XCOM: Enemy Unknow Review
I recently decided to go back and replay the whole XCOM: Enemy Unknown campaign in order to review it for Strategy and Wargaming. Several times, I have recommended it in my lists about the best strategy games ever and the best games to buy during a Steam Sale. I wanted to see if the game holds up, or if my perception of it required a new refresh. I’m happy to say that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is as good in 2025 as it was in 2012, arguably better, as the game has since received several expansions, patches, and amazing mods that improve the experience tremendously.
The basics: XCOM is directly descended from a line of turn-based tactical games that used to be a lot more complicated than they are today. Its predecessor had infinitely more options when it came to the grand-strategy aspect and a lot more options about the tactical side of the game as well, but with added complexity also came a lot of workload on the player to just get the game moving. Let’s take the tactical aspect, for example: want to move a unit? Count how many action points you have, how many you’ll need to move, count if you have enough to take a shot, and then decide if it’s worth it. While that level of granularity has some appeal to a more dedicated audience, the time players had to dedicate to learn its systems and to play a single battle was, by 2011, a lot more than the average gaming audience wanted to. If XCOM wanted to do something truly revolutionary and reach mainstream status, it had to change things around, and to the chagrin of a lot of its more nostalgic audience, it did, by streamlining the biggest pain points of the original.
The grand-strategy aspect and the base management aspect of the new XCOM were now much easier to interact with, with upgrades and research being a lot more linear. The campaign gradually introduced new weapons and new enemies as the story progressed, always accompanied by some pretty cool cinematic and narrative bits. Now, the player, or the “Commander,” had to individually go around and manually purchase individual grenades and medkits for each soldier, and the level of micromanaging the original had was reduced to a tee, with the player now just making strategic-level decisions with the funding available, instead of acting like a glorified supply officer. I think it’s fair to say the grand-strategic aspect of the game serves almost exclusively as a necessary palate cleanser from the main aspect of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it’s turn-based combat.
If there’s an aspect that’s nearly unrecognizable from the original XCOM: UFO Defense, it has to be the turn-based tactical battles. Gone are the action points, the insane level of micromanaging necessary to make a single soldier perform basic actions like walking, aiming, firing, and taking cover. Instead, the system had been overhauled to work on a 2-action point basis. Each unit can perform two actions per turn (excluding modifiers), essentially boiling them down to an action move or two, an action move, or a shooting/ability usage. Whenever a unit fired, its turn would come to an end. This meant a lot more fiddling around to get the action going, and the battles were now taking place at a faster pace, while the basics of moving and finding advantageous flanking positions still remained intact from the 1994 original. There’s a certain level of RNG (random number generation) to XCOM, but when one boils the entire mechanics of its mechanics down to their basics, the game is all about playing the game to increase your chances of success, instead of relying solely on a somewhat perceivable high shot percentage.
This system led to some of the best memes of all time, with novice soldiers right in front of their targets with a hit percentage of 50%, or some soldiers with a hit percentage of 99% and firing wildly, missing the door of a barn, from the inside. Very funny stuff.
Now, the system isn’t without its flaws, and there’s a clear, frustrating element to the turn-based system: whenever an alien unit or a cluster of units is spotted, they interrupt your turn, take their moves, denying you the satisfaction of pulling off a cool ambush and properly using scouting elements. Worse yet is the fact that after interrupting your turn and making a move, once you ended your turn, the aliens could act a full turn. So if the last unit you moved was the one spotting the aliens, and you had literally just one action left to react, too bad, there’s nothing you can do. This led to players naturally developing a more defensive playstyle, where the basic loop remained moving a soldier, putting them on overwatch, and doing the same thing for every other unit. With that tactic, when the aliens moved, you could at least take a couple of shots at them. XCOM 2 would fundamentally change this, making ambushes a core part of the gameplay, and the game is much better for that.
The number of available soldiers at a given time for each mission was also reduced from 14 (I think it was 14, but don’t quote me on that) to just 6 at the beginning, with a maximum number of 8. To compensate for that, each soldier now has several special abilities that range from borderline useless to game changers and add a lot of flavour to the game, and so much appreciated depth to the combat system. XCOM 2 would also improve on this aspect, with much more powerful abilities, allowing for insane chain kills.
The bottom line is that the changes made to the tactical combat of XCOM made for a game that’s faster paced, eliminates all the pain-points present in the original game, and doesn’t sacrifice one bit on the tactical depth and reliability of the title. It was a masterclass of game design, and its system became so iconic that it’s still emulated almost 15 years later.
If there’s one aspect that makes XCOM special and memorable, it’s the connection players tend to develop with their characters, especially when playing with the Ironman mode activated. XCOM: Enemy Unknown gives players the capability to customize their soldiers’ looks and skills, from the beginning, as inexperienced rookies, all the way to the top of their specialization, when they become unstoppable killing machines. One of my favorite aspects of the game is the ability to make them look as I want them to look, give them a name of a friend or a family member, and see if they would survive the whole campaign. This led to a lot of emergent storytelling moments I still have ingrained in my head, like my shotgun-bearer going from a useless nobody to an insane badass shredding aliens left, right and center.
As for the enemy design, I think that XCOM: Enemy Unknown has some of the best design decisions as well, even if the game’s AI can be lackluster from time to time. Enemies are instantly recognizable, and their purpose is instantly clear. It kind of reminds me of Halo. You instinctively know what the purpose of that unit is, even if it’s your first time coming across it. Sectoids are your average grunt unit, small and nearly useless in small numbers, but let them roam free, and they’ll be a pain to deal with when working in tandem with Thin Men and Muton. Speaking of which, those are two excellent examples of enemy design. The Thin Man is a creepy, slender, agile humanoid figure wearing a suit that fires a plasma rifle with high levels of accuracy. The Muton is another great example of visual presentation aligning with gameplay intention: Massive, meaty, and fighting with their bare hands, they instantly act as the meat shields and frontliners for the alien menace. I could go on and on and say the same thing for every other enemy.
I mentioned that the AI can be somewhat idiotic from time to time, and that’s true for the most part, and I’m not sure what motivates it to act the way they do, but the most egregious example I can give you is that the player can have an isolated unit, with a perfectly viable avenue for the enemy to flank and the AI choses to just retreat most of the time, prefering to engage in long-range firefights. Other times, it’s overly aggressive when it shouldn’t be, and I think this might come down to what type of unit it’s using, and it doesn’t take advantage of some of these very obvious mistakes on the part of the player because it thinks the unit it’s currently using shouldn’t be the one to do that.
I don’t think it’s fair to hold a 2012 game’s graphics to 2025 standards, a game that was released during the PlayStation 3 era. Yes, really. Despite that, I also don’t think it’s fair to say that the XCOM: Enemy Unknown graphics don’t hold up, because in my opinion, they certainly do, and quite well in fact. The game is helped a lot by the fact that the team went with a very unique art style. The GI-Joe x Gears of War x Comic Book look of the characters’ style made them game instantly recognizable and easy to read at a glance, with the oversized proportions of the characters and their weapons (an intentional design decision, mind you). The B-Movie shots of the cinematics and the map design itself constantly serve as reminders to the player that, despite its serious nature, this is still a video game about thwarting an alien invasion, and there’s some goofiness in that too.
This direction, with the game’s art style and tone, and avoiding the pitfalls of realism, does much to keep the game’s graphics still pretty damn good in 2025. It’s pretty clear by now that games that go for a more stylized aesthetic will have their graphics age a lot slower, just think about Dishonored, with its paintbrush aesthetic, and of course, the timeless Jet Set Radio and its now iconic cell-shaded graphics. So, yeah, XCOM: Enemy Unknown graphics are as good in 2025 as they were in 2012, and you can boot up the game and don’t feel like you’re playing a nearly 15-year-old game.
As for sound design, every weapon sound effect is engraved into my memory, and I can say the same thing for all miscellaneous sound effects. Music isn’t anything special, but it’s there to give you some nice ambiance.
To round things up and close this review out before this becomes a PhD thesis, I want to talk about the DLCs for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, especially the Enemy Within DLC, which brings a whole new way of playing the game, and should be an instant purchase for anyone starting out on the series in 2025. By adding new weapons, a new soldier type that fundamentally changes the way players can approach team composition and tactics (it’s a massive mech, so of course it’s a game changer), a whole new faction called EXALT, and a new resource called Meld, which is used for unlocking new skills and upgrading your soldiers. This Meld is available in most missions, but players have a very limited window of opportunity to get it before it becomes unstable and explodes, meaning that the cautionary tactics I have talked about earlier must go out the window, at least until you capture a couple of boxes here and there. It’s an amazing DLC, and you should absolutely get it.
Final Verdict and Score
10/10
XCOM is one of my favorite strategy games ever made, and I would argue one of the best games ever made in the history of gaming. It’s a testament to how a series can change and improve for the better, and how innovation, when directed by talented people with the intention of giving players not only what they want, but to understand what they need as well. It’s a game that single-handedly revitalized the strategy genre in the early 2010s, and everyone is still reaping the rewards sown by the team at Firaxis. Add to this the affordable price at which the game can be found at all times, sometimes for less than $5 for the whole collection, and this is an experience that everyone interested in strategy games should play at least once in their lifetime.
Game Score Breakdown
- Core Gameplay & Mechanics: 10/10
- Content: 10/10
- Graphics & Artstyle: 9/10
- Sound & Music: 7/10
- Technical Performance: 10/10
- Replayability & Value: 10/10
- Monetization & Business Mode: 10/10
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