XCOM: Enemy Within - Preview @ PC Gamer

Couchpotato

Couchpotato

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PC Gamer has a new preview of XCOM: Enemy Within were you meet Earth’s new defenders.

XCOM: Enemy Within replaces Enemy Unknown’s opening Arthur C Clarke quote with a pearl from American polymath R Buckminster Fuller. “Those who play with the Devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.”

It captures the central theme of this major expansion: how far are you prepared to warp your soldiers with alien tech before they lose touch with the race they’re defending? Fuller’s words do fall slightly askew, though. It’s not a sword, it’s a giant rocketpowered robot fist.

That fist belongs to Rebecca ‘Freya’ Berry, a US soldier strapped into a ten-foot-tall mech suit. I’m playing through a battle at Firaxis HQ, Maryland, surrounded by a squadron of design leads, all quietly waiting to see what I’ll do with this destructive new toy. The XCOM fundamentals remain unchanged: you build a base, research alien tech, conduct autopsies and invent new gear for your soldiers to utilise in turn-based human vs alien skirmishes. Enemy Within introduces new enemies, units, classes, gear, abilities, maps and more to grow that base game into something bigger, tougher and full of giant robots.

Mech-Freya is standing next to a tractor in the dark. I’m using my robo-soldier as a unmissable lump of bait, but I’ve played XCOM. I know how this goes. You throw a lone soldier forward and before you know it they’re knee-deep in little grey men blasting them in the flanks. Not today. I select my nearby assault soldier, Marco ‘Maestro’ Bruno, and have him take a covering position in the back of a pickup truck a few feet behind Freya. To my delight, he confirms the order in Spanish. Soldiers speak their native tongues in Enemy Within, rather than the generic US voices of old. XCOM’s team of international super-warriors will finally sound that way..
Click to expand...
More information.
 
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The correct voice overs alone is enough for me to want this. Although I only like the remake where I loved the original, it was the lack of depth and some weird mechanic choices that made it so. And the fact that everyone spoke the same way regardless where they were from. That's just silly (And a good reason enough not to have voice overs at all, if it's just text I can make up the accents myself.).
 
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I really tried to like the remake of Enemy Unknown but it just failed to deliver on any of the things that really hooked me on the original. They seem to have gone out of their way to provide one and only one play through that would be at all interesting. I really don't get people who can replay a game like that over and over again, getting the mission structure with the exact same maps and the exact same enemies and the exact same (brief) story delivery, every time. Did they really save so much money doing it that way that they had to alienate the fans of the original that they were supposedly attempting to please?
 
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They were probably just afraid to challenge the masses and console hardware :)
 
Couchpotato said:
To my delight, he confirms the order in Spanish. Soldiers speak their native tongues in Enemy Within, rather than the generic US voices of old. XCOM’s team of international super-warriors will finally sound that way..
Click to expand...
So if each soldier is from different nation they all speak different language. Sounds a bit stupid if they are suppose to be a closely co-operated team.

For immersion purposes I would replace this with national accents.
 
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