I love the original X-com and take it for a spin every few years.
By far the greatest thing original X-com had was the sense of mystery and dread of the unknown on your first playthrough. You didn't know what lies ahead, you didn't know what technologies to research, and how to do what. New aliens were catching you by surprise all the time, and Chrysalids, god, they were so so scary. When I got to flying armor my guys never walked again, just because of these guys.
I actually even liked the immediate sequel, because it added difficulty and stuff. If only it wasn't this last alien syndrome...
The reboot was a letdown for me. Underground base-hive was gorgeous, but I lacked the freedom of roaming the globe and sending patrol aircraft in different directions, locating bases that I knew were somewhere out there... It felt like I'm railroaded on a fixed path, instead of slowly finding out the clues on my own.
The second X-Com 2 was a step better for me, and I liked the feeling of being a scrappy resistance fighter, and all resource and time constraints made a lot more sense in that context. I actually managed to beat X-Com 2 in Ironman mode on Commander difficulty without losing any soldier, and THAT was a major feat, I tell you. Ironman adds a lot to the game, you can't savescum from a risky missed shot, and actually start to be really afraid for your guys.
The sense of mystery and dread that you mentioned touches on the only part of the article I disagreed with - the critique of the "pointless" weapons, of the game giving you a sub-par base and sub-par craft to begin with, and basically no guidance is what made it such an adventure.
X-Com (the organisation) truly feels like a hastily slapped together ragtag bunch in the beginning. Governments have thrown money at a problem with no real plan or strategy and whipped up something ASAP. They want results and it's your job to deliver them. You're the expert, they're more than happy to pull out if you fail. You are probably unprepared, but no one had any idea how unprepared, something you very quickly learn after your first encounter. That elite squad you outfitted with all of mankind's best aircraft, armour and weapons? Just got owned in their first encounter. Medkits? Basically useless when you're being melted by a single plasma rifle charge.
The clutter and disarray really drives home just how vastly outgunned humans are in the beginning and the story driven by player experience would suffer greatly if all the "useless" stuff was pared back and the starting condition pre-optimised.
Yes, this is it! The special sauce of the original is that there is so much mystery; "Enemy Unknown" is the whole idea. While I love the Firaxis reboot, and think it has better gameplay, I'm not sure it's strictly a better game. It all feels so clean and organized, and it's always clear what needs to be done. There's no sense of bureaucratic panic, wasted time on pointless tech-trees, or over-investment in a singular hail-mary plan that is completely foolhardy only in retrospect.
The discovery portion of XCOM matched with the dreadful mystery of XCOM, overlaid by unknown levels of complexity, is what makes the game feel real/alive. It makes the gamespace feel much more wide-open than it really is. When you first experience your own base under attack, the feeling is "holy shit I didn't even know this could happen and wow I did not plan appropriately for this eventuality!" In the reboot, it mostly just feels like another mission, where the layout is totally decoupled from the actual decisions you've made. And you're much more likely to have trained commandos at homebase rather than a ragtag bunch of rookies with "failed experiments" gear (eg laser tech and maybe some grenades lying around).
That's just one more example to illustrate how the original XCOM was as much about creating tension through the limitless possibilities of the unknown. Each and every decision was less like a chess game and more like a desperate gambit.
Hey, don't offend Laser Rifles! First, they are a valuable source of income (second only to Light Alloys + Personal Armors production, but that requires 2 components and is also messy), and do not require any ammunition, firing endlessly.
My every soldier carried an obligatory Laser Rifle in his backpack, taking it out and firing it every chance he had, achieving 3 objectives at once:
- the more stuff you carry, the faster strength and TUs of a soldier grow
- he always has a backup weapon with infinite ammo and decent damage
- everytime your other units are searching for that last alien, you must choose some barn or cabbage and SHOOT at it at full auto, RAPIDLY rising shooting accuracy.
In addition to laser rifles my commandoes always carry autocannons with HE or Incendiary ammo, creating havoc every time they can and scaring enemy to death. Later you can replace autocannons with Heavy Plasmas and those Blaster Launchers, but before that, it's the best way for heavy loading soldiers.
The only downside to this is somewhat reduced TU count in the beginning, and you also have to set up the gear for every mission, which is a drag. Unfortunately, original XCom doesn't have loadout templates.
Unfortunately, original XCom doesn't have loadout templates.
I remember downloading a savegame editor just to "cheat" and automate some of the equipment management. I shouldn't have to manually tell my soldiers to load ammo into their damn weapons, lol.
I played this game though probably 100 times and never realized that repeatedly firing weapons is what improves a soldier's accuracy. So thanks for that. I mean, it makes perfect sense when you think about it, as long as you assume there is no other training that these soldiers go through behind the scenes. Which... Yeah.
Try "Xenonauts", a recent remake of X-com using the original mechanics. It isn't a direct port, they have added a couple mechanics in areas like air combat, but it is 95% x-com with better graphics.
My want: Xenonauts + TFTD. TFTD was the pinnacle of the x-com franchise imho. That opening sequence, and all the sound, was amazing. I still hear TFTD sounds being reused in modern scifi.
Well, if they are the "spiritual successor" to the X-com franchise, Xenonauts 2 will have to be horrible. If they called it "Xenonauts: Fear the Depths" then I would be hopeful.
Agree on all points. There's a total conversion mod for the original X-COM: UFO Defense that is amazing, and being actively worked on. New updates every month or so. Hundreds more hours in the campaign. Set a few hundred years after X-COM loses, and earth is a radiated wasteland when some intrepid mutant gals start to fight back against the "Star Lords". It's called xPiratez. Rated a soft "R" for gratuitous pixellated boobage.
> Ironman adds a lot to the game, you can't savescum from a risky missed shot, and actually start to be really afraid for your guys.
I don't savescum... but I've had a couple of bugs or glitches with the reboots that I'm afraid to start an ironman game and not be able to go back to a previous turn.
You can still backup save files in Ironman on Steam actually, it's just too messy to use all the time for a failed shot. But it is better to save once in a while than lose the entire game, like I had once in UE4, ruining a very promising world conquest.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said, but wish to add that one thing I really didn't care for about the newer X-Com games was that the reverse difficulty carve is significantly more pronounced than it was in the original. Ironman helps a little, but it still feels like the real game is all in the beginning and you're just going through the motions after that.
Actually I did backups every few hours, but so far I never encountered savefile corruption in x-com games. Happened to me a few times in ck2/eu4 though.
For me the best part of X-Com is when you actually learn the mechanics of the game. When you learn the missions that aliens do, recognize how the ships look like. If you see three-four supply ships on the ground you know they're either resupplying or building a colony. Do you attack the colony, or harvest the supply ships that come regularly?
Look at the chart. Seeing extremely high alien activity in some remote country? High odds there's an alien base there.
> “We were very excited, so we signed a contract to do Diablo,” remembers Brevik. The studio then had to figure out what, exactly, this turn-based isometric game it had been thinking about for so long would actually look like -- and how it would be angled and rendered on-screen. “This was not easy back then...I kind of took a screengrab of X-Com, and we just took that, and put it right into Diablo,” said Brevik. “So the actual tile-square basis -- the same shape and size -- is exactly the same in X-Com and Diablo.” So in a sense, says Brevik, the look and technology of Diablo is all based directly on a screenshot of X-Com.
So, x-com heavily influenced Diablo. In retrospect it makes sense - X-com tile based world, and lightning was pretty unique.
Even greater than UFO Defense, in my opinion, was its expansion - Terror From the Deep.
It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify.
The greatest contributor to that is certainly its soundtrack. With its unnerving, relentless low horns; harps hitting on the same two or three notes; there's a feeling of utter despair, hopelessness. A sense of doom, as aquanauts armed with teeny darts and harpoons grunt through the deaths of their colleagues, outmatched by opponents so unfairly superior, in the harshest environment on Earth. They couldn't have done a better job.
I have been working on a new "HD" soundtrack for TFTD that I plan to release as a mod for OpenXCOM (this article is great timing!). I am not finished yet, but you can listen to some of the tracks already (and download them if you wish):
As a diehard fan of the series, I'm shocked! TFTD was such a major letdown to me after the predecessor, and I believe even Mr. Gollop doesn't have a high opinion of it. I'm also shocked to see the author of the linked article laud it as better than the original. I've honestly not heard that expressed by other XCOM fans.
It, bizarrely, leans heavily into its predecessor's flaws instead of fixing them or at least steering around them.
- The much more cramped battlefield areas (namely, ships) expose the very frustrating shooting/projectile mechanics. you can understand squaddies missing an easy shot in the heat of the moment. fine! understandable! but in cramped areas they make even more exasperating mistakes -- if a guy is standing next to a doorway for cover, i might expect him to miss his shot... but i do not expect him to empty half his clip directly into the door frame six inches from his face
- grenade tossing in cramped areas is essentially just a great way to frag yourself and your squadmates. dear lord. grenades are really only useful in the early game, mostly, but TFTD doesn't even let you have that!
- some weapons only work underwater, some only work in air! adding to the already mind-numbing micromanagement of equipment, not to mention the punishing difficulty
- perhaps my memory fails me here, but I remember distinctly less destructible environments, which added so much fun to the original. can't find a way into the house? Blow a wall open! But, also, watch out for collapses! So much fun and so unique at the time.
More importantly, regardless of which series entries we like the best... nice to see a fellow X-Com fan -- and so many others on here! Cheers!
I don't think Jimmy Maher, author of the linked article, said he preferred TFTD.
"Unfortunately, Terror from the Deep does little to correct the original’s problems; if anything, it makes them worse. Most notably, it’s an even more difficult game than its predecessor, a decision that’s hard to understand on any level. Was anyone really complaining that X-COM was too easy? All in all, Terror from the Deep is exactly the unimaginative quickie sequel which the Gollops weren’t excited about having to make.
Nevertheless, it’s arguably the best of the _post-original_, pre-reboot generation of X-COM games."
The problem with TFTD was that it crossed the time-reward curve threshold for many missions. The feedback that led to TFTD being so difficult was also related to the bug in the original that screwed up difficulty even if you played on Superhuman. So many players got the impression that XCOM was too easy and asked for a harder game
> some weapons only work underwater, some only work in air! adding to the already mind-numbing micromanagement of equipment, not to mention the punishing difficulty
This is Terror from the Deep's biggest fail, in my opinion. Environment specific weapons added nothing to the game but more micromanagement.
If I remember correctly, TftD was bugged as hell, too.
I absolutely love the original X-COM and think it's one of the best -- if not THE best -- games from my youth.
Of course it's a matter of personal taste. But disclaimer, TFTD was indeed my first entry to the series. And yes, I hate the ship as well.
The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason, as even today our submarine warfare would pale against T'Leth. So close yet so powerless.
The superb work on the graphics brings me deep into the abyss. Just look at how well the battle maps fade into the darkness. The various aliens are actually scary for once, and their shared past with the human species is realistic yet particularly disturbing. We all came from those same oceans, after all.
I already spoke about the music, but it really seals the deal.
I know this might sound it's all about the assets and the mood. But the game was already quite good, and TFTD gave that engine the content it deserved.
I will hazard a rough comparison – UFO Defense feels more like Starship Trooper, while TFTD is more like Alien. Intimate and downright scary.
To a certain extent yes, but TFTD is objectively even buggier than the original. IIRC it is even possible to put the original game into an unwinnable state by simply researching things in an unintended order. Fortunately OpenXCom[0] fixed this.
I didn't find TFTD to be scarier than X-Com/UFO Defense! Not arguing; just funny how different people have subjective experiences.
I think the game you played first will be scarier. Once you've played one, the other one is obviously just a bit of a re-skin, and just doesn't have quite the same fear factor. =)
> The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason
I feel that way about the original X-COM ;)
TFTD crossed the line into unfair, in my opinion. And buggy, too!
> The greatest contributor to that feeling is certainly the music.
If you are ever startled by a mobile phone nearby ringing with the menacing gmbigmar.mid buildup, please say hello, it's probably mine.
I found TFTD a bit too much work-like in some missions (finding that last panicked Gray on a freighter...), but they sure earned an entire spot in gaming history only for their audio.
OpenXCOM and OpenXCE fix almost all of TFTD's problems with tons of quality-of-life improvement, like the "bug hunt" mode which reveals the location of those pesky aliens when a play drags too long. Give it a spin if you didn't already!
- weird research paths. It was possible to ruin your game by doing the wrong research in wrong order. Also, you need a lot of luck to get some techs, e.g. to get early armor you need to kill a Deep One, which usually are only found in the beginning of the game and near the end of it. Similarly to get a vibroblade which is very useful against Lobstermen, you need to kill a Calcinite, which is a very rare spawn in the game.
- maps are too big. I like the variety, but the maps are just too big. Also they consist of tight tunnels providing perfect shooting gallery opportunities for the aliens
- tentaculats are badly balanced. I fear no lobstermen disruptors, I fear no tasoth mind control, but a one or two tentaculats can destroy your team in a single round. And they can fly across half the map to get you.
Definitely one of my favourite games growing up (along with Colonization).
I'm reminded of one of my best gaming facepalms which occurred playing X-COM. We'd been playing the game for ages and had found it very difficult to kill all the aliens during the ground missions. We'd go round the whole map attempting to find the last remaining aliens before having to give up. It was only when one of us accidentally clicked inside the UFO that we realised we could actually go inside the UFO. Our mission success-rate improved somewhat after that 'discovery'.
I was recently noticing just how ahead of its time Colonization was, not just for its gameplay. I mean, it's a game where the music is period music, where each Native American nation actually feels like its own unique culture where both cooperating or looting them can have far-reaching consequences and be a viable strategy for the Euro settlers, where you can crash the Euro economy and even screw with the economy of your neighbor colony's supply chain, where Privateers have secret national alliances appearing as unaligned ruffians...and so, so much more. It's a really incredibly deep game, and as much as I loved it when I played it, I didn't realize just how special it was because I was at an age where I didn't have anything worse to compare it to.
I'm not sure what it is about Colonization, but the mood and atmosphere of it just hit the nail on the head for me, and kept me coming back again and again.
I replay Colonization regularly,and the only thing I hate about it are bugs with wagon train routes that stop me from efficiently automating them, and a hard limit on 256 citizens. That's really low for a big developed economy with strong army.
Completely agree. For me the upbeat music really made the atmosphere of the original Colonization, and the later remake (based on Civ 4?) with its more downbeat soundtrack was much less enjoyable.
(Almost) entire game soundtrack by various artists, including a nice version of my favorite piece, Fisher's Hornpipe (note Yo Yo Ma also has a version)
Definitely agreed. Both XCOM and Colonization are some of my favorite games! I like Colonization so much I bought it from GOG recently, even though I'm under no illusion I'll have time to play it.
In my games it was usually the Dutch that ended up forming the... uh, United States of the Netherlands? :P
I usually play French. Because I hate wiping the natives, and French co-exist with them rather easily. Occasional bands still attack your settlements, but are usually easily repelled. Just don't let natives get access to muskets or horses, and bring them a gift from time to time.
A solid article. I'd disagree with the "single play through" and "pointless starting weapons" comments though. For me it was multiple play throughs learning about what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually a thing that kept me coming back. Trying out new tactics, base locations and equipment to see what worked. All the while trying to balance the budget and keep the squad alive long enough to level up. A truly great game. Played the newer versions on Xbox 360 and mobile, and whilst fun, they had removed far too many features to keep me engaged for more than a few hours. OpenXcom is a much better offering, especially on mobile.
If you want to play the classic X-COM today, make sure to grab the latest community patches.
I really liked the old X-COM games and had anticipated that I would not like the reboot very much.
However, while I wouldn't want to miss the originals for the reboot, the reboots are done very solidly and in most instances I even find myself agreeing with the streamlining the new authors chose.
If you want a tactical squad-level game that goes beyond what the original X-COM did, I suggest having a look at Frozen Synapse. Frozen Synapse has much fewer elements than X-COM, but its major innovation is that each turn both you and your opponent plan your turns concurrently at your leisure and then the turn plays out over 5 seconds in continuous time.
In contrast, I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
> However, while I wouldn't want to miss the originals for the reboot, the reboots are done very solidly
Much like you, I'm a diehard X-COM fan and anticipated the XCOM reboot wouldn't please me, and again like you I was pleasantly surprised.
I think the biggest improvement is the streamlining of TUs from the original (which was always a bit messy) into the actions of the reboot.
> In contrast, I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
I disagree about this. I like turn-based games; they feel more cerebral and less twitchy than RTS'es. I can play XCOM while eating a sandwich or drinking coffee, while I can't play an RTS that way.
> I can play XCOM while eating a sandwich or drinking coffee, while I can't play an RTS that way.
To be clear, Frozen Synapse is also a turn-based strategy game. You can enjoy your sandwich or coffee while playing. The difference it's you and your opponent plan your turn simultaneously. But you are still fundamentally planning a turn.
The aspect I enjoy about the mechanic is it leaves a lot more uncertainty in the air when planning in the turn. I still have to take into account the uncertainty about the opponent's actions while planning my turn.
Yes, Frozen Synapse pays explicit Homage to Laser Squad Nemesis. I think it's quite a bit more polished though, because it's deliberately more streamlined.
If I remember right, LSN still had tiles (and thus probably discrete units of time)?
Frozen Synapse, for better or worse, goes for a much more continuous approach. Making for a very different feeling game.
> I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
I was about to argue that it might have been a technical limitation too, but Dune II, the first real-time strategy game, came out two years before X-COM so technically that can't be quite right.
On the other hand, it also requires a certain set of programmer skills and specialized knowledge of how to simulate such systems, and opens up a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that can be much harder to design around if you also want to include lots of complex possibilities. Serialized turn-based design is much easier by comparison.
Yes, I think it's not so much a programming limitation per se, but a game design limitation. It's a much tougher nut to crack how to present the choices available to the player in a sensible and understandable way.
Notice how Frozen Synapse is otherwise a much simpler game with fewer elements than even just in the tactical mode of the original X-Com.
It's fair to say that, going further back in computer game history, something being possible didn't mean it was possible for you.
Programming expertise and information was a lot less accessible and evenly distributed.
You couldn't just "hire a graphics person", because no one knew what the hell that was. You hired a smart computer person / artist, and hoped they could learn everything. One reason the history of early games companies has so much "and then we hired this person named X, who had no training, but turned into one of the world's best Y's."
What I am saying is that just implementing a very crude version would have been doable in the early 90s.
What was much harder was to come up with a way to present the information and make the planning intuitive and fun. Including the programming aspects of that.
Really enjoyed both X-COM and also highly recommend Frozen Synapse. Great take on turn-based tactics... really liked how I didn't really know what would happen after setting up my moves!
There was also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Squad_Nemesis which was also simultaneous turn based. I don't like the puzzle aspect of FS since it's deterministic. It is all hard edges, hit or miss. Maybe if I spent more time with it it might me different.
At the core, Frozen Synapse is a sophisticated version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Yes, once both players made their choices the game plays out deterministically, but basic game theory tells you that randomising your strategy is the way to win.
Since you don't know exactly what your opponents are planning, you can't solve your turn like a deterministic puzzle.
I do admit there are some puzzle like aspects. Eg I often picked two or three plans that I thought my opponents are likely to choose, and tried to work out a plan of my own that would counter all three of them.
I'd disagree with the "single play through" and
"pointless starting weapons" comments though. For
me it was multiple play throughs learning about
what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually
a thing that kept me coming back.
Absolutely! Without cheating and looking at FAQs, it's essentially impossible to win your first playthrough... or your second, or third. It's not fair. But it makes you keep coming back. And when you finally learn to beat those bastards it's just exhilarating! In retrospect, I'm not sure how it manages to hook us. But it does. For me, perhaps it was the (intentionally) pulpy 90s-style, X-Files-style, paranoiac alien invasion/infiltration plot.
In many ways we could say X-COM broke so many rules of game design. By any conventional standards it's way too hard at the beginning and you'll generally be way too overpowered at the end, if you've got the flying armor suits and such. But that is part of its unique charm, intentional or not.
Played the newer versions on Xbox 360 and mobile,
and whilst fun, they had removed far too many features
to keep me engaged for more than a few hours.
I thought the 2012 reboot was just good. Like you said, I think it removed a little too much of what made X-COM.... X-COM, though there was certainly much I loved.
For me, though? XCOM2, and particularly the "War of the Chosen" expansion, actually do surpass the originals.
OpenXcom is a much better offering, especially on mobile.
I've been putting it off for years. I need to dive into that.
> Without cheating and looking at FAQs, it's essentially impossible to win your first playthrough
Personally I don't recall any big problems on my first playthrough. The biggest obstacle was understanding that we need to capture a live enemy commander to progress further. Other than that, things were pretty ok, considering that difficulty glitch.
Funny thing was that I've figured out that the game has TANKS only on 3rd game. Before that, what did those "HWP" mean was rather unclear.
At a minimum... there's no way to know that the alien base invasions are a thing, and unless you've laid out your bases in order to facilitate their defense -- setting up chokepoints and such -- they are easy pickings for the aliens. That's something you could get right by luck the first time... but there's no reason to lay your base out in such a way unless you know about it.
It's also difficult to know things like which weapons you can manufacture for strong financial returns. The midgame is tough unless you stumble upon this.
Also, just in general, winning strategies to beat the aliens aren't that easy to come by. Takes a fair amount of experimentation and heavy soldier losses. It's really tough to progress if you lose a lot of soldiers and/or drop ships.
And on your first play through it's also not clear what timetable you're working with and how fast the alien threats ramp up. Some of that is tied to your progression and some isn't IIRC.
Aside from the base layout thing, savescumming can definitely help obviously. =)
Of course, I know there were revisions made between the Euro, US, and Playstation versions. I think there were some difficulty tweaks. Not sure. So perhaps we had different experiences in that regard.
There's a massive modding community built around the new ones, which only really has any worth because people love replaying it, which the author must know of.
I think he's slightly guilty of simply listing his own preference there, rather than reporting reality.
To be honest, I can't even remember why the aliens invaded. I can remember the research progression, and the excitement of starting the game from scratch again and going up against the aliens with automatic weapons instead of late game plasma blasters.
So the author and I had very different experiences.
Totally agree! I played it endless times when I was young, and I was able to complete it (by destroying the mars base) only recently playing on dosbox!
The recent reboot is just a tactical console game. It was fun for a while but I get bored quickly.
Also X-Com Apocalypse is not on par with the original, but still quite enjoyable with the realtime combat mode.
Apocalypse was the biggest disappointment in my (gaming) life :(
Horrible graphics, different (but not good) gameplay, and worst of all it didn't "feel" like it was the same world of XCOM. All of this is subjective, of course.
This is the precise moment that pulled me out of the article and I left lol. The optimal starting strategy is to put avalanche missles on your fighters and the cannon is useless? That is objectively untrue!
The optimal starting strategy is TWO cannons. Avalanche missles are objectively wrong. They destroy small craft leaving you with no easy early ground missions. The cannons are more than capable of taking down a tiny or small craft and make sure it’s not destroyed in the process.
It's interesting to me that what you're describing has basically been codified into the game design of "rouge lites" like Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, and now Hades...bunch more, Mana Quest, Spelunky...it's a whole game mechanic now
I loved this game so much growing up, and this was a great article about it. It captured all the things I loved, and covered a lot of history I never knew.
One thing that caught my eye was the author’s complaint about no in-game exposition or tutorials at the start of the game. It seems silly in 2020, but in 1994 it was common for games to come with a reasonably lengthy manual printed on dead trees that explained all those things—or else there were printed strategy guides and magazines that talked about clever tricks. I read a borrowed copy of that book cover to cover before I even had a computer to actually run the game on. I still have a copy in my garage.
My first copy was pirated on 3.5” floppy disks from the school computer lab. Eventually I bought a copy to get the manual. Later on I bought a copy to get it on CD. Eventually I bought another copy to get the whole original collection on CD. And last year I played the reboots which got me nostalgic enough to buy the original and apocalypse on steam.
I had X-COM:enemy unknown [ufo defense] for the PlayStation, the manual for that thing was huge. It had a tutorial in it that walked you through a mission as well as told you how all the buildings worked (even the ones unlocked later in the game like the psylab).
I do miss the days where you'd get a physical manual. Nowadays you just get a slip of paper with an advertisement and a registration page. Saying that though, with live updates a lot of manuals would be out of date after a few years. I dont think the tome that is the world of warcraft manual is relevant to the modern game. Though maybe for classic.
I loved, loved X-COM. It had an ability to capture imagination in a way that few turn based strategy games do. The randomly generated soldier names still loom large as heroes in my mind. I was affected when they were killed in action.
"Bernard Dujardin", wherever you are, I salute you
The names dripping so heavily with national cliches, but they all throwing their skills in a single jar (and their limbs) because humanity vs aliens, it was truly impressive.
And the multitude of viable tactics and strategies... a friend of mine was systematically playing for earliest Mars victory, he ended up never shooting at scout UFO to lure in bigger targets. "If they don't set up a base by $date I won't be able to beat my record of $otherdate". Pretty sure that approach wasn't consciously designed into the game, but it worked out because the inner logic was sufficiently complete (even if perhaps not actually sound, he ended up doing some pretty radical strategical hacks)
I find this emotional attachment between a real human and a fictitious entity absolutely fascinating, unsettling, beautiful and creepy at the same time. This is pure fiction, generated by some C++ code written in Visual Studio and yet, we are attached to it like a real human. Same thing with fiction books. It’s just words being consumed by the brain but emotional impact is real. Then I question, isn’t all human to human interaction just data exchange through our “sensors” (sight, sound, touch, smell and taste)?
Slight nitpick: I am fairly sure the original X-COM was not written in C++ in Visual Studio.
No clue about the actual language it was written in, probably C or assembly. C++ is unlikely but possible.
But I am rather sure that the game was not written with Visual Studio.
Of course, your point still stands. As an addition to go even further back in time, I would add stories that people just tell to each other.
It's a great feature of humanity that we can communicate about situations that we weren't personally involved in. Emotional attachment is then just a general feature of how mammalian brains seem to work.
It did get slightly comical when one of them died (or you started another game from the beginning) and you had the second or third guy with the exact same name down the road, though.
But it's true, you did grow attached.
Since in some sense the nature of the game is also that your soldiers will die -- and sometimes a lot of them -- because of a small mistake or just due bad luck, that creates a weird dichotomy where you're tempted to care on one hand and to see them as expendable and replaceable on the other hand at the same time.
Also, the atmosphere of night missions in particular where shots might come out of the dark at any point, and you might not really even see where they came from, made for a surprisingly engaging and even scary experience.
The weird, ominous music was probably a part of that.
I've heard others not find it that way, though, so maybe it's a matter of imagination and how prone to getting immersed you are.
The reboots are a bit of a different beast, but they really lean into the soldier attachment thing. You can deeply customize your soldiers, and in XCOM2 they even gain visible scars (!) and emotional wounds (!!) and form bonds with other soldiers based on their experiences.
It's all bait, of course. Because they are gonna die. A lot. A rather deliciously sadistic design choice, encouraging you to form attachments like that. =)
My general rule of thumb in XCOM is that rookies are lower than dog crap. Not even human. You do not rename rookies because rookies don't even deserve a name in the first place, much less a new name. If there was an in-game mess hall I wouldn't even let them eat with the other soldiers. If they somehow survive a few drops... well, then we can talk lol.
I remember it was a big enough of a dilemma to me that I had to decide at the beginning of the game whether I was going to frequently save or not for that entire run.
Now I figure it's most fun not to re-do and deal with the drama, but I do bring some red-shirts with me now.
With the recent Firaxis XCom, a common recommendation going around was to rename your soldiers with your closest friends names, for an additional layer of attachment with them.
Great article, and a very fair review of a wonderful game with very sharp edges.
I will say, the best part of the Firaxis reboot of X-Com is that it perfectly captured the fun that I _remembered_ from the original game. It captured this so well that I remember thinking it was literally the same game with new graphics.
Then I went back and replayed the original... and remembered how hard and clunky it actually was :)
But still one of my all time favorites, along with another Microprose title of the same era, Master of Orion.
I did not play the original Master of Orion, but absolutely loved the second part.
I started focussing on science (namely Psilons) and only later developed a taste for trying out other strategies/races. I often played multiplayer with friends too, and really liked the laid back atmosphere enabled by turn based strategy.
Please go ahead and play the first Master of Orion. It's by far my favourite of the pair. (Make sure you get the latest community patches.)
The genius of the first MoO was that it really paired down the tedious busy work. And the tech system works a charm, it's cleverly randomised in a way that's not really possible with the more prevalent DAG based tech trees.
I once played a multiplayer game in MOO2 with a couple of friends. I went for industry, my one friend went for science, and another wiped the floor with us with his low-tech rock eating silicoids who mated at an insane speeds and colonized every shitty planet and had a huge output everywhere.
One of my favourite things about XCOM was the destructible scenery. The isometric building design (on the procedurally generated maps) was superb, and you could blast holes in it to make your own routes through the map. Likewise the design of the larger UFOs themselves was so exciting - not to mention the variety of scenery a UFO might land in.
One of the fatal flaws that made the reboot X-COM worse than the original was the inability to control the environment. Shots could no longer be aimed at scenery, and stray shots that hit the walls anyway proved that said walls were made out of cardboard. Even a pistol round could break an undamaged wall!
This made hiding behind corners much less useful: if you're suddenly flanked, you have a great risk of losing your cover entirely, no matter how strong the wall looked.
Not being able to create own passages or drop floors from under aliens are just nasty consequences of that.
The second flaw was that the enemy did not just seek you out, they always knew where you were, making it impossible to sneak up on them. I get the need to shorten the battles, but catching enemies unaware was my favorite tactic to survive despite technical disadvantage.
You can still catch enemies unaware. In fact, enemies in the reboots only become aware of you when you are within visible range of their pod (ie group).
The pod system is at the heart of the reboots. High level play involves exploiting it to the hilt.
I like the rebooted X-com series but in my opinion this "pod" system really kills the atmosphere of the original game. No more shots from the dark, no more searching for enemies, and no more throwing grenades blindly in hope of taking some aliens out.
I would say the more direct successor to the original X-Com is the excellent Silent Storm game (with Sentinels add-on).
I generally liked the rebooted X-COM2 (rebooted X-COM, only so-so), but this pod system is very unfortunate. Wandering aliens on the map in the original were way better.
Destructible environment and the off-screen action in terror missions. You'd never be able to save them all (attacked civilians), but where your team did stumble into an instance of the aliens grinding through a bunch of still-alive civilians they made a difference far more palpable than any sequence of artfully scripted set-pieces could ever achieve.
Don't forget the damage dealt to UFOs when they were shot down. Sometimes there was but a single alien with what amounts to a few tiles of scrap left from the encounter with my vigilant fighters. Talking about immersion.
This was the most disappointing things about the new xcom games. They got great reviews but to me the world seemed so much like a theme park without it.
I tried replaying it about 10 years ago but it’s got serious quality of life problems with the mission aspect of the game.
Particularly, it had no way to remember or save gear assignments between missions. So you would spend like 5 minutes at the start of every mission giving your guys the correct stuff for their stats. Every. Damn. Time.
The other thing that bugged me on missions was no keyboard shortcuts, particularly for moving the view up and down levels. You had to use the mouse to click a UI icon which was quite tedious.
Still fond memories, but a pity those aspects made it too tedious to replay for me.
The newer XCOM game fixed those aspects and allowed you to jump right into the action.
> Particularly, it had no way to remember or save gear assignments between missions.
OpenXcom has this, plus a lot of other improvements and bug-fixes. I'm no expert (played it and the original for a few hours each about a year ago) but my impression is that it manages to pull off nice QoL-improvements while staying faithful to the feel and gameplay of the original game.
I know that there are also some total conversion like Piratez XCOM.
I tried to love the firaxis XCOMs. They kind of scratch the same itch and I appreciate not to have to manage bullets in the inventory but some of the simplified mechanics just don't work that well.
Clusters of enemies in particular seems like very poor design to me. It has caused tons of issues in their 2 games, from encouraging turtling as a the main dominant strategy to forcing firaxis to add timers to try to force players out of the play style their game made dominant.
My favorite game of all time is another one in the turn based tactical genre, Jagged Alliance 2. A game still under active fan development some 20+ years later with the excellent 1.13 mod.
Special shout-out to JA:DG's asymmetric multi-player missions. eg:
Team1 Goal: Take a picture of item on some desk (only one of your team has a camera), in a building guarded by NPC's.
Team2 Goal: Assassinate High Value Captive in that same building guarded by NPC's.
Neither team knew what the other's goal was, and a squad-wipe was basically a guaranteed win for your side.
It added a huge amount of uncertainty and variety to multiplayer games, as there was never an optimal strategy.
While squad-wipe was guaranteed to be a win, pursuing a squad-wipe was generally much more "expensive" of a victory than what your opponent might be shooting for (eg: eliminating or retrieving a single objective).
Other descriptions here, but I've surprisingly never found a comprehensive list of multiplayer objectives when I've gone looking for them. (I distinctly remember "eliminate merc, eliminate npc, explode item, picture item, rescue captive, rescue item, ...and much much more!")
For those who haven't played it: Jagged Alliance 2 is the missing link between X-COM, Fallout and the most childish scriptwriting you've ever experienced.
Oh man I loved that game. It had so much personality...the characters and voices, the little web browser with PMC websites and gun stores, the email client, the sheer number of items, every little thing was so cool. I had no idea people were still working on it. Thanks for the reminder.
A few years back I had the problem of how to apply the x-com model to, of all things, the Left Behind franchise. Turns out that the strategy/tactical layer separation works pretty well with large scale PNPRPGs, too!
http://f3.to/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=LeftBeyond.QuestRuleshttp://f3.to/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=LeftBeyond.Quest2Rules
The gist of it is, it makes sense to decide a strategy interval (it was 1 year for the first quest, which had to span a century, and 1 month for the second, which had to span 8 years), and then "zoom in" on tactical actions at the end of the interval, with each being its own little dungeon instance. The tactical stuff would autoresolve if only nameless mooks were on scene, but would be roleplayed out if one or more of the heroes were there.
One of the tasks that could be given to said mooks and heroes is "stand by" and react to another faction attacking out of turn; if nobody was on standby, defense ability was reduced.
It was a pretty weird pair of games given that the enemy is supposed to be literally God, but the story came out well, and the players had fun.
“ X-COM provides the merest glimpse of what it must feel like to be an actual commander in war: the overwhelming stress of having the lives of others hanging on your decisions, the guilty second-guessing that inevitably goes on when you lose someone. It has something that games all too often lack: a sense of consequences for your actions.”
All a consequence of getting to name your soldiers. Humans have so much affection for something they can name...
I don't know if the author reads HN comments, but the story I heard about "Terror from the Deep" being so hard was because people were complaining that X-Com was too easy, due to an unfixed bug: Any time you loaded a save, the game reset to the easiest difficulty level.
Not only would people often not play in one sitting, but many strategy gamers aren't above save-scumming either. Result, a large fraction of game hours on X-Com were on the easiest difficulty level.
I would actually welcome the following variant of save-scumming:
You can plan all you like, ie save-scum. But you can't keep it. You can only make forward progress that counts, when you first disable your save-scum ability for a bit.
Of course, that only works for questions of probability, like hitting shots or not. It doesn't address that save-scumming also reveals information you are not supposed to have.
There's a middle ground for X-COM, called bronze-man-mode (in contrast to iron-man-mode). In bronze-man-mode you don't get to save-scum inside of missions. You can at most reload the whole mission to get another randomly generated one.
I used to play the original X-Com as as save-scummer when I was younger. I went back to replay a bit of the game via OpenXCom and stuck to a more 'mature' approach. The game was more fun that way.
I've played the first reboot in the ironman mode, and there's a point to avoiding save-scumming, but there's a point where I find it may actually make the game less enjoyable.
I found myself making every move so calculated (and seeing it as a massive mistake whenever I failed at that) that it actually took away some of the atmosphere of the game for me. I had too much of a motivation to make the game less exciting and to make it as little about chance as possible, and in a sense it began to feel like work rather than an atmospheric story.
It might be a bit different in the original since IMO it seems much more difficult to calculate your moves and their potential outcomes as accurately. But that also makes it even more brutal in the original. (Or maybe I'm just worse at playing it, but that's how it seems to me.)
As far as I remember, the Amiga version did not have that bug. In fact some missions were quite hard at regular difficulty levels.
That changed once you had access to psionics and the blaster as weapon. It became a large shoot 'em up afterwards (probably not at higher difficulties).
IIRC there was still another bug, the first tier of armor (which was supposed to be basically a little bit better than paper) accidentally provided as much protection as the much more expensive power armor.
Train Grisha Yakubik so his skills would overflow one-byte counter; he'd step very slowly, but hit alien two screens ahead in the eye before their first move.
I love this game. Growing up, it was along with Civilization the most played in my house. On one of our first successful play throughs we got this soldier called Maria Smith. She started out talented but by the end of the game was a certified badass. She was a sniper but with high morale and tons of action points. She was our favorite that decades later I still name one of my soldiers with the same moniker in her honor. The pure joy we got out of her ability to make seemingly impossible shots stayed with me. I should give this game another go as it’s been a few years. There is actually a fairly decent iOS clone that I played, but for the full effect you need a mechanical keyboard and a beige CRT, I think.
Fans of XCOM should give Xenonauts a try. It's pretty close to the original, but the new penetration and building destruction mechanics make it really enjoyable in combat.
If you are a big fan of the XCOM OST, I think you might enjoy the XCOM 2 Tactical Legacy Pack OST, which is a reimagining of the original's soundtrack. I played through XCOM 2: WotC with this and it was fantastic.
I still remember playing night time missions up late in a darkened room, hearing the soft padding of those alien footsteps, somewhere out beyond the limits of vision in the darkened fields...
This was such a passtime for me that 20 years later I remember the randomly-generated names of some individual soldiers who came through for me and turned a battle around when there seemed to be no hope.
Siegfried Krause, I applaud your sniper abilities to this day.
It was also interesting from a design perspective; the various parts of the game were all separate executables and I never did figure out how they all interacted (though clearly some people did, as evidenced by the excellent XComUtil which has proved difficult to track down lately!)
Well sure, when you put it that way it sounds simple! I was 12 or so, and I spent a few nights trying to figure out the "plain data file" before shrugging and going back to playing X-Com.
Gotta be honest, I installed the game tonight under DOSBox thinking I would give thirty-something, seasoned engineer me another crack at decoding the file format. But then, those UFOs kept landing and I mean, somebody had to do something about it. And then all of a sudden my kids were like "daddy where are you" and the file format (and UFOs) once again had to wait for another day...
Huh that explains it! I realised (somehow) that if I ctrl-q (or alt-f4) in a mission, it kicks you out to the Misson finished with the same results as your last completed mission.
Frozen Synapse is a simplified clone of Laser Squad Nemesis, which was done by... you guessed, the Gollops.
Sadly that game is no longer available. It was multiplayer only (it had some single player but it was an afterthought) and they've taken it down long ago.
I played Frozen Synapse a bit. I seem to remember there were some local multiplayer options?
Play by email would work ok for this kind of game. (But I don't think that was ever supported. Laser Squad Nemesis might have supported play-by-email, I'm not sure?)
I'm complaining about the time limit to send your turn in in multiplayer. I'm afraid I never played single player Frozen Synapse.
Laser Squad Nemesis (multiplayer, that game was never seriously single player) was so good that when I saw Frozen Synapse copied the simultaneous orders mechanic I jumped straight into the multiplayer and never looked back.
However instead of having 90 day games like in LSN you had like... 10 minutes per match? Felt too much like Starcraft.
Never played the original X-COM and plan to do so soon.
I played the third one, Apocalypse, obsessively and beat it in a couple of weeks one summer. It seems that I end up loving most any game that has a rotating Earth in the interface (the latest being Microsoft Flight Simulator).
Strongest memories is the panic when seeing a headhugger appear close by, getting attached to the individual commandos, and enjoying the destructability of the multi-floor building environments using the various weapons.
Great write-up. X-COM really grabs you just the way the article says. The characters are pets and it hurts when they die. I will never forget when my college roommate threw his keyboard across the room after his elite squad got wiped out in Terror from the Deep (which was really, really hard to win). The fact that nobody can die in Chimera Squad is why Chimera Squad is not a real X-COM game.
One of the top 5 games that I've ever played.
I'm not a greatly skilled gamer, and this game is difficult but was somehow able to make it enjoyable.
Enough discoveries and surprises to keep you pressing on, it did a lot of things well, from load outs to inventory managements, to keeping countries happy.
I can't wait to have some free time to play it again.
One of the best strategies ever for me together with Sim City (2000) and Transport Tycoon, was much less of fan of Dune 2 or C&C or Commando, so this was pretty much only strategy with actual fight and not just construction, which could capture my interest supported with popular TV show X-Files at times.
One thing they miss, in the intro about "plug into the success formula", is that there was a single-level demo on a floppy that came with one of the gaming magazines.
The wacky thing about the demo was that you were given raw recruits with minimal weapons, and then put up against the most difficult aliens in the game! It was brutally difficult, even by X-COM standards.
The other cool thing about the original X-COM was the crazy stories that just came out of gameplay... a friend got the Blaster Bomb, and on his first use of it, had his entire squad get way back out of the way before he targeted the door of an alien ship. Turns out the squad wasn't far enough back, and it killed them all! Hurray for save games :-)
12 year old me saw the box art at babbages and begged my mother to buy me the game. I didn't have a machine it could run on well. All I had at the time was a 486DX 66mhz IBM PC and I didn't care, lag and all, it was one of the most complex and satisfying gaming experiences. It's up there for me with Doom 1 (Ultimate Doom by the time I could afford to buy it). Quake. Ultima Online. Descent. SW: Tie Fighter. X-COM.
Man I've played X-Com for nights and nights on a 386SX16 with 2 MB RAM. The floppies where damaged for some reason, so some of the later levels (particularly on Mars) were heavily corrupted (missing maps parts with black holes, etc). The machine was so slow that the screen "hidden enemy move" sometimes lasted 10 minutes or more. Fun times.
Was I the only one to ever hit that bug where on some missions you randomly found so much Elerium-115 so that you no longer had to worry about depleting it as a resource? That made the game suddenly lot easier to finish.
Also, disagree that the "Terror from the Deep" was poor. It was more of the good stuff and much much harder.
I laughed at the part about how on the first playthrough the game was inscrutable with a crazy steep learning curve.
Many games were like that back then. Which is why there was also such a big market for guide books. I think I still have my dogeared copy of the Prima Guide to X-Com somewhere.
I grew up playing Rebelstar 2, and Chaos, his other amazing game... part of my early programming experience was making a map editor for R2 and making new monsters for Chaos!
I spent hours playing a similar game on the Speccy that I've never been able to track down. Turn based with graphics that looked like Lords of Chaos, except you controlled an army of wizards and soldiers against invading swamp/rock monsters.
The one distinguishing feature I remember is that you had to aim ranged weapons manually, a bit like a golf game with a rotating direction arrow where you have to press stop at the right time.
I loved the original X-Com, but I couldn't get into the new ones. My biggest issue with the original game is that as soon as one alien sees you, all aliens sees you starting to mindcontrol your entire team which easily spirals out of control. Luckily, modern reimplementations such as OpenXcom allow you to disable it and require line of sight checks before MC attempts.
We got the Prima Games strategy guide which was superb in that explained every single mechanic of the game.
After reading it my brother worked out how and then made a super bad ass psy team.
The key understanding is that there is a base psy attribute for characters which can never change and then another one which can improve through experience.
So your previously best characters probably land up having terrible base psy stat, so you need to abandon them ultimately unfortunately.
So he made lots of psy labs to find the strong soldiers. Then started getting them to skill up psy skill on missions.
Once they could mind control then it was to skill them up in other regards like accuracy and reactions. You would mind control aliens, have them drop their weapons then end your turn with them facing away from your guys ready to shoot them. During the aliens turn they would start walking and then get shot by the reacting “rookie” 3 blocks away. The rookies accuracy and reaction improved quickly.
If I recall he managed to complete the final mission in like 3 turns per part by mind controlling the first alien he could see, then using that to find the next alien to mind control and so on.
The thing that blows me away about X-Com is that it shipped with difficulty settings that initially didn't work. People didn't notice at first! The game has such a self correcting feedback loop that it seems hard if you are doing well and it eases off if you are doing badly.. naturally. It is an amazing and very complex game design.
Didn't have the computer to run this at the time (not enough RAM!) but I was SO EXCITED that I opened the files with a text editor and read the bits of text that were sprinkled in the binary, and even that was so immersive and exciting (for 7 years old me).
Xcom 2 is a disaster due to the arbitrary time (or turn, for the nitpickers) limits in all missions.
If you don't rush via the shortest path or if you do the unthinkable and explore the map a bit you'll run out of time and die.
And if you install a mod that removes the turn limits it becomes way too easy because it's balanced for rushing blindly ahead and it's like taking candy from a baby if you have time to scout and position yourself.
Chimera squad... what's chimera squad? Didn't look at anything after xcom 2.
To continue whining, the current Firaxis ruined Civilization as well. They tried to 'improve' religion and ended up adding another tactical layer. You're fighting the military war and the religious war. But with the military war you can make peace now and then, or simply not attack. The religious war never ends. Which means that every single turn you have to take care of umpteenth religious units making the game full of pointless busywork.
War of the Chosen fleshed out the turn limit mechanics quite a bit and made them more palatable.
I understand why they added the turn limits, but I think the execution could have been handled better.
'Invisible Inc.' did a much better job of getting you to hurry up.
Another interesting take on the squad level tactical game is Into the Breach. They solve the design problem of getting you to hurry up, by inverting the game compared to X-Com: in Into the Breach the player squad has to hold out for 4 turns per mission and hold of the aliens.
Heh. There's a textbook example on how you put time pressure on the player without something as peasant as turn limits in the original x-com.
Terror missions. Having to save your civilians (and trying to not get overwhelmed by chrysalids that spawn from the corpses) is excellent time pressure. Move or lose.
But whoever designed the "new" x-coms didn't notice that. The days of subtlety are gone.
Btw, the reason overwatch turtling is the preferred strategy in the "new" x-com 1 is because, especially in the beginning, being surprised costs too much. Another way to encourage the player to move faster would have been to give them more recovery options. Or even something as simple as more than two hitpoints for rookies.
Though the terror missions are still there in XCOM 2.
Regarding the overwatch turtling, another issue is the pod system, as the player will always meet a group of aliens, which, so activating a pod is more dangerous than just sighting an alien in the old game. But trying to play without the Overwatch crawl makes for an interesting challenge.
I enjoyed xcom2 much more than the reboot. Constraints of all kinds ($$$ and other resources) made much more sense for a resistance fighter of a humanity that had lost the war. It added the sense of urgency and danger.
What do you need to explore the map for? (there might be mission in the WotC expansion where you might need to, but I think those don't have timers, I think)
I only play through XCOM 2 once (my laptop's too potato to stomach another time at minimum graphics and slowdowns), but I felt that the timers weren't so bad, it pushed to move fast (agressive scouting) and not waste any time (no more overwatch crawl). Though there are missions with no timers or some where you can stop the timer partway through, so it's not always like that.
Well, they had a free weekend once and in the very first mission I thought "let's see what's around this corner". There were no aliens, the landscape was pretty, but it meant I lost 2 turns and the mission. I promptly uninstalled it and bought it a couple years later when it was 90% off. Never bought any expansion.
Maybe you like crap like that but I find it insulting. See my other answer for how to push players to move fast without introducing arbitrary limits.
> Xcom 2 is a disaster due to the arbitrary time (or turn, for the nitpickers) limits in all missions.
You know, I hated it at first too but after a while I really began to appreciate how it changes the way you play the game. So I have to disagree there. Ditto the Alien Rulers.
Chimera squad is the latest Xcom game. It's a bit simplified and you jump straight into position. It's nice to not have to spend 50 hours moving around but not everybody likes the change in gameplay.
Yes. If you want to have a quicker tactics game that's a tiny bit like some aspects of X-Com, then 'Into the Breach' is probably a better use of your time than Chimera Squad.
Chimera Squad is an OK game, and good if you like the (rebooted) X-Com universe.
XCOM2 is very moddable, so you can adjust your experience easily (for quality of life stuff, I can almost guarantee that there's already a mod to give you what you want).
The series overall has a pretty good cross-platform story:
- The original DOS versions run well on DOSBox from what I've heard, although I've never tried them personally.
- There's also a re-implementation of the game engine in the form of OpenXcom [1], which supports UFO Defense and TFTD (there's a separate version for Apocalypse around somewhere). Requires the original assets but includes a lot of small changes over the base game that make it less annoying to play overall, in addition to not requiring DOSBox.
- The Firaxis games both have native versions. I can't currently get stock XCOM 2 to run due to library link issues (the joys of running on an unstable distro), but both Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within and War of the Chosen run fairly well.
By far the greatest thing original X-com had was the sense of mystery and dread of the unknown on your first playthrough. You didn't know what lies ahead, you didn't know what technologies to research, and how to do what. New aliens were catching you by surprise all the time, and Chrysalids, god, they were so so scary. When I got to flying armor my guys never walked again, just because of these guys.
I actually even liked the immediate sequel, because it added difficulty and stuff. If only it wasn't this last alien syndrome...
The reboot was a letdown for me. Underground base-hive was gorgeous, but I lacked the freedom of roaming the globe and sending patrol aircraft in different directions, locating bases that I knew were somewhere out there... It felt like I'm railroaded on a fixed path, instead of slowly finding out the clues on my own.
The second X-Com 2 was a step better for me, and I liked the feeling of being a scrappy resistance fighter, and all resource and time constraints made a lot more sense in that context. I actually managed to beat X-Com 2 in Ironman mode on Commander difficulty without losing any soldier, and THAT was a major feat, I tell you. Ironman adds a lot to the game, you can't savescum from a risky missed shot, and actually start to be really afraid for your guys.