I’ve never had the patience to play turn based games until I tried Civilization 5 and Revolution, these games turned me 180 degrees around when it comes to this types of games.

Story

An alien invasion is in progress and the world leaders decide that it’s time to start the Xcom project. This is your project that you have 100% control over it, and it’s up to you to make easy and difficult choices regarding research and development of your base and soldiers. Not to mention do everything in your power to stop the invasion at all costs.

Base

Your base are your playground outside of the battlefield, this is where you can do you research on aliens and alien technology to be able to defeat them. In order to get this research starting and continuing, you will have to gather killed aliens from your mission and capture each race alive so you can interrogate them for better research. In the beginning of the game do you have to choose your base location, the locations you have to choose between are North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Each of these locations has their own continent bonus that you will benefit from right from the start. You can also earn the other bonuses as well if you get full satellite coverage in the respective countries/continents.

Besides the research and council communication, you also have the engineering, barracks, hangar and the situation room. At the engineering station can you take the final results from research and build weapons and such, you can also improve your current equipment and build new facilities for better and faster results and improve your base.

The barracks is where you have full view of the status for your soldiers, you can use the officer training school, view the memorial of your fallen soldiers, and you can also hire new recruits if you’re in lack of soldiers. When you’ve built the PSI labs, you can send three soldiers at the time to see if they have psionic abilities. The ones that have these abilities are in my opinion the most valuable soldiers you can get, as they can resist mind play from the enemies and actually use it on them in stead

In the hangar is it very limited of what you can do, but there’s always something. This is where you can view your aircrafts and improve them with the purchased weapons you’ve researched and built. You also have the status report for the aircrafts here as well.

Situation room is the room where you find the panic level bars over the respective countries. You also have the Xcom finance sheet so you can easily track your finances and see if you need to make some changes on the base. You have the grey market where you can sell the overflow of alien corpses and items you’ve gathered from your successful missions. Finally there are the pending requests, it’s here other countries can ask for certain items for a price of money, engineers or scientists.

Support

The project is founded by 16 countries which have a council member each. It’s important that you keep these countries in the project and don’t let the panic level rise to high, if the panic level get too high in a specific country will they pull out of the project and you will earn less monthly. If eight or more countries leave the project will it be terminated and the game is over.

Soldiers

Every soldier will gain access to upgrades along with their new ranks, and the better rank the better the upgrades will be. At every new rank there are usually two upgrades you have to choose between, so choosing wisely and for what’s best for your team will probably be the best choice. There are more upgrades for some of the soldiers, but that’s only available for those who have psionic abilities.

The soldiers with the psionic abilities are the most valuable soldiers you can get, so equipping them with the best gear would be a great idea. What’s cool is that if you’re good at doing the research, you will be able to fight the aliens with their own technology, which is awesome by the way. The weapons and armour the aliens are using are overpowered equipment compared to what you’re starting out with.

The Aliens

The enemy consists of 13 different alien species and upgraded species. Some of them are robots and other a combination of alien and robot, almost like a cyborg alien. Every species has its own way of fighting or special ability, and some other is just harder to kill. Some of the special abilities can be spitting acid, to use mind control and take control over one or more of your soldiers for a certain amount of turns or until you kill it.

Turn based strategy

Xcom: Enemy unknown is as I said earlier, a turn based game. This only applies to the battlefield where you have to be strategic about your movements and line of sight. When you’re on the battlefield will your soldiers only have two actions per soldier per turn, so just using both actions in just moving will most likely get your team killed unless you do it at the right times. You can always use over watch with some of your soldiers and then move forward two tiles under cover. This strategy will get you far sometimes but not always, so you always have to think before you act.

Engaging the enemy only from one side usually give you more trouble than you need, using the flanking method and remember the line of sight will give you the upper hand any time. Flanking the enemy will also sometimes give you an extra action with certain classes, but this is only if you’ve unlocked the right skills.

Taking cover

Using cover will usually protect you against the enemy attacks, but not every cover will be able to sustain the damage output that the enemy deal. This means that things that you can use as cover can be destroyed and reveal you completely, and you will most likely take damage. This can of course also be used against your enemy as a strategy, the only flaw with that is that you have to use one action or turn with a soldier to reveal the enemy that way. I think this is a cool feature, as you can really damage your surroundings if you like. But you always have to be careful when you’re going in for a crashed UFO, that’s a perfect opportunity to gather alien technology for your research.

Conclusion: This is one of the best turn based games I’ve played. Even though the graphics isn’t the best, it’s a great game with a high entertainment value.

Rating: 9/10