Dealing with backlog: The XCOM series

I started this project in November last year. Then AC Valhalla and Cyberpunk interrupted, so when I returned to Enemy Unknown in Feburary I had almost no clue what I had been doing. But here goes.

Enemy Unknown: This was so epic. I had heard a lot of good about this game and since I enjoy TBS I decided to give it a try. I had a lot of fun with it, even when some of my favourite soldiers died. There were a lot of times where I just reloaded the latest autosave to avoid having anyone killed altogether. It's funny how you can grow attached to characters that have no backstory and basically no personality, but here we are. I struggled a lot with money in the beginning, only to have way too much money at the end. And I realised way too late that I had forgotten to level my soldiers' Will and they kept getting mind controlled and panicked all over the place. So when I already had the Gollop Chamber built I started to level up my rookies with Will hoping to get them at a decent level before I started the final assault. Way too late. But it worked out in the end. The final assault was so epic and it explained the whole backstory of the alien forces and the different kinds of aliens I had been fighting throughout the game. 

Enemy Within: Let's do it all again, but better! Enemy Within is an expansion to Enemy Unknown, but it's basically the base game with added features. Enemy Within is so much better than Enemy Unknown. New features include cybernetics (I loved, loved, loved the brain implant that made the soldiers immune to mind control), mec troopers, medals, new aliens, new weapons, new missions and an entirely new threat added on top of the alien threat. I was completely surprised by the sudden attack on HQ and I wasn't entirely pleased with how that played out. There were a lot of reloaded autosaves before I completed that mission, but man was this expac worth it overall. There was so much more going on and I loved the different types of missions and the different story paths that this version offered, that Enemy Unknown didn't. Enemy Within is just... more. It was amazing. Without being deliberate I ended up with a full squad of black women fighting on the front lines. It was pretty cool. My Heavy class soldier got the nickname Big Momma. (The game assigns random nicknames to high-ranking soldiers). My A-team was usually five black women and Shaojie Zhang from the Slingshot DLC as an upgraded Mec Trooper. 

The Bureau: This was different from the others. Instead of a being a clear TBS like the others, this was more of a tactical FPS. It gave me strong Mass Effect vibes. The gameplay was a lot like the first Mass Effect game. The story is set in the 60s instead of contemporary times so we have all the macho men and casual sexism. Both Carter and Faulke really bothered me in the beginning due to this, but the more I played and the more I interacted with the characters the more I came to really like Carter. The game is short, only around 14 hours, but the story gets pretty deep nevertheless. I feel like if they had made the game longer the story would've become diluted. Was it as good as the others? I can't compare it gameplay-wise, because it's a completely different style, but storywise I feel like it's up to par. However it was a little janky to see the XCOM HQ filled with those massive 1960s computers and yet they still somehow manage to understand and pick up on alien tech. This takes place before humanity got to the moon on the processor power of a calculator, so how are you even able to use their tech? At the very least; how are you able to use their tech so quickly? It should take months, if not years, for you to understand and implement. Anyway, the story seems pretty straight-forward but there are several twists at the end and the player gets to make several choices that impacts how the story ends. I'm always one for war table missions, so I really liked that I was able to send other agents on missions and have them report back while I was out doing other things. More of that, please!

XCOM 2: I enjoyed going "back to normal" with this one unlike in The Bureau. What I didn't like was the Avatar Project timer making me stressed. Stressed to the point that I decided to start up the dev console to gain some kind of control over it. I don't want to be rushed through these kinds of games. I want to take my time and do everything to the best of my ability. Not haphazardly hoping everything will turn out alright because a stupid timer is stressing me out. I only used the dev console once though in the very beginning, soon after that I realised I could control it pretty well anyway by doing the actual missions instead of just hopping around scanning things xD Did I enjoy the game? Yes. At the moment I'm not sure which I liked the most of EU/EW or 2, but I did find myself missing EU/EW sometimes while playing this one, which is definitely in favour of EU/EW. So it's been 20 years since the first game and XCOM doesn't exist in the same way anymore. After the original invasion the aliens came back and settled down, brainwashing the people to think that they were benevolent overlords. Bradford (mission control from the first game) rescues the commander from alien grasp and sets up a makeshift XCOM and starts raising the resistance all over the world. This game was cool. All the new aliens and tech and stuff. I also very much enjoyed all the nods to the first game, and was actually kind of sad to find out what happened to Council Man. XCOM 2 was a wild ride. 

War of the Chosen: Let's do it all over again, but better! This seems to be a theme of XCOM's. This is an expansion to XCOM 2 that's basically the same thing as the base game but with added content. This expansion adds three new factions, covert missions (basically a war table - yay!), and three super villains called the Chosen. The Chosen each added another timer on top of the Avatar project timer, but this time, instead of getting stressed about it I realised I could deal with it if I focused on it. If those timers are left to run their course the Chosen will attack and infiltrate the HQ - not ideal. But focusing on the Chosen I managed to defeat all three of them before I even got halfway through the main mission and with time to spare on the Avatar Project timer. I loved the three new factions. The Templars are super cool and I loved seeing my Templar buddy do every single one of her Rends because omg so cool *_* But Mox became my sweetheart. I just loved him to bits and brought him on every mission I could. WotC also added soldier bonds, meaning that soldiers who do a lot of things together get bonuses, which was cool. I really enjoyed getting Mox to the highest bond level with my Reaper buddy because they hated each other in the beginning. WotC also added an energy meter on every soldier. After going on a few missions in a row a soldier usually gets tired and has to rest for a day or two before they can head back out. That was a pretty neat feature imo which forced me to use more than my standard ten soldiers; six default and four backup in case of injury. If I get the urge to play XCOM again after this series playthrough I'll definitely play WotC before I play the original XCOM 2. So much more to do, so much more fun :3

Chimera Squad: This is the most recent game of the bunch and it's obviously a spin-off. It takes place five years after the events of XCOM 2 and instead of playing as XCOM you play as an off-shoot called Chimera Squad employing both humans and aliens (and hybrids) working in a single city instead of all over the globe like previous XCOM games. This game very much feels like a simplified version of the other XCOM games and the campaign is very short and straight-forward. The one thing I really liked was that instead of randomly generated soldiers without background or personality this game has a preset group of soldiers to choose from and they all have background and personality. What I didn't like about this setup was that I was forced to choose only 8 when the game actually has 11 soldiers to choose from. Which means that if I want to play all the characters and get to know them all I'm forced to play through the game at least twice. Because of this I ended up with the same people in the squad pretty much all the time (because why change when I found my style?) Cherub, Shelter, Zephyr and Torque became my default team. All the missions are super short and in the same style and don't offer much room for being creatively handled. It was a surprise to find out that a mission failed and had to be restarted if a soldier died, because that hadn't been the case in all the other XCOMs. When I realised that one time that I wasn't going to be able to save that solider I figured I'd simply get a new recruitment slot. But no. I was forced to restart. The game is cute and has a lot of personality and I kind of like the cartoony comicbook style of the game, but it didn't catch my attention the way the others did and it didn't scratch that itch. 

I probably won't be going back to the 90s and play the original XCOM games, but you never know. I went back to the 90s to play the original Elder Scrolls games, just because I love the last four entries in that series.