining overwatch with 1 guy so the enemies stay put, while the rest of your unit kills them.
Repeat ad nauseam.

The lack of map variety, the idiotic ways you pop enemy spawns, and the lack of tactical options makes the game grow stale around the half-way point on normal difficulty. But considering the slim pickings, especially for PC-only gamers, it's probably worth the price of admission if you don't expect anything terribly deep or challenging. However, higher than normal difficulties get soul-crushingly boring very, very quickly. You'll literally have tried all the gameplay it offers, when you've beaten your first mission. In a very real sense, FiraXcom on higher difficulties is the very fucking definition of mindless grind.

There's also the not-so-small issue that the strategic layer - beyond being on rails and not even really pretending to be a dynamic campaign - offers just as little leeway as the tactical combat on higher difficulties. If you don't do the optimal thing at virtually every possible opportunity, you're going to die horribly. That might sound like a good thing on paper, but in practice it means you do the exact same thing in the exact same way every time. There's no way to shake things up or do things differently that won't get you a game over screen. So really, there's no strategy to speak of. It's a puzzle with just 1 solution.

 

[Galdred]

100 pages and I still don't know if I should play it. Should I ?

there's plenty of better games like x-com (the true one, the one with the - in the name), jagged alliance 2 or ja2 1.13.

Not really, there are a few better ones, like the ones you mentioned, but plenty is pushing it a little too far. The game is good, it just falls short of the masterpiece it tried to recreate, but not as short as all other XCom remakes I played before. It plays more like Incubation than XCom, with its boardgamey mechanics (incubation too had this bad habit of forcing some tactics through your throat).

Overall, it is still fun (until the base assault mission, then you can call it a win, and not painfully play through the last 2/3rd of the game without any challenge left) : if you can stomach the open ended geoscape turned into a linear "chose your mission among 3" railroad, the retarded spawning mechanism (but if you consider the game as a board game, and not some kind of simulation, it is quite ok), and the lack of inventory : it can still be good game in its board gamey way.

You should probably play it after you have played the afore mentionned classics plus a few others (Wh40K : Chaos Gate, Silent Storm and Fallout Tactics are decent if you don't mind the mission based linear campaign, and Battle Isle 4: Incubation if you want an even more streamlined mission based skirmish game), because the options in this genre are badly limited.

 

[Achilles]

100 pages and I still don't know if I should play it. Should I ?

Eh sure, give it a playthrough. It' not bad, it's just... boring.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

The game is utter shit,as everything Firaxis made post CIV.There is not a single decent dev that matter left in that fail studio.

 

[spectre]

there's plenty of better games like x-com (the true one, the one with the - in the name), jagged alliance 2 or ja2 1.13.

Any strategy gamer worth his salt already finished the good stuff ten times over.
Is it on par with the best the genre has to offer? No. But as we all can see, there's totally a fuckton of turn based tactical games out there.
Is it worth a playthrough or two? I guess so, but don't expect anything more. 1 playthrough to get the hang of it, 2 playthrough with proper ironman on classic/impossible and you're done. You've seen all the game has to offer. Maybe one more play to check out the Second Wave options.

Myself, I bit the bullet and bought it (because the demo was promising enough. unfortunately, the crack was fucked and you couldn't replace the dll references to make it run on XP as you could with the original version).
I managed to squeeze 1,5 full playthrough out of it, but all in all, it wasn't worth the money.

 

[Misconnected]

More than one playthrough and you're either shortbus material or the kind of guy who gets a kick out of watching paint dry. My earlier criticism stands: there's a very little bit of shit to do, but with solid if simple mechanics on normal & easier difficulties. Higher difficulties are just two puzzles, each with a single solution. And you're going to be solving one of those puzzles some 30 times or so. It really is the very damn definition of grind.

Are the UFO/AfterX games worse or better? The first of them is fucking terrible. The presentation is reasonably nice and the graphics won't make your eyes bleed even though they were pretty bad when the game came out and have only gotten worse since (the lack of virtues of 3D). The later two games in the series, though, are nowhere near as horrendously fucking mindlessly repetitive as FiraXcom. The RPG mechanics are maybe twice as complex, and about half as well-designed. But the framework within which you get to screw around with those mechanics - aka the actual game - is an order of magnitude more open in UFO2 and twice that in UFO3. So yeah, FiraXcom is a much better game for the first 3-4 days of in-game time. Beyond that, the UFO games are incredibly much better - and honestly, the UFO games are pretty fucking far from the standard the original X-COMs set for tactical TB combat based on a dynamic campaign. UFO 2 & 3 are more than worth the £5 or so they cost these days, if you're hugely into this sort of gameplay and have played all the good games. FiraXcom.... Is worth it if you're hugely into this sort of gameplay and have played both the good and the mediocre games.

But honestly, the gratis UFO AI fan project is a much better UFO game than FiraXcom, even if the environments aren't kind-of-sort-of destructible, and the 3D engine is 3-4 generations behind UE3.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

http://kotaku.com/5992122/this-is-what-the-first-playable-version-of-xcom-enemy-unknown-looked-like


So once upon a time Firaxis was working on a version closer to the original series. Then they scrapped it and went with the simpler plan.



The comment section is, of course, hilarious:

"I'm assuming they "ditched" it because the original gameplay doesn't hold up very well 20years later. The new game is a lot more strategic and modern."

 

[Galdred]

Higher difficulty missions do not have the same solution, these are mostly map dependent puzzle. The problem is that the most important skill is knowing the opponents' spawn points, which is cheap.

I did not really like Afterlight RT fireball combat, and its limited supply of soldiers, which forces you to abuse reloading. The lack of good squad scale tactical games is much worse than you make it sound

I thought I would resent them taking away the TU, but it's maybe the only change I like after all.