"Re-imagining? Remake? Whatever it is, XCOM brings back and revitalises a classic." This is your typical viewpoint during battle, here giving a great view of a Cyberdisc that's flown in behind my position and started a merry massacre of the poor troops.
Which nations can XCOM not afford to lose? With 'Ironman' mode activated, which ties a game to a single autosave, I guarantee you'll find out. It's relatively easy to keep nations happy on Normal difficulty, unless you fail missions repeatedly, but on Classic it's a whole other matter. The ones left to fend for themselves move closer to mass panic, and if a threshold is reached will permanently abandon XCOM. Successfully completing missions lowers the panic level, but only in that country. Running XCOM is about balancing budgets, but also nations if there are three attacks in different parts of the globe, you can only respond to one. There are always new things to fiddle with and read and choices to be made. The surface sheen is a gorgeous, zoomable 3D map of the facilities you've built, which whooshes into and out of rooms as you burrow into the nested menus - studying recovered alien technology, expanding XCOM's global coverage and training up an army.
The base management owes much to the original X-Com, but also to Kojima Productions' masterful Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and its Mother Base. This combination of genres is unusual even 18 years later, but works because of the multiple ways the two worlds intersect - the most obvious and irresistible through-line being how the XCOM troops evolve over time, from standard-issue grunts to plasma-wielding psychic warriors in cloaking suits, depending on how research and manufacturing are juggled. You play as the Commander of the eponymous task force set up to defend Earth from a new extraterrestrial threat, responsible for both the organisation's overall management and directing the ground battles. Re-imagining? Remake? Whatever it is, XCOM brings back and revitalises a classic.
XCOM absorbs you into a universe of Tonka toy soldiers and B-movie science-fiction, a rich and smartly streamlined strategy experience that's a hell of a credit to the design of the 1994 original. I know it's Big Game season, but this is so good I've chalked up 43 hours in four days and want more in the near future.
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