I have a feeling it's a long campaign, so after 3 hours, here are my impressions for XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
THE FOLLOWING IMPRESSIONS ARE RATED "H" FOR HONEST.
First impressions: Hey, it's that guy! Familiar voice acting can kinda throw you out of immersion. Just like as soon as I heard Dr. Shen, I realized it was Dr. Marvin Candle from Lost, and is he going to ask me to build Station 3, or The Swan? Anyway.
The story: Aliens have invaded Earth for some reason! And to nobody's surprise, most of them look like "the grays" (or, if you will, the Asgard from the Stargate television series.) A world council has created your team as "the first...and last...line of defense." So...we're the only line of defense, got it. And because the entire world would rather save money than save the world, the only line of defense is given a small facility with five engineers, five scientists, and like one soldier per country. You'd almost assume the world council was already compromised and WANTED you to fail! (Again, I don't know the story, is that a spoiler?) As with all games, as you progress, you see different aliens such as "looks like G-man from Half-Life" and "being made almost of pure energy, but good thing guns can still hurt it." And you upgrade your equipment and facilities with the money you can cobble together, and fight more and tougher aliens. And so it goes I assume until you take them all out for good.
So far, the story is sci-fi action movie fare. Got no problems with it per se, but I'm not at the point where plot holes emerge.
The gameplay: Having played Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall, I'm actually already used to the gameplay, more or less. Everyone gets essentially two action points. You can run and run, run and gun, or gun and none. (Maybe they're unlocks later, but for the moment I cannot "gun and run" or "gun and gun.") Additional actions include overwatch mode, where a cyborg cowboy shows up you can wait for an enemy to show up, then you can react by missing terribly, or you can enter defense mode. You can also change your loadouts and equip various things, which can make for really tough decisions. Do I take a frag grenade, a medkit, a scope? The biggest piss-off here was that I unlocked a nanofiber vest that confers 2 health. My regular body armour gives 1 health. I cannot, however, wear JUST the vest (which I assume would give me more mobility than body armour as an added bonus) and replace the armour - nope, the vest has to be in the same slot as the grenade, and only worn in addition to the armour. WHY?
Anyway, it's a pretty tight strategy game. The tutorial basically forces you to kill off three of your guys, so I assume it's telling you "prepare to die...unless you're savescumming in which case do that." The aliens generally have better range than you, and probably better accuracy or else the RNG is playing tricks.
The dialogue and audio: The head co-ordinator is doing a passable Adrian Pasdar impression, the lead scientist is yet another non-German with a bad German accent (seriously, guys, with as many video games that require Germans, can you not find ONE actual German voice actor?) the lead engineer does his best with his limited dialogue, and Every. Single. Soldier. Is a bro. "It's go time!" "Out of the game!" My heavy gunner has yet to say "Welcome to Erf," but the game is young. I'm surprised "armour with pop-up collar" isn't an upgrade. They all come from various countries, but they all sound American. (Oh hi, Technobabylon!) I do like how they receive random nicknames as they level up, so I now have a "Nuke," (not a bad nickname I guess,) a "Septic" (classy...) a "Walker" (Texas Ranger?) and a "Santa" (because he wears a digital wristwatch that only has a big number 3 on it.)
The graphics: Hold up pretty well. The main gameplay is zoomed out reasonably far so you don't have to nitpick at any bad close-up textures. Every time you encounter an alien on the map you get a mini-cutscene that's thankfully short so it's not too annoying. Every so often they change the camera angle on your soldier, so you can an over-the-shoulder running scene, or an action scene of their firing at the enemy (which almost always hits when they change the camera angle.) I guess that's what they take to mean "cinematic," but you know what? It works. It worked in the post-2 Fallout games and it works here.
The length: Not sure. The tutorial took me about 2 hours to get through, so if I was to hazard a guess, 30-40 hours?
The verdict: So far, it's more fun than I thought it was gonna be. But again, that's cause I like Shadowrun and I was able to slip into this game like a glove. I can't say yes or no to "should you buy/play it," but right now it's enjoyable.
