As your soldiers gain experience, they also unlock valuable promotions that open up new abilities. In between the strategic management phases, you’ll lead small squads of XCOM soldiers in turn-based tactical battles in a variety of locations – from cities to fields to highways to alien bases. You want to make the right decisions because that’s what’s going to keep your soldiers alive. It’s best to think of your first game as a learning experience. Even your basic goals are largely open-ended at the beginning of the game, despite the presence of key research and infrastructure decisions that are vital to your early success. Still, a few of the essential choices are presented in an either/or format and you may not realize the choice you ought to have made until it’s too late to do anything about it. ![]() That doesn’t necessarily count that as a criticism, because the pressure of having to keep pace with the escalating threat and learning from your catastrophic mistakes is part of the game’s charm. ![]() Unfortunately, in order to create that tension XCOM ramps up the difficulty and leaves you in the dark about some pretty important goals. When you combine that with the overall tone of the game, which emphasizes a DEFCON style countdown to a complete alien takeover, the whole experience is fantastically tense and engaging. Do you pull a trooper off of active duty to undergo psionic training or do you keep him out in the field where he can get better at his core skills? Do you spend your budget producing satellites to help locate UFOs or do you spend that same money producing interceptors to be sure you can shoot down the few UFOs you do locate? Every moment of XCOM is defined by these either/or decisions where every move involves some sort of sacrifice or compromise. ![]() The absolute best aspect of XCOM is the sense that there’s never enough time or resources to do everything that needs to be done.
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