I’ve been playing unfinished code for major XCOM expansion Enemy Within.Here are some early impressions for you.

XCOM has a confession to make. All this time it’s been carrying on like it’s a militaristic strategy game (albeit with aliens and robots and psychics), but really, really it’s been a superhero game all along. With major expansion Enemy Within, it proudly rips open its shirt, throws its spectacles to the wind and brazenly displays the lurid spandex beneath. My current squad, for instance, is led by a Mexican in a bright pink mech suit, wearing a matching tribly. He can spray flames from his hands. He can leap over small buildings. He can seep healing gas from whatever’s replaced his pores. He is, in short, about as far away as soldiers get from the mopey-looking, meandering dudes in overalls who characterised X-COM.

With Enemy Within, XCOM and X-COM almost entirely part company. While that’s a statement that would have seen 2011 me immediately take my seat in the Angry Tank, here’s why 2013 me is absolutely convinced this accentuated divergence is only a good thing.(more…)