An excellent evolution of Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. The gameplay is mostly the same -- you'll be alternating between a strategic worldmap and smaller 4-6 squad tactical battles as you work to overthrow an extraterrestrial regime. The tactical battles mostly work the same as the previous game (but with more variety in terms of missions, locations and enemies), which the strategic map (and your baseship) add another layer of strategy as you deal with managing priorities.



The game is much more challenging than Enemy Unknown was, with more hazards and surprises across the maps and opponents, and new mechanics (such as stealth insertions) help give it more variety. With more possibilities, threats and great squad characterization (both in terms of appearance and loadout), I found myself caring about my squad more and more -- every action that took felt like it could change the fate of the mission, and I was far more careful picking who to bring on my missions depending on my need and conditions. Overall, it is a great improvement over the previous Xcom. If you liked that game, you're going to love this game.



Controls handle well on the controller as well (which isn't a huge surprise, as controllers worked well for Xcom 1 on consoles), but there are some noticeable performance hitches. When the camera switches modes (cinematics, attacks, some movement), the framerate can drop down to a crawl (in the single digits at some points). This becomes more and more pronounced as the game goes on and you encounter enemies who are capable of doing more destruction (and using more physics/graphical resources in the process). They're temporary dips, but still very noticeable. The load times are also pretty bad -- missions can take up to a minute, and loading (or reloading) a save can take over a minute. It is still a very strong port, just not without its performance flaws. I'm tempted to deduct a star for all the performance problems, but the game is so fun that they're more of a minor annoyance than a huge issue.



Update: Downgrading this from five stars to three due to the performance problems. Framerate drops become much more common in the later game as you encounter enemies with flashier attacks or deal more environmental destruction. But the biggest issue is the load times. The load time after my most recent mission was 7 minutes, 12 seconds. Apparently the longer you play, the worse they become due to the save file building up. At this point, I've stopped playing the game -- a third of each mission is just waiting for the load time to end. No fix beyond starting a new game, and even then, it'll just occur again the longer you play.



Update 2: They put out a new patch as of Nov 29th that greatly reduces the load times -- I've gone from 9 minutes to 2 minutes. Re-upping my rating back to five stars, but my advice is only buy/play this game if you can patch it first. Using the base retail version without a patch is nearly unplayable.



As a note, even though this came out 6+ months after the PC version, this is just the base game and not a compilation of all the content on the PC. The DLC that was released for the PC is available as a separate purchase on the PSN.