Battles take place from an inclined, top-down perspective that the player can swivel to show cover points and raised platforms from different perspectives. When the latter occurs, players take control of a team of troops pitted against a selection of alien enemies. The way they go about this is by managing XCOM's finances and resources, and deploying soldiers to take down the alien threat wherever it appears on planet earth. The plot is pretty straight-forward: aliens are invading planet earth and the player, as the commander of an international defence initiative called XCOM, is charged with repelling the off-world cads. XCOM, in case you're hearing about it for the first time, is the latest entry in a series of point and click, turn-based strategy games, the first of which was 1994's UFO: Enemy Unknown. The first is Arkane's Steampunk yarn, Dishonored – already reviewed here by Simon Parkin. Games with guns hardly give you a chance to pause for a breath these days, so it's been refreshing this week to see two genuinely entertaining titles that prize a little cognitive thought on my part before I pull the trigger. Every second triple-A title contains enough high-octane shenanigans to shatter the thin film of glass on my TV set, prompting me to duck lest a kitchen sink hit me in the face.
T his week videogames reminded me of the virtue of patience.
