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Why XCOM still matters

 

Having already dismembered and unspeakably violated the once pristine corpse of Duke Nukem 3D, 2K Games are ready to risk making themselves leprous pariahs amongst PC gamers of a certain age and stripe by taking it upon themselves to ‘reboot’ the XCOM franchise. With a prequel. That looks like it will include NOTHING from the original that made it such a timeless classic. So why do we still care? For those of you that somehow haven’t played the original yet, we’ve done a wee review of why it’s still one of the best strategy games of all time. For those of you who have played it, well done. Have a Jaffa Cake and read on. You’re going to avoid that work one way or another, and you can’t check your Facebook again already can you? Can you? No? Good. Let’s crack on then. Less

 

First up, the game has a whole feel of its own. You know how in most games, there’s a guy who gives you your assignment, tells you where to go next, how to use your guns and which bad guys to kill on this level? In X-Com, you are that guy. The guy you normally are is but one of a legion of minions that do your bidding. Sounds good already, right? Damn straight. You are the commander of a whole organization, the whole world is your main mission map, and the first time you play the game you have literally no idea of how you’re actually going to beat these alien dudes. Just like in real life. You’ll have to research new techs, build them, replicate alien equipment on earth and keep your politician overlords happy, all on a hugely stringent budget. This will also turn you into the kind of callous, cost/benefit analyzing bastard-at-the-top you actually hate in real life. You’re actively encouraged to see your soldiers as expendable walking bullet dispensers, you’ll cut corners to save money, let people die if they are not key to the organization as a whole, and you can (and will) exploit a bug that lets you jib your entire research staff out of their hard earned paychecks every month. You just don’t care any more. You’re a cross between Rupert Murdoch and Chairman Mao, except the hacked phones are your employees chance to feed their family, and your shot-in-the-head dissidents are actually shot-in-the-head aliens. Your only excuse is to tell yourself that the future of the human race is hanging on your blood-stained murderous hands. Which does actually kind of help. I bet that’s what Mao actually told himself whilst he sipped Bovril before beddybyes.

 

The feel of the game is maintained impeccably throughout, and as such, the combat side of the game usually carries a creepy tension that Kubric would be proud of, a sublime blend of tense gameplay mechanics, genuinely scary aliens (new breeds keep popping up throughout the game, and decimating your previously invulnerable squad) and the most dramatically engrossing minimal soundtrack ever written in 24 bit bleeps. It all comes together to create an ambience, and a vibe, that really does suck you in and make the alien war feel personal. And when a game this old still makes itself feel personal, and real, and important to you, then that is the ultimate litmus test of that je ne sais quoi that all the best games have in abundance. Character. Heart. Soul. Whatever it is, that little something that makes you remember a game fondly for the rest of your life, it’s here in X-Com in absolute spades. You’ll remember the tension. The amount of tries it took to complete it. The games you had to abandon halfway through because the aliens found out where your base was and now THIRTY FRICKIN HOURS of play time are down the drain and you have to start again with nothing. These are things that will still stir in your heart if you played the game back in the day. This is why we are so damn worried. Like Duke Nukem, X-Com is more than just a nostalgia trip, it’s a legacy from a time when games were the perpetual entertainment underdog, when they were less slick, less flash and made less money than even today’s most half assed, rushed, buggy and badly designed button-basher. Games are feeling increasingly like just another product. Between the advent of DLC meaning games now come out up to a year before they are “finished” (as the word used to mean), developers recycling the same engines as much as possible, game consumers getting screwed in increasingly obvious ways and with quality new ideas getting thinner and scarcer by the day, the original X-Com game harks back to when games had to be well thought out to be noticed, and were usually something that felt like a lot of love and time and painstaking attention to detail were involved in. It makes us think of the games that felt really special in an era where all games felt more special. And to take that nostalgic love and to turn it into another ‘tactical-action FPS’ because you know it will make money off the name alone is nothing short of criminal. Release this game by all means, and if it’s still a good game then it will still sell and all will be happy. Just don’t release any game under the X-Com name until you’ve made a game that will be the spiritual as well as nominal successor to the Microprose classic, otherwise you’ll be known as the Fools Who Ruined 90s PC Gaming. And that will do more damage to sales and credibility long term than any mediocre appendage to a great gaming legacy can ever generate in the short term.