Review: XCOM: Enemy Within

OMG, you guys.

Even after my recent XCOM: Enemy Within preview, I thought Firaxis’ recent add-on was just going to amount to XCOM with some fluff. I could never have been more wrong.

Enemy Within has already provided me with the same number of playable hours that XCOM itself did; of my 89 hours of total playtime, 49 are from Enemy Unknown and 40 are from Within itself. Although I’ve been playing the game for a while now, I’m still as hooked as ever, now in a playrun where I’m trying to grab all the Steam Achievements I can.

I started up Enemy Within from scratch and instantly renamed my soldiers to carry the names of my wife and three kids. Then, I went into the campaign, guns blazing, collecting meld and finishing the game’s first mission with little fuss. I thought the game would largely play out the same until my head scientist and engineer started to brainstorm ideas, throw wild new theories at me and gave me access to build new facilities. The choices are frankly overwhelming.

Oh, and then I turned my son into a cyborg. Awesome.

When transitioned my son into full-on cyborg, you lose the soldier’s previous class to become mech soldier in its place. You’ll also need to build a mech chassis for your soldier to ‘ride in’, again giving you additional choices for weapons and skills when it’s time to upgrade.

In my next mission, I come across a flying squid that doesn’t look too hard to destroy. Until it turns invisible. I foolishly advance on the enemy’s last location, looking for an easy kill, and the squid de-cloaks and wraps one solider up in a seemingly loving embrace. My solider dies. The squid does this to two more of my soldiers before I decide that losing three family members in one day isn’t acceptable and restart the campaign from scratch. Enemy Within is just as unforgiving as the original.

In my second attempt, I decide to focus on tactics, not just speeding in trying to mop up maps as fast as possible. I then click on the fact that every level I’ve played on is different to the old XCOM. In fact, there are over 40 new maps and 2 new mission types, one of which is cloak and dagger which provides a soldier with little more than a pistol. As sucky as that sounds, the game mode is one of the best in Enemy Within, providing edge-of-your-seat action with a high risk and reward structure.

As I pointed out in our Enemy Within preview, Firaxis has tweeked the game’s UI and graphical standards, providing additional options in the form of a transparent grid overlay, showing your ‘move range’ far more precisely. Additionally, anything that an explosive device can destroy will now glow red if it’s in the blast radius of said bang, making the use of grenades and rockets in ships far more intuitive.

Multiplayer adds all the new bells and whistles from the campaign and can be just as unforgiving (or more!) as the AI in single-player. It’s not for the meek or mild, but then again, none of XCOM: Enemy Within is. That’s what makes it great.