Chess with Aliens

Why XCOM was Game of the Year 2012 & 2013 for me

Adrianna Tan
6 min readDec 30, 2013

I’m not your average gamer.

For a start, I don’t know if I would even call myself one. In my youth my idle thumbs would pick up a controller here and there to bash some keys in the various Street Fighter games, or to shoot some hoops in some version of NBA Live. Then for a time, I was all about Command and Conquer, but that was more from being a military history buff as a kid than from loving the game (which I did, eventually). In all of those games, I took home with me a stark sense of dualism. You were either Allied Forces or dirty Soviets, Ken and Ryu or M. Bison, Chicago Bulls or everyone else. You were us, or you were not. And we were going to shoot you, hadouken you, or beat you at the championships because you were not us.

Then I stopped gaming. Life—and a teenage girlhood—caught up with me. I went to a fancy girls’ school where my schoolmates were more likely to discuss the latest Prada season and their trust funds (true story) than they were to discuss the latest gaming trends.

Sometime in 2012 in the wake of a personal tragedy, the sort which focuses you to move cities, reconfigure life, figure stuff out from scratch: I somehow picked up a console along with the screen, ergonomic chair and the other elements in my ‘dream setup’. I loved the Assassins’ Creed games, played through a couple other games which were in vogue at the time, but when I was done I wanted something more challenging. XCOM: Enemy Unknown, was it.

If I were to describe XCOM to anyone, I would do so breathlessly: it’s a turn-based strategy game where you battle aliens which get progressively smarter and better; you’re in an arms race with aliens, are at the mercy of a shady Council which provides your funding, and every action has a consequence—or two.

At any one time, you do the following, or several at the same time:

Manage a squad of soldiers, sending them to battle. Boy, when you battle, it’s like playing chess with aliens. The battlefield is literally a map with tiles. You can take two moves, or one big one. A fog of war surrounds the map; chilling music and sound effects make you wonder what’s ahead. As your soldiers are commandeered forth, or sideways, the fog of war lifts and you see your enemies—in plain sight, or in cover. You have four to six moves per turn (you can upgrade your squad size to six). Should the aliens reveal themselves to be within striking distance on your last move on your watch, you are in for a nasty surprise.

Deal with death, again and again. Many other gamers have already pointed out: death in XCOM is permanent. There is no permaspawn. The soldiers aren’t just nameless warm bodies. They are people with names, identities, specific talents and you’ve brought them up from rookies, when they would miss every shot, to the awesome colonels and majors you would entrust your own baby to. When they die, they’re not easily replaceable by someone from the same unit. Genetically-modified, assault class Colonel Adriana Lopez has various skills; the next most senior assault class soldier would not be a perfect fit. Colonel Henry Thoreau may look like a softie, but on the battlefield he is a killing machine. Perhaps he had specific ideas in mind on how to exact vengeance upon an invader that destroyed his Walden. Death in XCOM feels so real that this happened.

Face hard decisions, live with the consequences. XCOM makes you think through your actions. There is no win-win. There is only maybe-win-and-lose-lose. When alien abductions present you with three sites around the world, choosing one country alienates (haha) the other two. How do you pick? You want to help them all, of course, but maybe you need engineers most now and Brazil you must now help, since they’re offering you engineers in return. But helping Brazil now makes India and Canada panic. When 8 countries panic to the red alert level, and withdraw from the council, you lose, no matter how great you’ve been at shooting things up.

Investing in scientific research, planning ahead for infrastructure. Dr Vahlen and Dr Shen, who head scientific research and engineering respectively, will be constantly on your back asking you to capture live aliens, or to improve your tech and facilities. With limited time and resources, this part of the game adds resource management elements which complement the turn-based strategy aspects when you are in combat. When not in combat, th geoscape shows you a bird’s eye view of engineering, research, barracks, hangar, situation room, mission control, events to expect; all of this adds a rich depth and breadth to a game that doesn’t care about how well you fight and kill, but cares about how you get there as well.

Chase and shoot down UFOs. Not doing so, obviously, has consequences.

Strike a balance of geopolitical power. Some countries are more important than others, although they all are, in their own way. Each country contributes something to the XCOM project, which affects your funding directly. When they lose confidence and withdraw, you lose those benefits and you inch closer to the 8-strikes-and-you’re-out deadline. If you’re playing it in Classic or Ironman modes, it’s even harder: not only are the battles ferocious and irreversible (there’s only a single save file on Ironman mode), the war rages on even when you’re not fighting.

Mind control, cybernetics, genetics… At some point in Enemy Within, I found myself sending my soldiers to the lab to be augmented. A creepy voiceover told me, a chop here, a chop there… I was sending my soldiers to get their limbs chopped off so they could become super soldiers?! That was precisely what I was doing.

Game of the Year

Many gaming publications and communities gave XCOM: Enemy Unknown the Game of the Year 2012 accolade. Even though Enemy Within is, in the conventional sense, just an expansion pack, I would argue that the new elements it introduces to the game changes everything about it for me. Even though the objectives and endings are more or less the same, how you get there is very different. It’s not just weaponry; it’s a whole new way of thinking about the XCOM universe.

I particularly like the EXALT side missions. The element of a covert ops group—a human group that wants to subvert your efforts because they welcome aliens—was the sort of thing that a scifi and espionage lover would dig. The missions they introduced were completely different from the ones you’ve been playing this whole time.

The upgrades weren’t just gimmicks; they changed your philosophy to battle and to warfare completely. MEC troopers could have very well been indestructible, but they came with their own flaws and in their own way, came at a cost (you need Meld to make and repair the suits).

Meld took the way most of us played it—carefully, tactically, addicted to Overwatch—and turned it on its head. You had to get there in a few turns if you wanted enough of this stuff to make other stuff more awesome.

Chess With Aliens

In the end, I loved that the more I played this, even though I’ve already completed Enemy Unknown many times and played it in different ways, Enemy Within still made me feel engaged. It still felt like a game of chess. Except with aliens.

I love the quiet moments when I make a wrong move and watch all my carefully planned work go up in flames.

I love the adrenalin surges when I am on fire and have guessed everything the aliens are going to try, and moved the right troops in the right places to deal with specific aliens in the most appropriate way.

I love the feeling of hopelessness as you try your darndest best, but nothing’s working and everyone is leaving the Council despite building satellites and interceptors as quickly as you can.

There are very few games which have made me feel this depth of emotion, not to mention the wonderfully immersive world of retro and modern graphics and amazing music that literally fills you with fear as you hear those damn Chryssalids and their dumb-ass little legs scattering up right up to striking position where they can and will turn your Colonel into a zombie if you don’t stop them (tip: mimic beacon).

I know I will keep coming back to XCOM again and again as the hallmark of a great game that knows its limits and its ambitions. I don’t expect any less of this stellar team, though.

I’m so glad I got back into the game again.

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Adrianna Tan
Adrianna Tan

Written by Adrianna Tan

Product Director for San Francisco Digital Services

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