Obviously a great achievement for how it brought the tactics genre to a new generation, but playing it in 2022 wasn’t as enjoyable or fun as I expected.

I loved the tension and atmosphere of most missions inside a city. Slowly dissipating the fog of war of the suburbs knowing that discovering a new group of aliens at the end of your turn could mess you up extremely bad is one of the best things the game offers. I also enjoyed how different the classes felt and getting attached to my top officers and bringing them all the way to the last mission.

What I didn’t enjoy is mostly the pacing, the repetitiveness of missions and a very poor job of stoytelling and progression. There are bullshit difficulty spikes, plenty of bugs that will make you lose progress and overall a lack of polish that always prevents you from fully trusting the game.

Overall I enjoyed my time with it but around the 20 hour mark I was ready for it to end. It has some great ideas that I haven’t seen anywhere else but I expected more from one of the classics of the genre.

I like the basic premise of this game, but the tatical combat is just so frustrating. As one quickly figures out, the optimal strategy is to slowly inch forward across the map, in order to only trigger one alien group at a time. This is very, very boring. Of course, you could charge ahead and 'take risks', but this usually just punishes you really hard by putting your soldiers out of position and giving a timing advantage to the enemy. This gets your soldiers killed, which loses the long game. So you either have a bit of fun and lose, or you bore yourself to death and win.

Played this bad boy with the Long War mod, they weren't lying it is RATHER long. After a month of almost daily consistent play I made it to the alien base assault which I think is like halfway through the game? Dense, fucking dense. Makes for a good podcast game.

Mainly judging my experience with the Long War mod rather than base game here (base game is great, an all time classic, five stars easily), I thought it was.. good! I think my experience would've been much better if I wasn't such a proud young man and played on Iron Man mode, reloading saves would've been a god send.

As a game that fulfills the fantasy of blowing up a little grey alien's head with a shotgun, it's excellent, seeing those little freaks ragdoll never gets old. As a tactical experience, a couple of pain points make it feel flat out bad. One thing is that you do not know where enemies are positioned when you start a mission. This isn't bad, it creates a nice early game tension, it feels like a decision based on atmosphere. The really bad thing is that, when you do spot an enemy, it is not just one or two, it will typically end up being a group of like, 4 or 5. And when you spot them, they will all move for free, and will get to move whenever it's their turn as well.

As a game that wants to fulfill the fantasy of being a little squad overwhelmed by an insurmountable threat from outer space, it's fine it's cool it's not a big deal. As a tactical game, where you are often encouraged to play slowly, carefully, and live with your decisions both good and bad, it's a feature that gets more and more grating as the game progresses, doubly so in Long War. You do not just encounter and alert one squad of aliens on a map, you encounter and alert several alien squads in a map. In late-game missions, it feels like the objective is to just feel around and tryyy to only fight one squad at a time without alerting and dragging in other squads to a fight to avoid getting overwhelmed, it doesn't make me feel "tactically smart", it makes me feel like I'm gaming the system to have a chance to keep playing the game.

The thing that ends up killing you is that, on a given mission, the enemy is going to have a better turn economy than you, an army of 12 getting to move and shoot is going to get more opportunities to do so than an army of 6. The enemy is going to get more chances to roll the dice to kill you, while you've got to manage your own dice rolls against them. The big thing is that oh haha xcom soldiers are bad at aiming, which is absurdly true, even with the second wave option to improve soldier aim. I cannot tell you how many times I flipped a coin and lost like 4 times in a row.

There is a bit more to manage in Long War, the "air game" is more important, because the game is so long resource management and basebuilding can have cascading effects. If you manage your resources well, you can try to build yourself back up again from lost soldiers, battles, lost jets, etc. It just takes time, it takes in-game days to do that. Days that are going to be spent fighting more aliens, having to bench soldiers due to fatigue/injury for even more days, etc etc.

This is where the gameplay loop tickled me, the resource management and "air game" feels great, it feels like the game is giving you answers for all your woes as you progress. Do your soldiers have shitty aim? Try out these shotguns instead. Do your jets keep getting shot down? Here's a research project that could help with that. Ohhh you're really close to being able to afford this new weapon that melts alien-eyes, but you'll probably need to scavenge a UFO to get the resources.

Maybe I should've looked into playing an easier difficulty and chosen more modifier to give me an edge due to the "tactical fighting" feeling like poop and butt to play, they felt like a chore to get back to managing research projects, construction, keeping countries happy, espionage, etc etc. I prefer when strategy games aren't THIS reliant on random numbers, it feels cheap most of the time. If I make a mistake and get punished for it, that's fair. If a little grey takes the shot of a lifetime and hits a 10% chance shot, I just don't know. I just don't know.

To set the stage I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I like the more Fire Emblem side of the genre and didn't enjoy Mario + Rabbids that much, but hey like 17 euro for everything in a bundle why not? I also have not played much western games and XCOM is my most western feeling game I ever played.

Even if the game can encourage you to play extremely slow and my fe experience makes me wary of permadeath, I adored the tension these two things create, especially with the sound design of ambient music and alien noises.

XCOM's story leans way more in to vibes then a linear defined experience. It starts with the stark , but let's be honest accurate trope of Earth's nations only being able to come together and set aside their differences only due to an extra-terrestrial threat. It asks us to ponder what it means to be human as you repurpose more and more alien tech etc... and you start to wonder where is the line between human and alien.

never in my entire life do i feel like i've wasted my time harder than when i try an I/I run and this game just RNG trolls me. oh these enemies you had no ability to see spawned on you and the entire game is fog of war with no ability to improve your vision and the earlygame is insufferable from how little strategic options you have. look this game is really fun and enjoyable on normal when these stupid objectively bad game design decisions don't result in you losing a several hours run. but this game literally cannot hold up to its own difficulty. it implodes and becomes one of the most miserable luck-based tactics games i've played.

it's extremely telling how the game refuses to tell you what the enemy hit percentages when they attack because they hit improbable 360 no scope shots when you're behind full cover but you miss point blank "you have no cover" shots. i want to like this game i really do but this feels like the type of tactics games only fucking morons are capable of enjoying. when luck is the ultimate deciding factor in your tactics game, you have not made a fun game based on strategy. sorry, this isn't disco elysium, i can't forgive the excessive dicerolling you're expecting players to do.

i'm saying nothing new here but holy shit this game is not optimized well for PS3. literally why even release it on console if it's gonna chug this bad and have this bad of a cursor. there's nothing wrong with tilesets. i miss them dearly.

Narrative: 4 - Gameplay: 4.5 - Visuals: 3.5 - Soundtrack: 3.5 - Time: 4
Stars: 4
The strategy games have a special and complicated spot in my heart. I can say with a lot of energy that I love those games and that I’m always up to play them, but… They, just like the open world genre, are in the highest tier of unfinished personal games. I guess that happened because in the very essence of those games lies real challenges, punishing experiences and – therefore – frustration. A strategy game usually takes about 30 minutes to go through a level. In most of them, this number can easily make an hour and, eventually, up to 4 hours. For any casual, or even hardcore, gamer that’s a huge investment of time. The frustration of losing after that kind of sacrificed time isn’t an arithmetic progression but a geometric one. If you add a perfectionist mindset and an urge to play a lot of different games to the equation, you have the “special and complicated” thing I was talking about. It won’t come as a surprise that it took me 5 years to finally finish this game. But, boy, it is worth it.