Guilt-Free Alien Disposal
The one genuinely good thing about the world outside turning to cold rain and storms, the sun making only occasional brief appearances as if to laugh at you, is that you don’t have to feel guilty anymore about sitting in front of a screen all day eating cookies from a family-size box and running one stupid video game after another.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is the latest ostensible cause of moral decline and youth corruption that I’d recommend to anyone. I’d describe it as an elegant hybrid of Mass Effect and Civilization—which I say having played approximately three games total in the past five years, so take that for what it’s worth.
The structure is turn-based tactical: you select missions around the globe, send a squad of special-forces soldiers into combat against slimy extraterrestrials, research technologies, promote your units, make sweeping decisions about which nations to protect and which to abandon to screaming, and eventually shoot the heads off various Mars Attacks!-looking creatures after a series of careful, deliberate clicks. It’s genuinely enjoyable in concept.
Less enjoyable: half your squad dies in the very first mission and you’re genuinely gutted about it, because you had plans for these people—the sniper you’d already decided was your favorite, the one you’d mentally named. Gone. Then everything accelerates: a kidnapping in China, an extraterrestrial terror attack in the US, and back at base a scientist who delivers every single line of dialogue as though she’s about thirty seconds from nodding off mid-sentence. Sleep well, Doctor.
The game borrows from every genre it can reach and welds the pieces into something compulsive, which makes it all the more frustrating that the actual story is so aggressively dull. If the aliens ever do show up for real, I’d ask them to at least put in some effort. Show some creativity. Dress as Santa Claus. Lure people onto the mothership with free beer and merch. Launch their own streaming platform and dissolve our brains from the inside over several seasons. But that last one might be too on the nose.
For anyone raised on Call of Duty who physically cannot tolerate waiting—the turn intervals, during which the enemy gets to decide what to do with your remaining soldiers, are not brief—XCOM will be a problem. It didn’t bother me. Whether I want to play more than five missions in a row, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Find the demo, try it yourself, make your own call. Over and out. Fuck these aliens.