This demo will barely let you breathe because it's only the tutorial and some bonus cutscenes, and for that reason I think it might have been a huge mistake. And if a soldier ends their turn out of cover, don't bank on them being alive come next turn.Ħ) Do not worry about linearity.
With each soldier unutterably precious, part of the puzzle of each mission is how to get close enough to the enemy to take them down effectively without getting killed first. It's about the tactical challenge of soldier positioning rather than being Gears of War. If you can't stomach the need to have everyone in cover, and that combat depends on being able to shoot ostensibly around corners once in cover, then you're and this game aren't going to be friends: it's a big change and one of the major factors in this being a different take on XCOM rather than a remake. It is a cover game in a way that X-COM was not. I think, ideally, I'd like squads to go up to 8, but 6 doesn't feel too small - XCOM is designed to have faster missions than X-COM, and that's part of the overall design rather than 4/6 soldiers being a singular, pointless hobbling.ĥ) Yes, cover is basically mandatory for survival. But it doesn't take long to increase it to six (bought with cash at the Officer Training School), which feels a lot more like it - you can control the battlefield and you feel like you have a range of tactical options. Soldiers' barks can also be turned off if you find 'em too Action Movie.Ĥ) Yes, squads of 4 soldiers feel too small. I'm torn between which I prefer - some sequences do repeat a little too often, but there's a singular horror to suddenly being shown, say, three capering Thin Men arriving on the scene just when you think you're in the control of the situation. Promise.ģ) In a similar vein, the 'glamcam' - that third-person or cinematic view that occasionally kicks in for random shots or actions - can be turned off in options if you don't like it. But my point is, no your turn-based strategising is not going to be constantly interrupted by cutscenes. In preview code, anyway: I'd guess at there being more when major events occur in the storyline. Those cutscenes that you will encounter tend to involve the research and engineering heads explaining their findings when you're back at base - in terms of in-mission or even pre-mission stuff, there's almost nothing after the scripted, scene-setting stuff in the tutorial missions. That's basically just an extended intro movie, and doesn't carry on through to the game proper. That first mission is very heavy on them, from the talking military types to the horror movie-aping cinematic sequences and whatnot. It's just the tutorial, which introduces the initial concepts of the game while offering a scripted, cutscene-littered half-hour that isn't an accurate reflection of the game to come.Ģ) Going on from that, you won't see many more cutscenes. Not filesize tiny, seeing as it's six bloody gig, but content-tiny. Let me explain, in the form of a list.ġ) It's tiny.
In others, it's suggesting a much smaller and far more shallow game than the preview code we've been engrossed in, and for that reason I think it may have been a bit of a gaffe. In some ways - both good and bad - the demo does tell a true story. As a result of this, comments about the demo are a warzone of disappointment. For various reasons, mostly due to its very minute amount of content (one entirely scripted mission, one on-rails tour of the base and one more too short, too-easy mission), it gives an impression of the game that isn't altogether accurate.
This game could only ever divide opinion, of course, being as it is a remake of one of the most revered PC games of all time, but in this instance I think it's dividing opinion for the wrong reasons. The XCOM demo arrived yesterday, and immediately, violently divided opinion.