XCom: Enemy Unknown has taken over my Steam friends list in the same way that FTL: Faster Than Light did a few weeks ago. XCom is bigger, flashier and, I think, more important than FTL – largely connected to the reasons that Ben Kuchera laid out earlier this week in his essay at Penny Arcade Report.

In short, this is a game that could determine the future of Firaxis as a studio. It is undoubtedly their most expensive game, it is quite unlike anything that team has made before – both in appearance and underlying technology – and if it’s as big a sales success as 2K hopes then it will free the studio from the Civilization Forever graveyard (though if they ever get to work on their own new, original IP is an open question.) I don’t think that Hartman’s comments about the pointlessness of strategy games were some long con or trolling; I honestly think he had zero expectations for the strategy XCom having any legs at all. I hope that the gaming population proves him wrong.

This is not a game that will change the fortune of AAA caliber strategy games, however. We may see more tactical games like this in other settings, games that will crib heavily from XCom and similar titles. But most people who play it will see it as an alien shooting game with a neat RPG mechanic; even if they love it, many will not make the connection between the planning, resource hoarding & tough decision making and the wider world of strategy games, including smaller similarly awesome games like Frozen Synapse. Strategy gaming is a huge genre and squad-based tactical games like this are a tiny part of that.

XCom is, as many have noted, almost the ideal remake. It captures what much of what made the first XCom so appealing but updates it for a newer multi-platform audience. It is probably one of the first strategy games to get the cinematic aspect of gaming right; the cutscenes are terrible of course, but [Read more →]