The Case

Last year’s excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown proved that Firaxis had a deep understanding and respect towards the storied legacy of the original X-COM: UFO Defense. That didn’t stop some of the more impassioned fans from crying foul at the game’s more simplified systems when compared to MicroProse’s games. With the expansion Enemy Within, Firaxis have decided to build upon the original framework they’d established in Enemy Unknown. Does the studio manage to successfully quell the complaints of long-time diehards by adding more or do they botch the job and repel newcomers by making the game more complicated?

The Trial

I will never forget the day I lost my favorite soldier in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Corporal Fanny ‘Teh Bitch’ Changstein. I always made it a task to fit her with the toughest armor, equip her with the most powerful weapons and pore over hours choosing just the right upgrades to fit her “fierce Irish girl” personality. She was the envy of the rest of her squadmates and the literally red-headed step-daughter that I’ll never have in real life. A moment of silence for Fanny...

Right then, the new expansion. While Enemy Within is an expansion to Enemy Unknown, it’s also an entity of its own. The base game remains the same but any existing saves you had (and in turn any soldiers/squads you’d grown accustomed to using) for EU are incompatible with it. It means you’re required to start a new game from scratch. I can hear you moaning now, I know, I can sympathize. EU’s mind-numbingly slow early-game research-a-thon isn’t something I was very keen on re-experiencing going into EW either, but it makes up for that my making all the newer bits and bobs ripe for plucking from the get-go, I wasn’t even in the three hour mark before I had a giant red, French-speaking robot and a spliced-up Guile-wannabe in my fledgling army.

Speaking of new bits and bobs, by all accounts I should hate EW. Firaxis have managed to screw over my carefully calculated strategy of playing XCOM where I move my squad from cover-to-cover, always on Overwatch until the nasties present themselves and (hopefully) get blasted in the face, with one simple addition: MELD. Big ass canisters full of delicious alien orange juice (which always come in two, curiously) randomly strewn about in every map, and are tied to a specific number of turns before they expire. Because of this, I found myself spreading my soldiers around in tighter groups of two or three and in a radius wider than anything I would’ve been comfortable with in EU, leaving them highly vulnerable and at certain moments without any cover. For an impulsive save-scummer such as I, this can be quite problematic you see.

MELD alone changes up the very way one approaches combat in XCOM in more than one way. It bleeds into two of the expansion’s major new additions, MECs and Gene Mods. At any given point in the game you can nominate up to three simultaneous soldiers into being morphed into either a hulking cyborg or a bastardized human being with Xeno-genes crawling inside him/her, processes which require MELD as currency. It’s an ingenious way to get complacent players like me to crawl out of my comfort zone and employ abilities and tactics that I’d never have used had I adhered to my old ways.

MEC the thousand-ton elephant in the room. If you’re seeking further validation into how awesome they are, then I shall comply. Yes, they are indeed awesome, they’re lethal and surprisingly fast for being such massive units, but they are also incredibly exposed because of that very reason. Deploying a MEC plays into that risk/reward dynamic that is ingrained within XCOM, you have to be smart about which situation to bring in your massive friend to, at least in the initial stages of its development, especially given the fact that a MEC unit gains some extra abilities depending on what class of unit he/she may have been prior to its mechanical-grafting. Gene-modded soldiers on the other hand are a much safer bet, essentially enhancing specific skills such as aim, reaction, etc. while some mods offer new abilities altogether such as the ability to blend into cover. The abilities for gene-modded soldiers can be respeced mid-game without any penalties other than the process requiring a few days to complete.

While MELD and unit modification are the biggest additions, Firaxis have also made sure the meta-game gets an appropriate kick in the chassis as well. The crux of those changes lies within EXALT, which is fundamentally an anti-XCOM organization with misguided beliefs towards the alien invaders. After the initial encounter the EXALT can do much to hinder your progress, from draining funds to inciting terror within countries/continents that were perfectly stable mere days ago. You can tackle them by sending in covert operatives to infiltrate EXALT cells that are being harbored by certain countries. During direct confrontations, there’s a certain sick pleasure that comes from killing human enemies as opposed to the regular gallery of creepy-crawlies, human enemies who happen to deploy tactics similar to your troops. I’m pretty sure there’s some deep philosophical observation tucked away somewhere, but unfortunately I’m not smart or observant enough to pick at it.

There are numerous changes made under-the-hood that further refine the game and goad players into taking a different approach, be it in combat or the meta-game. I felt like the game was throwing combat opportunities at a more inconsistent and unpredictable frequency than in EU, often seeing weeks pass by without anything popping up on the geoscape while sometimes being bombarded by a triathlon of a terror mission, covert-ops mission and alien abduction in the same day.

The Verdict

I realize there’s been some moderate amount of doubt and cynicism amongst some concerned individuals about EW’s rather steep price point. If you’ve been following developer Firaxis’ previous exploits into the land of DLC and expansion packs then you’re already rather knowledgeable how their minds operate when it comes to content. Enemy Within brings a smorgasbord of changes and refinements into the base game while adding on more and more features, both obvious and subtle, to justify calling Enemy Within an expansion pack.

Case Review