I'll paste some interesting paragraphs:
XCOM is a first-person shooter, set in the 1950s. Deep breath. This is not a time to panic. This alien invasion is an occasion to celebrate. Consider what those original strategy games were about. An implacable alien menace threatened the world. You were in charge of an agency that investigated these otherworldly horrors, engaged them in direct combat when it could find them, and poured vast funds and research into developing and improving countermeasures.
That's exactly what XCOM does.
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This isn't a linear shooter, either. Your base's phonetappers and police-radio scanners present you with choices as to where to go next and what to do, picked from a large map of the US. Rumours of animal attacks and strange weather patterns in a certain state? Sounds like Blobs are on the rampage. Saddle up, Agent Carter. Grab the wheel of your hulking fedmobile, take two of your best men with you, and go see what's going on
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Your goal here isn't to kill every alien in the place. XCOM doesn't work like that. It's incredibly unlikely that you'll comb every area of one of its wide-open mission maps, as health, ammo and armour are strictly limited to whatever you brought in with you. If your bullets – or, more pertinently, those flame grenades – are in short supply, you won't be able to hold out much longer. The alien presence grows and grows the longer you stay, so you need to make a judgement call between trying to gather more evidence and simply staying alive. Your car's just down the road – you could leave right now, knowing the photos you've taken and notes you've scribbled will still be some use in establishing the nature of this enemy unknown.
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Also, there's Elerium here somewhere. This incredibly rare alien element is crucial for the construction of new weapons, armour and gadgets, but seizing it involves enormous risk.
More Blobs. You'll need to take them down if you want this precious spacerock. Check health, check ammo, check grenades. Every shot counts.
By the time it's over, both your agents are asphyxiated, smouldering corpses, and the formerly pristine house is a mess of scorched walls, shattered windows and broken furniture. You have your Elerium, but at what cost? It's probably time to get out of here, but you know full well you've explored barely a third of this area. There's always more evidence, more aliens, more Elerium. Maybe it's worth persevering just a little longer... And that's when the sky splits in two.
Stanley Kubrick's psychedelic nightmares are made flesh as an enormous monolith shudders out of the horizon, the accompanying mist and lightning blocking out the daylight. Before your eyes, this cubist deathmachine – is it a creature, a spacecraft, a building, all of the above? – transforms. First, into a ring of smaller, diamond-shaped artifacts, and then into two concentric rings, like a gaping metal maw. The rings suck. All the furniture of the house you're in is dragged towards it, smashing through what few windows remain. Run. Your guns have no effect here. Run.
Outside, reality seems to distort as the thing increases its power, carving a great furrow down the tarmac road. You're pushed and bashed about horribly as you try to get away, besieged from all sides by newly-arrived Blobs as well as by this hulking Titan. Honestly, you can't do anything about this. Not this time. You have to run, get to the Interceptor, get away while you still can. Maybe those eggheads back in the lab will be able to build you something, so next time you can bring this faceless horror down to Earth. But not this time. Run.
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"One of the things that we wanted to move away from was the kitsch or the expected from these creatures," says Pelling. "Creating a set of enemies loaded with preconceptions really undermines the game. Part of the impact of seeing our aliens is that they're not bipedal things walking around, it's something completely different. We want you to look at them, study and explore them."
Well, for a little while. Again, you don't take on these missions expecting to snoop around every corner and execute every alien you find, rather to gather as much evidence as you can before you have to leave. The better equipped you are, the longer you'll be able to stay.
This stay-or-go structure is a re-creation of the original X-COM's missions. Yes, killing everything would mean success, but that wasn't always possible. If half your team was dead and most of your ammo was spent, it was fruitless to hang around. Gather any alien tech and corpses you can, then get out of there.
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So, is this XCOM really our beloved X-COM? "We're forging a new mythology, but what we're retaining is the core elements that made X-COM X-COM," says Pelling. "The strategy, the base, the research, agents, being in charge, and dealing with this problem as you see fit. You are the one that's driving the investigation – those elements remain but we want to create a new world with a new set of enemies that's genuinely compelling for players to learn more about."
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X-COM was a game about investigating an alien invasion of Earth at your own speed, by your own means. So is XCOM. You can start believing.
Check out the full preview and the very odd screenshots here.
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