XCOM: Enemy Within

Reviewing XCOM: Enemy Within is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman. You’ll end up trying various body modifications and mechanical augmentations in your lengthy quest for success, but ultimately you’ll still end up defeated with this horrible squelchy alien-looking stuff everywhere.

You can cripple yourself by choosing to help the wrong countries

Enemy Within is an expansion to last year’s Enemy Unknown; it doesn’t bring a new campaign to the table but it does bring a bunch of new elements. New maps, new enemy units, a new mini-campaign centred on fighting a human enemy with similar equipment to your forces and the new option to bring Gene Mods and Cybernetics to battle. The latter capability has a profound effect on proceedings, as it allows you to transform individual soldiers into walking tanks. I’ve checked a number of sources (Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Metal Gear Solid 4 and that stupid Robocop movie with the walking tank) and can confirm that walking tanks can be relied upon to often make the difference when it comes to shooting things in the face. Here they’re called MEC units, and are a simple and pure joy to order about. You have to look after them, as they are expensive and often surprisingly vulnerable on the battlefield, but it’s worth it as they regularly dole out massive damage to your enemies and look cool while doing it.

enormous alien insectoids will feast on your soldiers’ faces

The Gene Mods offer less essential benefits but for a couple of exceptions. For example, fitting the Adaptive Bone Marrow modification to a soldier will give them regenerative health (to a point), and also see them recover from injuries sustained in battle far more quickly. While we’re on the subject, rest assured, your soldiers will still be sustaining plenty of injuries in battle this time around. After all, we’re still talking XCOM here; it’s a stiff challenge and not just when you’re on a mission. The broader decisions taken between squad excursions require focus, foresight and involved planning even on normal, and for newcomers now faced with the new features and conundrums brought to the table by this expansion, it is likely to be utterly baffling. On Classic difficulty, which I’d recommend as the only sensible setting for veterans of last year’s game, every decision you take for the first couple of months is crucial. You can cripple yourself by choosing to help the wrong countries, or by failing to concentrate solely on building satellites during that opening period. As before, once you’re over the hump, i.e. you’ve stuck Plasma Rifles in every soldier’s hands and can mind control any aliens who aren’t incinerated by said Plasma Rifles, the game becomes a lot easier as you go on. Getting to that point is still richly rewarding, and pleasingly addictive.

The little touches have warmed my heart considerably, as someone who has a great deal of affection for both old and new school XCOM. In Enemy Unknown last year after ordering a soldier to fire on an enemy you would then instantly know whether or not the alien was going to die because the game would use a specific camera angle – Enemy Within does away with that suspense-draining habit. Also, you can now press a button to un-equip all items from soliders in the barracks, which saves much time when loading your little guys up for battle.

My favourite change is that you can set an option to have soldiers speak in languages other than English. Russian soldiers become threatening (and sexier), Italian all bouncy and jovial (a little sexier), Spanish throaty (even sexier still) and Scottish soldiers still speak in American (but yeah, ok, they’re the still the sexiest I guess). This also all doubles as a great way to learn a new foreign language. “Oh God my face has been eaten by that enormous alien insectoid thing”, contains a healthy mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives for you to feast on, in much the same way that enormous alien insectoids will feast on your soldiers’ faces.

To sum up, there’s a new mission you get sent on in Enemy Within that effectively takes you into the heart of a Chryssalid nest, and then tasks you with escaping within a set number of turns. If you don’t know what Chryssalids are, let me tell you: Chryssalids are total bullshit, that’s what they are. I had to start that mission over twice, because it required such a shift from my usual play-style. I swore at Enemy Within and told it that it is a stupid game, but I tried one last time, figured it out and beat the mission without losing anyone. Just like Enemy Unknown, it isn’t quite Dark Souls but it’s in the same ballpark – if you’re prepared to fail and learn from your mistakes, the game will reward you.