XCOM: Enemy Unknown Previews
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What instantly caught my eye was that when choosing where to place our units, to which you only have 2 turns for each character, every piece of the environment has a defensive cover rating.
This is represented by a badge that, depending on the cover at hand, could be full, half full or empty. With no enemies in sight, XCOM notified us that each character, if we were to choose to place them in cover that was outside our radius, would use up both turns at once.
This meant they would dash to reach cover, leaving them susceptible to enemy fire and could result in a quick death and a disadvantage. Each units radius is represented by a blue line with anything outside represented by a yellow one.
Then move to Bit-tech:
Unlike the other XCOM though, Enemy Unknown doesn't feel as much like a re-imagining as it does a remake; there are recognisable threats and the action feels more fairly weighted against you than you'd expect of a modern shooter. Your soldiers can be effortlessly taken down by the alien threat, with the tutorial mission ramming this home by forcing you to shepherd your squad to an assured destruction.
As the same suggests, it's the mystery of the aliens which makes them such a menace to fight; the first time you kill a thin alien at close range then you'll immediately regret it as he detonate into a poisonous cloud. There's no warning that this or other events will happen; forced to adapt blindly, you must find your own bearings. As aliens touch down on multiple cities at once you must scatter your forces as best you can, aware that the consequences may haunt you later.
You can't know everything, nor be everywhere at once and, like the X-Coms of old, XCOM: Enemy Unknown's greatest success is that it communicates such tragedies with the most scarce of information.
Before concluding at Games On Net:
At one point, one of my men shouted in the direction of an alien: 'You shoot like a limp-dick dog!', thus cleverly asserting that the xeno was both bad at his job and suffering from erectile dysfunction. Upon being wounded, another trooper cried out: (Who's got a med-kit?!) He knew jolly well that I hadn't bothered to research med-kits yet, in what was clearly a passive-aggressive response to me allowing him to get shot in the first place.
Their quips mostly hit the mark, but a few came out wrong. Blasting at a gangly, alien-possessed human, my sniper calmly stated that he was (aiming for centre mass,) even though I specifically ordered him to go for a head-shot.
Most disconcerting of all was Patrick, the token Australian trooper on my team. Patrick Taylor was a man without a face. He wasn't disfigured or deformed; rather the texture for his head was just missing entirely. A hairpiece hovered eerily over his gaping neck-hole. Suspecting that he may have some manner of supernatural edge over his peers, I gave him the S.C.O.P.E. Device I'd researched in lieu of those nano-tech med-kits. It boosted his chance to hit significantly, on the rare occasions that I deployed him into effective firing positions.
