The very best thing about the new XCOM, among a whole lot of very good things, is that it means I never have to play the original ever again.

That is a compliment to both it and its forebear. The fact that the original XCOM was not supplanted or surpassed by anything in eighteen years except its own remake is worthy of note. It was a great game – one of the classics – but I think most people who aren’t hopeless nostalgics or bitter grognards will agree that at a remove of nearly two decades it’s hard to even play, much less fully appreciate. That would require seeing past a 320×200 image cluttered with barely-decipherable little icons to control a game that expects you to micromanage every trivial detail, right down to whether your little dudes kneel or not.

Some people call what the new XCOM does “dumbing down.” I think a game where the world’s deadliest trained killers don’t need to be told how to duck behind a low wall has been smarted up.

Firaxis seems to have a knack for bringing the pleasures of narrative to unlikely game genres. Their 1999 classic Alpha Centauri used the framework of a 4X game – a genre where you don’t even control or interact with individual human beings – to tell a serious and thoughtful story about mankind’s likely futures. They’ve done it again here; while your individual soldiers are renameable and disposable (and too often disposed of!), they hang a straightforward but nonetheless compelling plot on a handful of iconic base personnel. A chilly female scientist, a humane and wise engineer, a no-nonsense colonel; they’re broadly-characterized, but they work. Their interactions and comments describe the contours of a linear videogame story, but within those contours ou are free to enjoy XCOM’s emergent, ever-shifting, ever-treacherous sandbox more-or-less as it was before – only better.

Ottoman Solo