Like many, my gaming time is limited. This is a series where I outline why I decided to shelf a particular game.
I have been a longtime advocate for busy people (read: adults) to check out modern handhelds for their gaming fix. The ability to stop and resume games on a dime is priceless if your free time comes in twenty minute spurts. I'm always excited to see a new franchise come to handheld from console or PC and tend to be especially excited when the game you get is the real deal and not cut down to size to fit the handheld.
Turn-based strategy games seem a perfect fit for this. They rely not on spectacle and fast pacing, where the less comfortable controls and lower graphical power of a handheld would be much more of an issue, but on slow, contemplative decision making. Unfortunately, this game just never clicked for me. This is partly my fault, partly the design of the game and party the port to Vita.
On my end, I went into this knowing perma-death is a hallmark of the series and just couldn't help really wanting it to be Fire Emblem. It's not, obviously. Your characters are persistent mission to mission but they don't have personalities other than whatever you might come up w/ roll playing in your head. You learn how to use them tactically but your attachment to them is based on their usefulness to you and not to them as characters. This is all fine but it took me a while to get used to an essential aspect of playing XCOM: some of your characters are supposed to die.
Playing through, I eventually realized that this is actually a strength of the game. It adds a shade of military realism to it. You don't get to soldiers alive at the expense of the mission just because you like them. You make choices that put people in harm's way and sometimes the result of that is, well, harm to those people. This is not a game where you dominate w/ perfect strategy but one where strategy is the means by which you squeak by by the skin of your teeth.
The downside to this is you can lose. You can put a dozen hours into a campaign and have one mission go sideways, lose all your best characters and find yourself in basically and untenable position. Fire Emblem (usually) deals w/ this by letting you grind through relatively easy random encounters to rebuild your party. In XCOM, you restart the whole game or save scum your way through.
This, again, is one of the game's strengths ultimately. You have to employ both a broad strategy and tactics in individual missions to be able to win. You can't just lean on your best characters and maximize their stats by only bringing them along on missions because if things go south, you are left w/ almost nothing. You need to make sure to bring rookies up through the ranks quickly and always keep some of your best characters in reserve so getting nailed in an encounter doesn't leave you helpless. You need to make best use of your limited technology and resources so that you
This all actually sounds awesome to me, honestly. Reading back what I just wrote, I feel an intense urge to pick XCOM back up, like, right now. The thing is every time I do go back to play it, it's just feels like a slog.
For starters, the tactics lean on what they call a flanking mechanic but is really just line-of-sight based cover. From a gaming standpoint, I see what this is supposed to do. If you've got line of sight on an enemy, they've got line of sight on you. It's a high-risk/high-reward proposition. It works fine but why settle for fine? Make it so which way the units are facing matter. Allow players to engage the enemy w/ one unit and then route said enemy from the side with a different unit. This is how flanking actually works in military tactics and I think this one additional element would add a ton of depth to combat.
The other factor that really killed me is when you run into an enemy, it immediately gets to move against you. Like, right in the middle of your turn it gets to move. The character you are moving stops dead and the enemy gets an extra turn then your character finally gets to finish moving--and you don't even get to adjust your move in reaction to the new situation. This seems to almost always leave your one unfortunate character helpless unless you've played extremely cautiously.
Ultimately, the one strategy I found that consistently worked was to always move all my units as one group. Move slowly and throw every character into a defensive mode called overwatch that allows you to fire back in the event you run into hostiles. Never attempt to flank the enemy unless you have them greatly outnumbered. When in doubt, stay hunkered down.
In short, XCOM seems to want you to play aggressively w/ its flanking system but then has a mechanic where you will almost always get rocked if you actually do so. The end result is a crawling pace.
I didn't want to but I eventually ended up save scumming. One thing was glitches, which I'm not sure are unique to the Vita version, but could be real party killers. If you accidentally move one step farther than you intended, you sometimes aren't able to shoot which turns a substantial chance to get a kill into a substantial chance to be killed. So I started save scumming to avoid that. Then I slowly let myself start restarting missions rather than take heavy losses just so I did not have to restart the whole game. Then I started allowing myself to return to my safety saves just because my turn went badly to avoid having to restart the mission. So, yeah, I am a damn, dirty cheater and I don't deserve a game like XCOM.
Having said all this, I feel like the two main arguments I will get will boil down to "Git gud" and "That's XCOM baby!" and, whatever, fair enough. Everything that drives me nuts about this has a positive side--well, except the glitches aren't the funny kind and the load times are terrible on the Vita--and I would never say its a bad game. It's just not for me. If it makes you feel any better, I will put it on my long list for a replay next time it goes on sale for PC and I find myself w/ a few dozen hours to kill on a Friday evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment