I've Solved Those Missions Like This

By Author: Jennefiy
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The latter is always more rewarding.XCOM is a game of resource management and tactics more than a game of chance. I can pretend it's the dice roll that decides who lives and who dies, but it's my decisions. Because I decided to spend money on laser rifles instead of body armor, I had to send an under-equipped soldier on a difficult mission, and I pulled him out of cover to collect Meld for my laboratories. And now he's dead. In that respect, it's more vitally a game about sacrifice, ethics, and responsibility.

Enemy Within muddies up those ethical waters with even more excruciating decisions, requires more complex tactics, and promotes an even deeper connection to the soldiers I dearly want to protect. It doesn't significantly address Enemy Unknown's shortcomings, but adds more great, challenging experiences to an already great game.VerdictThe fantastic Exalt missions, gene mods, and MEC Troopers are an excellent reason to play more laying with genetics always involves tubes of neon liquid.Rest in peace, Major Evan “Mad Dog” Lahti. You single-handedly killed a Muton with a scatter laser, saving the life of ...
... rookie sniper Wesley Snipes. It's too bad there were two Mutons, but seriously, you died a hero, and we all know that last 82 percent chance shot should have hit—that's just total BS. And hey, you also completed a secondary objective that was really important, so we appreciate that. Sorry you're dead.

That's just how XCOM goes. It's about making hard decisions as you command earth's front line defense against an alien invasion, primarily by nurturing squads of soldiers which you control in a series of turn-based assaults on the extraterrestrials. Unless you're using save reloading as a crutch, your soldiers' lives are in your hands. If they die, they're dead forever. Not only do I attach emotional value to these customized troops—usually named after my friends or actors with appropriate names—I'm invested in their skills and how they fit into a well-balanced squad. Losing a great soldier can be devastating, and sometimes you have to lose one to save another, or bad luck smacks one down with a surprise critical hit.Sq. Lahti was killed.

Not to be confused with Major Lahti. He dies later.Improving by addingIlove XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I love the base-building metagame, I love the tactical combat, and I love the permadeath. The Enemy Within expansion adds good stuff to all of that. My biggest criticism, however—and the reason it took me forever to play the original Enemy Unknown campaign to completion—is that the number of surprises drops off steeply after the first ten or so missions. Once all the aliens are introduced, the most common kill-all-aliens missions become route exercises.

I've solved those missions like this: Spotting a group of aliens by advancing a soldier into line of sight contact is dangerous, because it “activates” that threat and gives the aliens a free movement turn. But the aliens won't advance until activated, so I keep my soldiers in tight formation and use my sniper's Battle Scanner, which can be tossed like a grenade and provides two turns of remote sight, to activate alien mobs from a distance. Then I just patiently wait for the enemy to come to me, using the Overwatch ability to take shots whenever they try to move fifa 14 ultimate team coins up. It works nearly every time, but feels exploitative of the mechanics.I try to make sure all my soldiers remain in line-of-sight of each other.Enemy Within tries to solve this problem by adding a secondary objective to each basic mission type—find and collect a new resource used in genetics and cybernetics labs, Meld, before the containers self-destruct—but it's just a patch.