X-Com: Enemy Within: first impressions

The rest of the world may be getting excited about the launch of the PS4, but I know there are a few gamers out there like me who are much more excited about today’s release of Enemy Within, the new expansion to last year’s X-Com: Enemy Unknown.

The bad news is that we don’t have a full review of Enemy Unknown for you just yet. Because of some technical issues with the review code we got, I was only able to start playing the game yesterday, and as veterans will know, X-Com isn’t the sort of game that you can just sit down and beat in a few hours. We’ll have a full review for you quite soon, within the next day or two. But for those of you who can’t wait, here’s the good news: the game is great.

To prevent you from being disappointed, though, it’s important to first make it clear what Enemy Within is and what it isn’t. What it most definitely isn’t is a new game, and while there’s plenty that’s fresh about it, you’ll be experiencing all of that within the general context of the Enemy Unknown campaign. That means that while you’ll visit plenty of new places, battle new enemies, use new powers, items, and upgrades, etc., you’ll also play through a few of the old missions, and a lot of your old friends (like Mr. Chryssalid below) are back for the ride.

With that said, Enemy Within is fantastic, and it will keep you on your toes in ways that Enemy Unknown never did. Perhaps the most significant addition to the game is Meld, a new resource that can be used to enhances your soldiers genetically. Meld is found only on the battlefield, and it’s held in self-destructing containers that will detonate after a set number of turns. That means that if you want to collect Meld, the traditional X-Com strategy of creeping slowly forward so as not to run into too many aliens at once is out the window. Instead, you’ve always got a choice: play it safe and lose the Meld but protect your soldiers, or rush to collect the Meld but potentially risk your soldiers’ lives in the process. (X-Com veterans will know this is no joke, because death in X-Com is permanent. If one of your soldiers gets killed, they’re dead forever.)

Enemy Within offers a lot more options than Enemy Unknown when it comes to tricking out your soldiers. In addition to everything from the first game, there are genetic modifications, and there are the new MEC suits that turn your soldiers into walking steel weapons. But there are also a lot of other new things, like a whole bunch of new grenades that can do everything from deploying Thin Man poison to making your soldiers temporarily invisible. It seems likely to me that it’s going to take most players several full playthroughs before they’ve explored all the options thoroughly.

The new maps go a long way towards making the game feel fresh even on the familiar, generic missions like UFO crash cleanups. Whereas before such missions inevitably dropped you into the woods, now UFOs crash into towns and cities, and the experience of clearing a map like that is quite different. There’s a lot more cover for you, of course, but there’s more for the aliens as well. And although the old aliens are mostly back, there are new aliens for you to contend with too:

Enemy Within also includes a variety of new mission types that shake things up, and some of them are quite thrilling. I played one that tasks you with investigating a village that has disappeared, and ends with you desperately trying to outrun every X-Com player’s worst nightmare: a swarm of Chryssalids.