That’s a hugely powerful change, and it makes Experimental Warfare a viable choice for research right off the bat, further widening your options and replay value.
The Foundry upgrades have become much more important as well, due largely to the new Tactical Rigging upgrade which allows every XCOM soldier to carry two pieces of equipment instead of just one. But speaking of blunt instruments, the Kinetic Strike is joyfully satisfying to use, as it blasts enemies clear through walls if you can get close enough.Between those upgrades and new stat-boosting medals, Enemy Within poses another difficult choice: do you spread out your upgrades to slightly enhance your whole lineup, or pile them onto a few elite soldiers and risk losing it all at once if a Sectopod gets off a lucky shot? They’re not as indestructible as they look, though – they can take a lot of damage, but they’re also huge targets and can’t take cover, so they end up as useful tools that reward good tactics and working with the rest of the team rather than blunt instruments. Layering those abilities on top of the existing skill tree (which has also received some notable rebalancing) makes the number of useful combinations and possible new tactics huge, and the drive to gather more Meld strong.Īlternatively, you can spend Meld to convert a soldier into a mech trooper for access to a whole new skill tree, and some powerful heavy weaponry. Almost immediately you can choose to delay important weapon and armor research in favor of unlocking enhancements that let soldiers auto-heal, aim better after a miss, jump to rooftops, and more. Meld leads to another big improvement: a broader early technology tree with several viable paths. As a direct result, my XCOM body count was much higher in Enemy Within than it has been on recent Enemy Unknown playthroughs (on Classic difficulty), and that’s reinvigorated the sense of danger. Their ticking self-destruct timers forced me out of my usual conservative patterns by pushing me to explore the map quickly, and prompted me to take exciting risks with the lives of my troops. Known as Meld, it’s used to buy powerful new genetic and cybernetic upgrades, and Enemy Within deviously dangles randomly placed cannisters in front of our noses.
There are a ton of great changes here, but the biggest is the addition of a new resource to most of the tactical maps. But as awesome as it is that developer Firaxis has given us so many more toys in this expansion (on PC – it's available as a stand-alone game on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), the aliens could’ve used some more help to keep the last months of the war competitive. Turn-based tactical games are all about tough choices, and XCOM: Enemy Within does an outstanding job of piling more of those into the first half of the campaign against the alien invasion that began in last year’s excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
0 kommentar(er)
