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618 - Intergalatic Chess — Description
This is not a critique on XCOM itself, but rather making an observation.

Why am I always playing as the US military, or some variation of that in this tiresome game of Humans Vs Aliens? Maybe I’d like to play as the Inslaverious monsters from beyond the stars for once.

Guy: Inslaverious is not a word.
Me: IT IS NOW!!!

That and it’s always the same kind of scenario. “Aliens are pricks and only Murca can save the day!” A narrative that’s beginning to grate with all these bloody films, TV shows, comics and games that basically deliver the message of “AMERICA IS FUCKING AWESOME!!!” while it would be nice if the rest of the world were more fucking competent in these interplanetary warfare games.

Not that that’s entirely XCOM’s fault, for the troops were from all countries and genders…. That were like lambs to the slaughter since I fucking suck at tactical role-playing games.

So from what I understood about the game from the intro. The human race is, once again, under attack from “evil aliens #4572” and a secret military unit called XCOM is tasked with eradicating the alien menace once and for all.

Just so you understand. I’m not calling XCOM: Enemy Within a bad game. It did what it set out to do, but I merely could not get my head around it and lost pretty quickly. Nor am I saying that the genre itself is bad. I’m more of a run in, guns blazing kinda guy. However the point of these Experiments is to go in blind and see if I can enjoy myself. Just because I didn’t understand it, doesn’t mean I’m going to call the game a useless sack of shit for not “catering to my preferred preferences”

I’m not IGN or Zero Punctuation!

It didn’t start off that way, I was doing an okay job until the game took the training wheels off. It did remind of the board sections from Mega Man: Battle Network 5 and Project X Zone. Except that instead of engaging a RPG battle, you instead fire guns or throw grenades. Like I said, I was doing okay at first until the game expanded upon concepts and I began to lose track of a few things.

First, it asked me to build satellites, then upgrade weapons tech, keep an eye out for alien activity, report to the council, then build new facilities, hire new troops, build uplinks, prepare a containment field and I think by that point my head exploded.

I was more interested in going from mission to mission. It gives you this world map to respond to attacks or to maintain order. Yet I couldn’t access anything until the satellite detected alien movement. Which would mean long periods of time of nothing really happening. Then the difficulty increased and newer aliens were introduced. I think I went through more men than Lady Gaga after a few rounds of Smirnoff Ice.

Some weird things happened that maybe XCOM veterans can help explain to me. One alien got a lucky shot on one of my soldiers, then they all proceeded to panic, Like Tumblr does when they encounter a straight white guy.

I would have kept playing but I lost my troops and no new recruits arrived, despite buying a few with the money I had left.

That’s basically my experience with XCOM. Wasn’t bad, but perhaps the fact I went into this one blind kinda left me unprepared of what to expect. I’ll probably come back to this another time and give it another go. Again, I’m not calling the game bad/awful/terrible/shitty etc.

Maybe I should have had Kari explain it to me properly in the first place.

(sad face)