XCOM: Enemy Within

Since this game is an expansion pack of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and I've reviewed the original title here, I'll just use this review as an expansion of my original review! With XCOM: Enemy Within, you get close to the exact same core game as XCOM: Enemy Unknown but with some additional missions and slight modifications of the original game. It's otherwise the same turn-based, third-person, squad based, RPG, save-the-world-from- invading-aliens tactical shooter.

Additional content:

The additional missions revolve around having to deal with an organisation known as "EXALT", which are human collaborators with the alien invaders. These missions are entirely new and have not appeared in XCOM: EU, nor have the EXALT forces. You might think that having to fight against humans would be a doddle, but these humans have been genetically modified and are, of course, quite challenging to defeat, especially early on in the game.

Modifications to gameplay:

1) The original missions from XCOM: EU can now feature new alien types...two, to be exact: firstly, there are "Seekers", which...I'll let you discover them for yourselves! Secondly, there are Mechtoids, which are basically a greatly buffed up Sectoid...Sectoids on steroids, so to speak...not literally though...which you could say about EXALT...if you wanted to.

2) Your own XCOM troops can now be modified. There are two types of modifications: you can either genetically modify your troops (akin to what the EXALT forces do) or you can mechanise your troops...sort of turning them into a RoboCop, if you will.

3) Lastly, you are able to recruit some troopers which have a backstory, so you get a more narrative based experience (towards the end of the game, at least).

XCOM: EW is the definitive version of this game because you get basically the same game as XCOM: EU but with the additional content. One difference though is that these two games have entirely different trophy sets...you could play the expansion first and get the Platinum trophy and then play XCOM: EU and find yourself having no trophies for that when you start playing it! Personally, I found chasing some of the trophies in the original game a chore, especially when they glitched out, meaning that I played the game a whole lot more than I otherwise would have, because one trophy required you to win from a different starting continent...I'm assuming that a software update has fixed that glitch (fortunately!). The trophies for the expansion are less of a grind and there's less of them to collect.

Speaking of faults which have been fixed, I think that the "teleportation glitch" from XCOM: EU has been fixed for the expansion. If I recall correctly, that glitch basically made the aliens materialise on top of your squad, giving you no time to make your squad battle ready.

Murphy's Law dictates that something must go wrong to compensate for these fixes. In my opinion it's a big one: the randomness of your difficulty can be pretty close to intolerable if you choose to play in the hardest mode where the game autosaves after your turn. For example, I've had more than one mission (early on in the game, mind!) where I would be facing multiple enemies of the very hard to kill variety...in Terror Missions, mind, where you are trying to save civilians from being killed by the aliens. Not playing on the hardest difficulty level of this game which autosaves after your turn, I'd restart the mission and find myself having a much more acceptable mix of aliens. On more than one mission, I'd be faced with a mix of aliens which pretty much guaranteed that your entire squad would die, because there were so many hard-to-kill aliens in the mix. A more intelligent dealing out of aliens would be appreciated. As it stands, you can't really say whether the people who completed this game on a hard level all had the same level of difficulty.

Having mentioned above that I didn't play the game on the hardest difficulty setting (the one with the autosave), I'll repeat the reason why (I mentioned this in my review of XCOM: EU): when I played XCOM: EU for the first time, the game beat me. That made me not trust the game as it would be entirely possible to sink hours, if not days and weeks into this game and have it all count for nothing as the game ends abruptly because you can't keep your organisation viable. So, in order to not play this game countless times, I just scumsaved...i.e. if a mission was going badly, I'd just reload a previous save and save when I was doing better in the mission. So, even though I am far from elite at this game, I have to tell you that even with my scumsaving, it was extremely difficult to achieve what I wanted to achieve...i.e. have none of my soldiers die and have none of them receive critical injuries (I did the latter because I learned that your soldiers suffer permanent deterioration to their battle effectiveness if that happens). Meeting those twin objectives could often be a grind for me...the game really, really wants your soldiers (or your entire squad!) to die! There was definitely a sense of satisfaction gained for me by not having any of my soldiers die or lose critical health (apart from the tutorial mission, where you lose all but one of your starting squad).

My score reflects the peculiar way that I approached playing this game. If I tried playing this game "normally" and had the autosave feature enabled I have no doubt this game would have been immensely frustrating and induced rage-quit in me! That would be mainly for the reason I gave before...just the randomness of the mix of aliens you face...you could face aliens in a mission which would be pretty much impossible to defeat when your squad haven't had enough time to upgrade their equipment yet.