Let me be blunt: while this game MIGHT end up being OK as an FPS on its own merits, it has pointedly chosen to be judged as an X-COM game (despite the lack of hyphen). And as an X-COM game, it's pathetic. It's linear (missions are pre-generated to advance the "story" and scripted), shallow (you can only take 2 agents into the field with you at once and they level up along set lines), lacks any of the difficulty or tension of the original (since you play a precreated character obviously there's no risk of "losing" him otherwise you'd just get a game over), pointlessly muddled (who cares about the social setting aspect of the story when ALIENS are invading?!) and the action is mindless, generic, cover-based shooting.
Play the original X-COM for an hour. You had to choose where in the world to build your bases, what facilities to upgrade them with, how to equip them. You would deploy squads of up to 12 men or women right off the bat, with casualty rates of over 50% being COMMON in the early missions before you developed proper weapons, armour and more experienced soldiers. You had to expand your operations based on funding from the various world governments while repelling the aliens on a global scale to keep them from infiltrating humanity and cutting off your support. You had to shoot down the alien UFOs as they performed their missions and raid the crash sites for whatever you could scavenge, respond to enemy terror strikes before they had a devastating effect on your public support. You had to perform the research necessary to determine the aliens' plans yourself, eventually finding their base and destroying them in a mission you constructed and organised YOURSELF, in your own time- yet in a race against the clock before the Earth's inevitable defeat. And if you didn't want a mission to end in a total wipe-out- (which DIDN'T actually cause an immediate "game over") you had to be a tactical genius, scouting, using cover for protection, laying down covering fire, destroying terrain. The designer talks about how the original game was "overwhelming"? Well, that just proves that he's COMPLETELY the wrong person to be working on a game marketed with the 'X-COM' name. The game was deep. It was brilliant. And, despite being released in 1994, it makes this piece of rubbish look like cheap, shallow crap.
Like I said, this game may have its own merits, although to be honest I'm not really that impressed by the trailer- the graphics are unimpressive, especially the creepy uncanny-valley character models, despite the alien design being intially impressive when you see they just play as "creepy looking gun-toting humans" any sense of fighting aliens just goes to waste, and completing missions seems to be more based on "give the correct command to solve this scripted problem" rather than using your head. But if they call it XCOM they immediately burden the game with the demand that it live up to the X-COM franchise- and this is a total failure. This is NOT X-COM. It does not recapture the feel of X-COM, it does not invoke the spirit of X-COM, it does not do justice to the brilliant gameplay depth of X-COM. If they'd called the game ANYTHING else I would certainly have been more generous to it, but they really have shot themselves in the foot. I feel fully justified in pre-judging this and I judge it not even slightly worth my time.
Now excuse me, I'm going back to blast some more Ethereals before they manage to overrun my underground base in Central Europe.
Play the original X-COM for an hour. You had to choose where in the world to build your bases, what facilities to upgrade them with, how to equip them. You would deploy squads of up to 12 men or women right off the bat, with casualty rates of over 50% being COMMON in the early missions before you developed proper weapons, armour and more experienced soldiers. You had to expand your operations based on funding from the various world governments while repelling the aliens on a global scale to keep them from infiltrating humanity and cutting off your support. You had to shoot down the alien UFOs as they performed their missions and raid the crash sites for whatever you could scavenge, respond to enemy terror strikes before they had a devastating effect on your public support. You had to perform the research necessary to determine the aliens' plans yourself, eventually finding their base and destroying them in a mission you constructed and organised YOURSELF, in your own time- yet in a race against the clock before the Earth's inevitable defeat. And if you didn't want a mission to end in a total wipe-out- (which DIDN'T actually cause an immediate "game over") you had to be a tactical genius, scouting, using cover for protection, laying down covering fire, destroying terrain. The designer talks about how the original game was "overwhelming"? Well, that just proves that he's COMPLETELY the wrong person to be working on a game marketed with the 'X-COM' name. The game was deep. It was brilliant. And, despite being released in 1994, it makes this piece of rubbish look like cheap, shallow crap.
Like I said, this game may have its own merits, although to be honest I'm not really that impressed by the trailer- the graphics are unimpressive, especially the creepy uncanny-valley character models, despite the alien design being intially impressive when you see they just play as "creepy looking gun-toting humans" any sense of fighting aliens just goes to waste, and completing missions seems to be more based on "give the correct command to solve this scripted problem" rather than using your head. But if they call it XCOM they immediately burden the game with the demand that it live up to the X-COM franchise- and this is a total failure. This is NOT X-COM. It does not recapture the feel of X-COM, it does not invoke the spirit of X-COM, it does not do justice to the brilliant gameplay depth of X-COM. If they'd called the game ANYTHING else I would certainly have been more generous to it, but they really have shot themselves in the foot. I feel fully justified in pre-judging this and I judge it not even slightly worth my time.
Now excuse me, I'm going back to blast some more Ethereals before they manage to overrun my underground base in Central Europe.
