They go in with no armour and armed only with a pistol plus gadgets, but this doesn’t matter because when you extract them you get to send a full squad into the resulting battlescape mission, which then becomes a simple matter of keeping the operative’s head down while your soldiers who actually have guns do all the hard work of fighting the Exalt forces.Įxalt soldiers themselves are clones of your own XCOM troop classes dressed in pinstripe suits and face masks. Then you get the option to send in one of your soldiers as a covert operative to infiltrate the Exalt cell responsible. The way they work is that every so often you’ll get a message saying that Exalt have done something annoying – stolen some money, say, or slowed down some research. And they should have been cut, because Exalt in their current form simply cannot be taken seriously as either a gameplay mechanic or a threat to XCOM. Sadly as things stand Exalt are worse than a wasted opportunity – rather, they’re actively detrimental to the game and I really, really wish they’d been cut from the final product. I certainly never thought they’d stuff such a promising idea up quite so badly as they have here. Doing what Firaxis do best, in other words. I thought they’d listened to the criticism they were getting about the dull geoscape and were actively trying to liven it up a bit in the expansion. Perhaps I was letting my imagination run away with me, but this is why the reveal of Exalt a month or two ago got me quite excited. Potentially we could have had three-way fights with XCOM and Exalt both trying to carry off as much alien tech from a crashed UFO as possible, and Exalt running their own game in the background of the geoscape, setting up hidden cells within funding countries and – if unchecked – increasing their influence to the point where your funding is reduced or even stopped. This seemed like it might be a neat way of fixing up the static, unreactive nature of the geoscape segments: the addition of a human(ish) organisation that has many similarities to XCOM and who is working in direct opposition to you would have let them run a version of that parallel campaign structure I so enjoyed in the original X-COM. Exalt is supposed to be a third faction in the game they’re a sort of paramilitary anti-XCOM that wants to harness the alien technology to further their own end goal of taking over the world, which brings them into direct confrontation with your forces. Let’s talk about the expansion pack’s big failure first, because it involves the feature I was looking forward to the most: Exalt. As with Gods and Kings the headline features – Meld and Exalt – fall kind of flat, and it’s left to the unannounced changes and additions to the research trees and game balance to pull EW’s soldiers out of the plasma fire. So it goes with Enemy Within, which manages to be a solid expansion while only partially living up to its potential to turn XCOM from flawed gem into genuine classic. Unfortunately - and as I’ve mentioned several times on here - high hopes usually only lead to disappointment and broken dreams. After the success of Gods and Kings and the well-designed additions Brave New World made to Civ V (even if I didn’t particularly agree with them all that much) I had high hopes that Enemy Within would do the same for XCOM. A good thing, then, that it was made by Firaxis, since if there’s one thing Firaxis excel at it’s fixing critical flaws with comprehensive and well-designed expansion packs. Enemy Within is the first expansion to the XCOM remake, a game which was pretty well received on here over a year ago but which in the long run turned out to suffer from some fairly deep-seated structural issues – the aliens’ completely supine geoscape presence and an inverse difficulty curve being amongst the most prominent.
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