14 DAY TRIAL // 2K Marin, more specifically, its Australia branch, has announced that it is developing a title called XCOM based on the old alien fighting franchise, ditching the hyphen and moving the experience to the first person shooter genre.
The initial announcement was pretty divisive, some gamers that knew the original being afraid that the experience might be dumped down in order to appeal to the modern gamer. But it seems 2K Marin is interested in keeping at least some of the elements that made X-COM great.
A French gaming magazine named CanardPC offered a few more pieces of information related to the new XCOM in a preview feature. The big disappointment is that there's no full 3D rotating map of Earth showing alien attacks and allowing the player to intercept their UFOs and then engage in combat with them once they land or crash. Instead, the fresh XCOM has a map of the United States of America, with a retro feel to it, which will be used to choose missions from a branching tree.
The good pieces of news coming out of the preview are: base management is in, alongside production of hardware needed to tackle the alien threat and research of new advanced technologies that can level the playing field a little. Players will also be able to manage the team that goes into any mission and the demo did not allow the player to directly control teammates, although this might change for the final release.
The game seems to have been running on an Xbox 360 home console and 2K appears to have been inspired by BioShock with pictures taken by the player during the single player levels serving the research effort. It's also not clear how random the missions offered by the United States map are. The title may be launched in a little more than a year, giving the developers enough time to offer more information linked to it.