14 DAY TRIAL // What we know:
XCOM was a strategy game with turn based battles and a focus on man management, production and research, but the revival from publisher Take Two and developer 2K Marin, of BioShock 2 fame, takes the name and uses it for a mission based action game played from a third person perspective with limited control over the strategic layer.
From what we have seen players will be able to explore the base that serves as the nerve center of the anti-alien fight and can then choose missions that play out in real time.
On the battlefield players will control a team of three agents, one of them their own avatar, and they will be able to use both normal firepower and some special abilities in order to defeat an escalating number of enemies. The game will also include confrontations with powerful boss characters.
It seems that gamers will also have limited control over research, weapon development and agent recruitment and evolution.
The shooter reimagining of XCOM was set for an early March launch.
Given the history of the project and the rather limited amount of promotion going on for it at the moment, it was no surprise to see the publisher push it back to 2013, although that interval might also be optimistic.
Why it matters
XCOM might just be the most intriguing proposition of 2012 when it comes to player reaction, mainly because it takes something that the gaming public believes is likeable and then strips away all the elements that define its identity.
I got to see the game in action during the 2011 edition of the E3 trade show and it seemed to be a serviceable, if not particularly inspired squad based third person shooter, with some themes taken from UFO but little relation when it came to design or enemy identity.
And this was the second “coming” of the game, after the developers had already had a previous version, which was apparently scrapped because it was not good enough for public presentation.
The full Incoming 2012 series of articles can be read on Softpedia right here.