XCOM: Enemy Unknown Message Board older than one year ago

#xcom So while playing the 360 version of XCOM, we noticed a little hiccup that we hadn't seen on other versions. If you're in the barracks, and swap between a male and a female soldier, the game freaks out a little bit. More »

#xcom XCOM has a nice little surprise for those willing to go without achievements for the game: superhero "cheat" characters who, in addition to being maxxed out killing machines, are also famous video game developers. More »

Hah, ‘meet the team’ he says. Most of these guys won’t live long enough to realise they’re in a team. There is every chance they won’t even survive the first mission. Never mind, their sacrifice will not be in vain. It will be stupid, it will be embarrassing and it will be horrible, but it will not be in vain. Fighting for the future of humanity is a brave, terrified group of RPS writers past and present. Who, if any, will survive? I will be playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown on Classic difficulty and in Iron Man mode – so no mistakes can be rectified. Death is forever.

Are you sitting uncomfortably? Then let us begin.(more…)

#xcom If you're playing XCOM on PC, you might have noticed a little discrepancy between the standard in-game visuals and those of the game's cutscenes, which can look a little blurry. More »

#xcom I'll admit to rooting for XCOM: Enemy Unknown to be a hit ever since I got a speeding ticket coming home from a press preview event for it over the summer. Sure, I deserved it, but I wanted that embarrassment (and money) at least to be worth something. More »

Today's PS Store dump includes a barrage of full games as part of Sony's Day 1 Digital promotion and its ongoing indie focus. For full games, we have Dishonored, Birds of Steel, Devil May Cry HD Collection and The Testament of Sherlock Holmes.

PSN gets Retro City Rampage, The Walking Dead Episode Four: Around Every Corner, Derrick the Deathfin, Machinarium, Worms Revolution and more. Retro City Rampage is also hitting Vita, alongside Dr. Who: The Eternity Clock, Spy Hunter and Sunflowers.

Vita is getting three new PSOne Classics, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4, Destrega and Saiyuki: Journey West. There's also a free demo for this week's big release (that isn't Dishonored), XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and the Mechromancer DLC for Borderlands 2. Check out the complete lineup here.

Commander, to the living room console. Commander, to the living room console.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown's demo is available now on Xbox 360 to Xbox Live gold members. The demo will hit the PlayStation 3 following the regular PSN update later today, and be available tomorrow in Europe. The PC demo is already out there for discovery.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is available today at retail and will deliver close encounters of the awesome kind.

#beforeyoustart Two amazing games come out today: stealth-action-RPG Dishonored and strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Both are vastly different, but equally lovable. More »

How to succeed in XCOM's single player, straight from the dev.

#xcom Saving the world ain't easy. It takes strategy, preparation, determination and more than a little luck. So don't be thinking you can just fire up XCOM: Enemy Unknown and see alien corpses pile up at your feet. Go in with that attitude and the only corpses you'll see are those of your trusted and highly personalised XCOM soldiers. More »

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a turn-based strategy game, is getting pretty high marks across the board. We'll let that "turn-based strategy" bit sink in before we continue.... Okay, so, it is a strategy game from Firaxis, the studio behind the accessible Civilization series, which we said in our review "deftly blended management, tactics and the sort of gut-level, throaty encounters usually reserved for fast-paced action games."

• Edge (90/100): "Charting a course through Earth's imminent destruction is as unashamedly difficult as it was in 1994's X-COM. It's possible, through bad planning and bad management, to doom the planet early on, making the game feel unfair. Get it right, however - survive the stresses of management, and the strains of aliens - and you'll feel like world's greatest hero."
• Eurogamer (90/100): "So much craft has gone into its atmosphere, into innumerable small details that together add enormous depth and flavour to the world: the occasional conversations overheard while fiddling around in the base; the mission loading screen, which gives you a view of the troops inside the carrier, fidgeting and tapping their feet in transit; the ridiculously cute touch of soldiers acquiring nicknames like 'Longshot' or 'Odin' after a few missions; the memorial room for fallen warriors, with a cork board of photos on the wall, which records their names - and the fact that visiting it triggers, after a few seconds, the sound of a bagpipe march. "
• Destructoid (90/100): "I was disappointed EU didn't have a great story, at first. But, somewhere along the way, my own story played out through the game's intense missions and grueling decision making back at the base. My story is about an unlikely group of space heroes. After months of waging a seemingly impossible war, my elite squad of XCOM soldiers died."
• Polygon (85/100): "While tactical, squad-based combat has never felt so effortless and rewarding, the strategy component takes just enough away to make the game as a whole feel like two slightly disjointed halves. One of those halves just so happens to be one of the best and most artfully-designed strategy games in recent memory."
• IGN (82/100): "Recently Firaxis has been very willing to try new things with its franchises, and it's great to see both the revival of the XCOM franchise and the extension of strategy games on the consoles. You're still likely to want a bit more depth and surprise in the tactical game, but the campaign is full of tense moments that are sure to keep you coming back for more."

Sid Meier's I Love Mondays for Kinect, Gangnam Style!

Joystiq's resident strategy game fan, Alexander Sliwinski, examines XCOM: Enemy Unknown from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the series. How will other rookies react? Never played X-COM before? Cool, neither had I. Although the details are still hazy on how the hyphenated installments of the alien defense strategy series passed me by during the '90s, I am a turn-based strategy fan and I love me some sci-fi.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is one of the best and most accessible strategy games to come along in a long time, as evidenced by Joystiq's review. The game is split between the turn-based combat missions you'd see in a Final Fantasy Tactics, streamlined for a larger audience; and managing the resources and growth of XCOM's barracks, laboratories, workshops, satellite installations and more.

I can assure you that starting a game at the "normal" difficulty is imperative your first time through. The "classic" difficulty, even after I've beaten the game on normal and know the abilities of each alien species, is still a challenge. It's not that the aliens are overpowered, it's just that they're out to kill you in the classic mode as much as you're after them to usurp their tech. The normal difficulty setting won't regularly activate the aliens until you find them at your own pace.

#reviews Two vastly different, perhaps equally great games hit store shelves tomorrow, October 9th. And we've reviewed both. More »

My squad touches down in a wooded area, somewhere in the continental United States. The Skyranger's ramp lowers and my soldiers shuffle out. Dead animals litter the ground under the tree cover. I inch my squad members forward, toward the crashed UFO. I'm the one who shot it down, and I expect its occupants are none too happy about it. As my squad slowly creeps forward, wary of ambush, I notice strange pods scattered about the terrain. I have just enough time to wonder what they are before my point man, Cameron "Shield" Robertson, discovers three Muton soldiers - ugly, hulking brutes with equally nasty plasma rifles.

The Mutons scramble into cover, positioning themselves to fire. Before they have a chance, my heavy trooper readies a rocket launcher, sending its payload directly into the aliens, scorching their hides and blasting their cover to smithereens. Now fully exposed, the beasts make easy targets for my sniper, Sheng "Xeno" Lin. Thanks to some special training, he quickly settles into "the zone," taking out all three Mutons with three perfect shots in rapid succession.

The entire exchange is exhilarating, and I pat myself on the back for a job well done. Little do I know that I have just wasted my only rocket, and that I'll really regret it later on. It's choices like these, and their repercussions, that define XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Oh dear, it turns out it’s a first-person shooter with quick-time events and checkpoints after all. Move along, nothing to see here.

No, no, rest assured Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown is, like its 1993 predecessor X-COM: UFO Defense aka UFO: Enemy Unknown, a rich brew of turn-based strategy, base management, a sort of roleplaying and the sudden, frequent, horrible death of people you’ve developed an unhealthy fixation with. This remake, until fairly recently, seemed like an impossibility – large publishers had lost faith that big-budget strategy games could pay for their yachts, iPads and watches heavy enough to beat a donkey to death with, and the X-COM name was sullied by spin-offs that had about as much in common with it as Hulk Hogan has with Stephen Hawking. X-COM was over, surely.

X-COM is back. I’ve waited 15 years for this, and now I can wait no more. Here’s what I think. (Note – this write-up covers singleplayer only. Thoughts on multiplayer will follow at a later date).(more…)

Some aliens and their circular robotic friends conspire to bring down Ryan's team of bug stompers.

#xcom Don't worry: despite the theme and appearance of this launch trailer for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the game isn't a shooter. It's a strategy game. Which makes it kind of hard to sell, but hey. More »

Here's the launch trailer for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which invades retail next week. We will have our review prepped to launch on Monday at 8AM Eastern.

Very soon now, XCOM will launch. Much like a Skyranger emerging from an underground base it will cause people to point at it and go ‘ooooo, that’s spectacular’, of this I am sure. But unlike a Skyranger it won’t fly to a petrol station, unload a group of frightened human beings and then return home hours later with an empty hold and a pilot with a lament for fallen soldiers on his lips. Or maybe he just whistles nonchalantly and says he dropped them off at a party or at a beach resort. One without lobstermen. To celebrate the impending release, here are two videos. One uses footage of the game to make it look like a different game, while the other features lead designer Jake Solomon going undercover to sell the game. That’s the one to watch.

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That's a very big gun.

The crew at Firaxis is pretty passionate about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, few more so than lead designer Jake Solomon, who went to a local shop to pitch the upcoming game to customers. In his own special way, he tries to get customers to give the game a shot come launch day.

If you appreciate Solomon hamming it up, be sure to give our Gamescom podcast a listen, where he joins us as a guest with XCOM producer and designer Garth DeAngelis. They eventually get around to talking about XCOM, but it's a fun and bizarre journey before we get to that point. XCOM: Enemy Unknown will begin abducting your time October 9.

See how XCOM was first envisioned, and join Lead Designer Jake Solomon as he discusses why Firaxis made the changes they did.

Riddle me this: when is a trailer no longer a trailer? The answer, as it turns out, is not now. If you want to get up-close-and-personal with XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s extraterrestrial antics, the demo’s still (mostly) your best bet. But if, for some reason, you can’t play it (say, because you find it intimidating, don’t currently have a functional gaming PC, or recently became a horse), this is probably the next best thing. It’s basically a “choose your own tutorial,” but it does a solid, easily understandable job of breaking down the basics. Click some buttons and watch things happen after the break.

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#xcom More »

If you're unable to download XCOM: Enemy Unknown's PC demo due to a Sectoid incursion of your higher mental functions, check out this YouTube-based choose your own adventure video.

The fork-in-the-road style video lets you choose what will happen to your squad on a routine mission to give planetary outsiders a ticket to XCOM HQ's autopsy slab. Don't worry if rookies die. Rookies always die.

If you're looking for a less interactive XCOM viewing experience, you can always check out the hour-long playthrough by the developers.

The XCOM demo arrived yesterday, and immediately, violently divided opinion. This game could only ever divide option, of course, being as it is a remake of one of the most revered PC games of all time, but in this instance I think it’s dividing opinion for the wrong reasons. For various reasons, mostly due to its very minute amount of content (one entirely scripted mission, one on-rails tour of the base and one more too short, too-easy mission), it gives an impression of the game that isn’t altogether accurate. As a result of this, comments about the demo are a warzone of disappointment. In some ways – both good and bad – the demo does tell a true story. In others, it’s suggesting a much smaller and far more shallow game than the preview code we’ve been engrossed in, and for that reason I think it may have been a bit of a gaffe. Let me explain, in the form of a list.(more…)

To the Firaxis guys, using Giant Bomb staff as fodder is an acceptable strategy when combating aliens.

#xcom I've lost video game troops before. I've sent virtual men bravely to their digital deaths. In StarCraft, in Company of Heroes; in Warcraft and Civilization, I've sent heroic men and women to the front lines, never to return. Sometimes I feel a pang at an unnecessary loss, but most video game troops are just numbers to me. More »

XCOM: Enemy Unknown will have a PC demo available today on Steam, with a console version "available soon." The demo covers two levels of the strategy game's single-player tutorial campaign, which also introduces the XCOM base, where all the training, research and alien autopsies happen.

We've been impressed with how the game is shaping up so far, both its single-player campaign, seen in the video above, and multiplayer component. XCOM will admit new recruits on October 9.