What a perfect mix of strategy and action. It looks and sounds nice, the camera could move slightly more smoothly. If you aren't sure you want to spend more bucks for the better sequel, this is at a great price for trying out the series. The second one has much more stuff and they improve a lot, but this one still was a great challenge. The workshop is full of good mods once you're done exploring the original offerings as well, including hilarious sound packs. I have been recommending this game for years.

Enemy Unknown is the tale of Earth under attack - but rather than a full-scale invasion force the aliens are performing surgical strikes that gradually weaken the resolve of the planet's leaders. XCOM is an emergency organization with a huge underground base that's activated in an attempt to stop the rise of the alien menace, and your job broadly speaking is to drop into impacted zones to take out aliens, shoot down UFOs and generally try to prepare humanity for the worst. Missions play out in grid-based, turn-based combat where your small squad of soldiers faces off against numerous enemy threats. You're commanding soldiers to move about to take cover or get to the high ground and so on, and each soldier fills a class role - a soldier, a support, a sniper, a heavy and so on. Between missions you're sent back to the XCOM underground base, represented in an anthill-style side-on cross section, and it's there you can also do some solid RPG-style menu prep. That includes upgrading and training soldiers via choosing perks and skills for them as they level up, plus performing research to unlock new skills and new equipment in the form of armor, weapons and supporting technology. Customizing your soldiers is key not only to victory, but to getting the most out of XCOM in general. An important part of managing the XCOM base and forces is dealing with limited resources; sometimes you may have to make the difficult call to let an alien abduction take place in order to safeguard your long-term viability, but doing so may mean less resources for you down the line. XCOM Enemy Unknown Plus is rife with little problems that come as a result of porting such a large and CPU-heavy PC game to a pocket system like the Vita, but even in the same breath as acknowledging that it's hard to say that if you've no other way to play XCOM it isn't worth it: the game is that good. This definitely comes recommended behind the PC and console versions of this classic game and has a lower score as a result, but if the Vita is your main or preferred way of experiencing games, this port is still easy to recommend. Personally... I hate the robots.

The game opens with an atmospheric tutorial, unfortunately, the same feel isn't kept once the game really starts but it still makes for a good opening. Four classes of soldiers are featured each with two abilities to choose from every time they get a promotion, giving you some options on what kind of character you want to create. Permanent death makes you really think about your actions so you don't lose your favourite characters, although if you want to make things a little easier them game does allow you to reload saves if you want to. A variety of upgrades are able to be researched giving you access to better weapons, armor, items, some with fun abilities to use on the field such as a cloak, jet pack, or a grappling hook. Grenades and rockets can be used to destroy walls and cover or to cause objects in the environment like cars to explode and damage nearby enemies. The game has a lot of poor design choices. You will run into frequent bugs relating to shooting through walls or grenades going through walls. Line of sight problems can prevent you from seeing things right next to you, and likely due to the way the game handles elevation it doesn't understand how ramps or stairs work since they don't just jump to the next preset levels often causing problems with line of sight when there is only slight elevation difference and without taking height into consideration. The game lacks useful information you would expect to have in a turn based game likely due to the console versions, things like how far your character can see, range indicators if moving to a different location would allow you to shoot at a known threat. The game is short and you end up upgrading equipment very quickly to the point where you will only be using regular guns for a short time, or you might just end up skipping laser weapons and moving straight to the final plasma weapons. You start to get some cool armor as the game goes on but might not have as long to play around with it as you would like. There is low map variety, horrible in UFO crash missions that have you frequently placed in the same forest area. Poor character customization options, but color choices improve with DLC. You have no choice when it comes to what class soldiers get once they get their first promotion, it can be very annoying to see a character with a high aim stat become a class where you would want them using a shotgun or heavy weapon or when you keep getting the same class when you want another one. The terrible country panic system where you might need to rely more on luck to keep countries safe because aliens somehow hit three different places at the same exact time all the time, and you are prevented from sending out multiple teams. Terror missions are badly done, both because of the poor civilian and Alien AI when civilians are involved and because of the random placement of civilians can make things extremely easy or nearly impossible, it also makes very little sense that you are capable of completely negating panic from spreading if you do well enough as an entire town was likely destroyed and civilians would still have been killed. Soldiers are limited to taking only one item with them forcing you to make strange trade offs where you are deciding between taking things like a scope, armor, grenades, or a medkit. The game also has an uninteresting story with characters that end up being kind of annoying. A lot of improvements were made and some of the problems were fixed in the Enemy Within expansion. Enemy Within and the DLC give you new missions that add a bit more variety to the game's maps, Enemy Within also adds new mission types, ways to customize your soldiers, and a new mech classes for you to use. If you are interested in playing the original XCOM now this is the version you should get.

This game is one of the hardest, most challenging, most rewarding, most rage-quit inducing games I have ever played. It is addicting, but not for the weak of will.

Command your troops, kill aliens, you think to yourself, it's a easy game, find an arachnid like robot, he kill all your major and best equiped soliders, rage quit, 10 minutes after and you're playing it again, 10/10 would rage quit once more