“At the beginning of the game we direct you in a couple of different ways, and then that web of possibilities of what you can research starts to explode – but pretty much anything you bring back will have some use later on in the game. “There aren't a lot of blind alleys you can go down,” says Murray. So you want to be careful with the highexplosives, especially around sensitive alien equipment, as a fragmented something-orother is probably not as useful as an intact one for your scientists to work on.”įiraxis have also made this research less opaque than in the original game.

As the invasion continues you come across more and more powerful aliens and different technologies. “Like in the original game, at some point the tide turns and suddenly you are more awesome than the aliens. Classic difficulty, meanwhile, aims to recreate the austere challenge of the original game. XCOM has made some concessions to the broader gaming audience: lower difficulties come with lower lethality, additional telemetry and tool-tips.

With your range of expertise weakened, it's very easy to then lose control of a situation entirely – at least, it is on the harder difficulty settings. Needless to say, with their roles so defined, just one dead teammate means a gigantic hole in your tactical operation. And the last class is the support soldier – he's a guy who can fill a whole bunch of roles on the battlefield, from medic to jack-of-all-trades.” You've also got assault soldiers, who are the masters of closequarters combat they can take a tonne of damage and they can dish a tonne out at close range.

You've got a sniper: he can sit up on a mountaintop like Zeus and hurl thunderbolts at people or bushwhack through the weeds and get in position for that perfect shot. He's going to solve big problems with big tools. You've got a heavy weapons specialist: he's got a machine gun and a rocket launcher.

“You've got four different classes of soldier in XCOM. With smaller team sizes comes greater emphasis on the interoperation of their different classes, too.

Xcom enemy unknown classes