Enemy Within is a proper expansion – like in the olden days – for last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was a very different reworking of 90s ultro-classic X-COM: UFO Defense. This time around, we get robo-folk and genetic modification, and one giant leap further away from XCOM’s parentage. Good idea/bad idea? Let’s find out!>Saving the world with a big, pink, French cyborg: this perhaps isn’t the XCOM expansion we asked for, but I think it’s the one we needed. (more…)

I’ve been playing unfinished code for major XCOM expansion Enemy Within.Here are some early impressions for you.>

XCOM has a confession to make. All this time it’s been carrying on like it’s a militaristic strategy game (albeit with aliens and robots and psychics), but really, really> it’s been a superhero game all along. With major expansion Enemy Within, it proudly rips open its shirt, throws its spectacles to the wind and brazenly displays the lurid spandex beneath. My current squad, for instance, is led by a Mexican in a bright pink mech suit, wearing a matching tribly. He can spray flames from his hands. He can leap over small buildings. He can seep healing gas from whatever’s replaced his pores. He is, in short, about as far away as soldiers get from the mopey-looking, meandering dudes in overalls who characterised X-COM.

With Enemy Within, XCOM and X-COM almost entirely part company. While that’s a statement that would have seen 2011 me immediately take my seat in the Angry Tank, here’s why 2013 me is absolutely convinced this accentuated divergence is only a good thing. (more…)

Consider this your daily dose of nice. Artist Joey Spiotto, aka Joebot, draws films and videogames as the covers of children’s books. His game work includes imagined covers for Half-Life 2 (above, in part), Skyrim, BioShock, Portal, Mass Effect and more. (more…)

I was away when body-horror XCOM expansion Enemy Within was announced, so that means you’ve tragically been denied my thoughts on it. Clearly, I am outraged that Firaxis are going to pervert their beautiful and unique snowflake with CHANGES and I beseech you to sign my online petition demanding that they cancel months of work immediately and develop a 100% faithful remake of Terror From The Deep instead.

Nah, there isn’t a game I’m more looking forward to right now. I can’t wait to play it. I’m especially enamoured of the idea that now is when they truly make XCOM their own game instead of beholden to its noble origins, and the new soldier-modding stuff sounds fascinating. A smaller added feature is that they’re offering the option to deactivate what’s something of a Firaxis house rule – pre-determined outcomes, regardless of how many times you reload the game. (more…)

XCOM: Enemy Within escalates the alien invasion, introducing body modification, sky-squids and Mechtoids. After seeing the initial reveal at Gamescom, I was eager to try the expansion before release, but when I had the chance last week, I hadn’t expected to see humanity turning on itself. XCOM have encountered a new threat and this one originates much closer to home.>

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Bioshock has that one part>, the stunning moment that locks the game in the memory forever. I’m talking, of course, about the opening plane crash and the first view of the lighthouse. The descent into Rapture, like the ascent into Columbia, employed tidy, efficient techniques to build a world that was eerie, allusive and oddly attractive. Alec wrote an entire post about that first sight of Rapture. The opening five minutes of Burial At Sea, Bioshock Infinite’s narrative DLC, contain a different side of Rapture, as Booker and Elizabeth walk the corridors before the Fall. Spoilers abound, obviously, with the plot’s initial direction outlined as the two take in some familiar sights.

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Steam’s free weekend deals used to stretch a good way into Monday for us Brits. Now they seem to stop at 1pm on Sunday for the West coast Americans, which seems very peculiar – surely Sunday afternoon would be the prime free playing time? Still, in the Mother Country that means it stretches until 9pm. And this weekend there’s quite the choice. The absolutely superb XCOM: Enemy Unknown, at 75% off (that’s just £7.50 – cripes), and free to play for the next three days. And there’s Retrovirus, the great six-axis shooter that I bet you never played. Now you can pick it up with 60% off at £6, and also play it for free until Sunday.

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I’m fairly sure that this is the most shooty-bangy XCOM trailer that I’ve ever seen. It’s far more energetic and noisy than the videos for the never-born FPS ever managed to be, and if I didn’t know anything about Enemy Unknown, I’d assume this was an advert for some kind of third-person alien-punching game. There’s even a bit at the end that has two mechanical monstrosities punching each other, as if this were Revenge Of The Rise Of The Robots, the sequel that nobody wanted. Has a trailer for a turn-based game of tactics and base-building ever before featured such blatant pandering to the robot fight fan demographic? Not to my knowledge. I’m very much looking forward to playing the expansion, mind.

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I’ve been watching the skies, waiting for news about XCOM: Expansion Unknown ever since the first teaser trailer landed. Turns out I would have been wiser watching my inbox instead because that’s where I found an invitation to speak to Firaxis about the Enemy Within expansion at Gamescom. I spent half an hour with senior games designer Anand Gupta. As well as details on the contents of the expansion, we talked about the theme of the game, Lovecraftian possibilities and moral choices. Oh, and base invasions. Then Gupta casually mentioned that it’s possible to rip out a soldier’s heart.>

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Ah well, not a full sequel then. But a hefty expansion, nonetheless – Firaxis style. (Actually, it’ll be a standalone game on consoles, but not PC, oddly.) Rather obviously XCOM: Enemy Within will have new maps (40 of them), and new soldier class (stompy mech) and multiplayer stuff (cuddles), but also introduces a rather significant new mechanic, changing how you approach the game.

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