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XCOM: Enemy Unknown
For a proven blend of base management and turn-based tactics, this is a clear buying opportunity: Standard costs ≈ $0.18 at 
Kinguin and sits at the lowest point recorded in this price history. The Steam PC version combines soldier and technology management with global missions and careful squad control. Players seeking single-player or multiplayer get a focused strategic package, provided the confirmed language options suit their setup. With a ≈ $14.81 saving against Steam’s $14.99 price, Standard is directly comparable on Steam.
KinguinXCOM: Enemy Unknown PC Steam CD Key
GGselXCOM: Enemy Unknown РФ+СНГ+ВЕСЬ МИР Steam КЛЮЧAll-time low ~ $1.49across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $0.152026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $1.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+1227%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About XCOM: Enemy Unknown
You command XCOM against a global alien invasion. Manage resources, research alien technology, and expand the base while recruiting and customizing soldiers. In turn-based ground battles, plan movement and squad tactics; you can also deploy aircraft and respond to threats around the world. The Steam PC version supports single-player and multiplayer. The Steam PC version offers full controller support. It was released on October 8, 2012. 93%% of 40,494 Steam player reviews are positive.
Credits
J
Composer
Michael McCann
Developer
Firaxis Games · Feral Interactive (Linux)
Publisher
2K · Feral Interactive (Linux)
Voice
Jon Bailey
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$0.152026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| German | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 7 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-11-10
02Before you buy
Modes and controller
The Steam PC version supports single-player and multiplayer, with full controller support.
Language support
Confirmed interface languages are English and Traditional Chinese. English has full audio and subtitles; Traditional Chinese has subtitles.
03Frequently asked questions
What do you do in XCOM: Enemy Unknown?
You command XCOM, manage resources, research technologies, and lead soldiers through turn-based ground combat.
How large is the campaign?
The campaign includes more than 70 unique missions and takes the fight around the world.
What strategic tasks are included?
You recruit and customize soldiers, expand the XCOM base, and deploy aircraft such as the Interceptor and Skyranger.
8.6
Overall Score
Graphics6.5
Audio8
Gameplay9.5
Story8.5
Content8.5
“You'll rename a soldier after a friend, then watch him fall for good after a 90% shot misses — it braids base management into ground combat so every call costs you something real. For strategy players who chase high difficulty and can stomach the dice.”
Our Verdict
In 2012 it dragged a dying genre back out of the grave
To grasp this game's weight, set it back in 2012. Before it, turn-based tactics was a genre the market had all but pronounced dead — the big releases were all chasing real time, chasing visuals, chasing action thrills, and the spiritual heirs to old X-COM either died in development or curdled into niche nostalgia. Firaxis took the risk of remaking a twenty-year-old game that might have found no audience at all, and it landed both critically and commercially, proving outright that "hardcore turn-based plus permadeath plus high difficulty" still had a huge market on modern platforms.
The honors it collected are heavy: twenty awards swept at E3 2012, Game of the Year nods from GameTrailers, Kotaku, GameSpy and other major outlets, and a 2013 BAFTA for Best Strategy Game.
The deeper impact is that it founded a school. The sequel XCOM 2, the indie standout Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, Phoenix Point from original X-COM creator Julian Gollop, and a long list of modern tactics games carrying permadeath all show its DNA in their design. "XCOM-like" is now an industry-recognized subgenre label, and the game that defined the term is this one.
Who should buy it, and who should steer clear
So who is it for in 2026? The answer is clear. If you are a hardcore strategy player who wants high difficulty, can accept that soldiers really die, and is willing to own the consequences of every call, it is nearly a rite of passage — you will pull a tension and a satisfaction out of its "every decision has a cost" systems that few peers can match. If what you love is the grind-it-out, step-by-step, win-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth kind of triumph, it was built for you.
But if you want relaxed and breezy, if a shown ninety percent that misses sends your blood pressure through the roof, if one bad break wiping your squad will ruin your night — steer clear. This is not a game that coddles you. It will make you lose, it will make you hurt, and that hurt is by design, not a bug. Graphics chasers should brace too: the 2012 Unreal 3 visuals look their age today.
There is one more group to flag: the perfectionists, the players who cannot stand luck in the loop. The hit chance here is genuinely random — it will not quietly stack the odds in your favor because you are the protagonist, so a shown ninety percent really does whiff one time in ten, and the whiff can be the exact shot that leaves your best veteran hanging in the open. For some people that "you can do everything right and still get wrecked by a roll" design is the most thrilling thing about it; for others it is pure torment. Work out which camp you fall into before you buy, because the game will not bend to meet you halfway. On versions, do not agonize — grab the Complete Edition or any copy with Enemy Within and own the whole decade of depth for one price.
It is not flawless: the multiplayer is a husk, the maps repeat, the visuals show their years, and the random hit rolls will, at some point, betray you at the worst possible moment. But the engine at its core, the one that grows stories out of mechanics, still makes people reopen it again and again, to walk a squad that really dies and that you really name into a fight that simply has to be fought. More than a decade on, almost nothing in the genre it founded asks you to feel this much for soldiers it never bothered to write — and that, far more than any score, is the reason it still matters.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Failed college. Lost girlfriend....just one more turn.Show moreShow less
114 hours at review3,440 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Good game, uninstalled it for something else, but won't be reinstalling it... Take 2 needs to back peddle on thier EULA and data collection: INFORMATION COLLECTION & USAGE By installing and using the Software, you consent to the information collection and usage terms set forth in this section and Licensor's Privacy Policy, including (where applicable) (i) the transfer of any personal information and other information to Licensor, its affiliates, vendors, and business partners, and to certain other third parties, such as governmental authorities, in the U.S. and other countries located outside Europe or your home country, including countries that may have lower standards of privacy protection; (ii) the public display of your data, such as identification of your user-created content or displaying your scores, ranking, achievements, and other gameplay data on websites and other platforms; (iii) the sharing of your gameplay data with hardware manufacturers, platform hosts, and Licensor's marketing partners; and (iv) other uses and disclosures of your personal information or other information as specified in the above-referenced Privacy Policy, as amended from time to time. If you do not want your information used or shared in this manner, then you should not use the Software. For the purposes all data privacy issues, including the collection, use, disclosure, and transfer of your personal information and other information, the Privacy Policy located at www.take2games.com/privacy, as amended from time to time, takes precedence over any other statement in this Agreement.Show moreShow less
7.5 hours at review527 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ THIN MEN AND THEIR PRECISION ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ CHRYSSALIDS AND THEIR ONE HIT KOs ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ROOKIES SUCK BIG WINGWONGS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SOLDIERS MISS EVERY SHOT THEY TAKE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ALIENS HIT EVERY SHOT THEY TAKE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PERPETUALLY OUTNUMBERED ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SECTOPODS ARE THE SIZE OF AT-ATS BUT ARE SOMEHOW IMPOSSIBLE TO HIT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BOMB DEFUSAL MISSIONS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ COUNTRIES ARE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WUSSY ASSDICKS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ IRONMAN IMPOSSIBLE FOR MASOCHISTS ONLY NO RETREAT. NO SURRENDER. HUMANITY PERSERVERES. WIN ANYWAYS. ♥♥♥♥ ALIENS. ALL CAPS RAGE REVIEWS #1 THAT'S XCOM BABYYYYY.Show moreShow less
557.1 hours at review1,430 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a re-imagining of the classic X-COM: UFO Defense and as such has a similar setting. Aliens come out of nowhere and attack earth. The multinational organization X-COM has to battle the aliens, reverse engineer their technology to create equipment that is on par with that of the invaders and eventually defeat them. As the X-COM commander the player decides about the building of base facilities, instructs the scientists and engineers, is in charge of the deployment of soldiers and commands them in battle. XCOM: Enemy Unknown naturally takes much inspiration from the older X-COM games but also changes quite a bit. Some of those changes are actually good. Some are rather bad and some are just horrible. In this game you have one base and cannot construct additional ones like in the previous entries in the series. Also the squads have been downsized to four people at the beginning and six with upgrades. I actually like that because it counteracts the grindy nature of the game a little bit. Building one base to completion takes quite a lot of time anyway. Also while playing the original games I always took machines with me because they would take four squad slots thus reducing the number of soldiers I had to command. Spending the whole first turn with just moving a dozen people out of the landing craft was tedious. Also there are character classes now. Every class gets to choose from different abilities to learn as they level up. This adds depth to your squad selection, especially since squads are smaller now. The game also mixes up the grindyness with some missions that have special objectives not seen in previous entries. The developers also chose to have some non-interchangeable talking characters at your base. That actually adds a lot of personality to the game and I really like it. In my opinion XCOM: Enemy Unknown gets those changes right. However, there are changes that are more problematic. The previous X-COM games use an action point system. Moving, shooting, ducking, turning, switching out equipment all takes away from your soldier's action points. XCOM: Enemy Unknown however drops the action points. You just have two actions per turn. For example moving and then moving some more. Or moving and then shooting. This system would not be so bad if it was not flawed. Shooting ends the soldier's turn. Reloading also does. Because of that there is not benefit to standing and shooting as opposed to moving and shooting. Also, reloading and shooting in the same turn is not possible. Reaction shots to enemy movement in the earlier games where possible whenever the soldier ended his turn with enough unused action points. In this game however, you need to activate the ability "Overwatch" to have the chance of a reaction shot. Using this ability also ends your soldier's turn. Also whenever moving you have to decide beforehand where to move. You cannot move step by step to check if you got a line of sight to the enemy. If you have no line of sight at the end of your movement you cannot shoot. That is especially frustrating because unlike in the prequels it can be very hard to judge if you will have line of sight after moving to a certain position. Cover in this game does not act as physical barrier anymore, it's just a modifier on the attacker's hit roll. Yes, it gives a certain protection from enemy fire but everybody can be hit at all times given there is a line of sight to his cover. This doesn't work well with the games' rigged RNG rolls. Sometimes enemies will just one-hit your soldiers who are standing behind heavy cover from a great distance while your soldiers have problems hitting enemies that are five meters away from them in the open. In the original games you could stand so close to enemies that missing was virtually impossible because an actual projectile was going out on a 2D plane. Also, there is no collision detection for shots anymore. In the previous X-COM entries you had to be careful with your positioning because friendly fire could be a serious threat. Now you can only hit the target that you were aiming at in the first place. It is not possible to accidently hit a teammate or another enemy instead. XCOM: Enemy Unknown handles armor in a bad way. Armor does not reduce damage taken. It just adds more hit points. In the classic games energy armor would make a soldier nearly invincible against small weapons. In this game however a soldier in the heaviest armor can be worn down by sticks and stones given there are enough sticks and stones thrown at him. I think it is great that there are character classes now. The problem is that soldiers start without a character class. They get assigned one after their first promotion. This assigment is random though. That means if you need more soldiers of a certain class you have to constantly take rookies with you and hope that they survive, get their promotion and turn out to be the class that you have wanted in the first place. Some of the upgrades have the only point of battling bad design choices. You can for example upgrade your weapon technology to slowly reload automatically over time. Also, with the gene mods you can use in the expansion you can enhance your soldiers with hit point regeneration per turn and with an ability that makes them untargetable in cover given that the enemy did not see them at the beginning of your turn before moving into cover. You can also buy an upgrade to have your rookies already start with a character class. However it is still random. Those are sure nice upgrades but none of them would be necessary if reloading, cover, armor and classes would not have been handled that badly. Enemy movement: This is the aspect of the game the does not want me to recommend it. The game has many flaws but this one is just infuriating. Every time you spot a group of enemies they get a free turn of movement to get into cover, flank you or run towards you. This happens during your turn - in a turn-based strategy game. Also, most of the enemies appear in groups now and you always trigger the whole group of them. It often happens that you move all your soldiers without seeing any enemy and then you discover an alien squad with your last soldier, letting them get into optimal positions to fire at you in their upcoming turn. This doesn't work well together with enemy types that can one-hit kill rookies, converting them into bullet-sponge zombies afterwards. After you spot them they use their reaction movement to get closer and immediately close in for the kill in their turn. It happens really rarely that enemies move before you discover them. In most cases they are standing in place waiting to be triggered like land mines. Because of that melee combat is completely unviable now. In the classic games you could sneak up on enemies if they were not looking in your direction. Now they always now that you are there and start moving at once. Also, sometimes enemies will just drop from the sky - sometimes right next to you - making all planning and tactics kind of useless. The only other game in which I have seen such levels of lazyness in enemy placement and AI was Dragon Age 2. I still have my fair share of fun with the game and maybe you will too. But as it is I cannot recommend it since it is full of really weird design choices some of which are so blatantly bad I cannot even imagine what the developers were thinking. Sometimes it is really infuriating. The most frustrating thing is that the developers got so much right just to screw up royally in other departments. If there would be a re-release with a proper action point system and decent enemy movement and placement XCOM: Enemy Unknown could easily become one of my favourite games of all time despite its other flaws. As it is now it sadly cannot. More reviews hereShow moreShow less
53.5 hours at review364 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Changed my soldiers to look like Stormtroopers to reflect their aim.Show moreShow less
69.9 hours at review1,360 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
- https://www.take2games.com/privacy/ "The information we collect may include personal information such as your first and/or last name, e-mail address, phone number, photo, mailing address, geolocation, or payment information. In addition, we may collect your age, gender, date of birth, zip code, hardware configuration, console ID, software products played, survey data, purchases, IP address and the systems you have played on. We may combine the information with your personal information and across other computers or devices that you may use." You agree that your data can be sent to "countries that may not have equivalent data protection".Show moreShow less
3.3 hours at review344 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
actually the enemy is an alienShow moreShow less
0.8 hours at review969 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game really is not anywhere near as good as people think it is. I would promise you that at least 90% of the people who have praised this game have not actually played it in a true Ironman and Classic playthrough. And I want to make two poiints here: Why the game fails as a game, and why it fails as an XCOM game. Why it isnt an XCOM game: This game is simple, and by that I mean REALLY simple. Xcom enemy Unkown plays like a really old board game(think Monopoly/Risk), the ruleset is extremely simplistic and leave such a large gab to chance that almost all decisions you make are irelevant. Most people(even those who dislike this game) do not seem to understand this as they complain about 'bugs' that cause shooting through walls, floors, and other things. If you actually play this game and look at the ruleset applied it becomes clear that those were never bugs or oversights, this is simply how this game works. 'Props/Cover/objects/ground' never exists in this game, it all applies a very Warhamer/LOTR/40k logic, but simplified: If you have line of sight on an enemy you can shoot at it, only you and the object matter, the hit calculation is PURELY created by the different effects on a unit.(aka, if he is in cover you get -40% on the hit chance. What is the cover and how is it actually position and what about the 5 other things obscuring the view? Like I said, board game logic. As such the shooting through a wall was never a bug, it simply is that the ruleset has no consideration for anything but the 3 or so objects used in the calculation.(That is why there is no free shooting, 'bullets' do not exist, that is why explosions always do the same damage, through walls or not through walls. That is why all cover works in a very binary state of existing or not existing.) Why am I rambling on this? The people who played the old Xcoms and say this has the spirit of xcom are utterly wrong, Xcom (as silly as it sometimes was) was in a way a simulation. It tried to "simulate" squad combat, based on a ruleset that was as 'reaslitic' as would be possible while being fun. If you looked at something and thought about how it would work based on your reasoning then most of the time it would react the way you expected it to. Bullets would travel, if they missed or were shot at a bad angle they would travel in an angle away from where it meant to go, if the bullet hit an object it would damage or destroy the object, an explosion would damage objects, if the bullet can travel the path and is shot in the correct angle it WILL travel the path. Expectations were formed on your understanding of how things would interact, not simply by the very (often binnary) ruleset given to you. This game has nothing to do with XCOM besides the skin and that both are a Turned based strategy, their fundemantal game design is different and as such it fails to be an XCOM game. Why is it a bad game even on its own terms? As said, it plays like a board game would, which can be fine, I like board games... It plays like a bad board game. A board game will give the player a defined set of rules the player has to adapt to in order to overcome a certain problem. Almost any board game ever will be forced to fall back to the concept of luck as certainty on everything will become boring. But the job of any good game is to give the player a multitude of meaningful obtions for allow him to minize the randomness of the dicethrow to such a level that he can confidently predict the outcome based on the rulest the game uses. This game fails to do that across the board. Why? Because just about every single thing you can do has simply has far too little actual impact on the game. Cover can either lower your chance to be hit by 20%, or 40%. Which might not sound like so little but considering that the whole game is cenetered around the concept of cover and by extension of it flanking, it means that flanking is not a nessesary move, cover simply isnt reliable as it is. Compared to other such games(Warhamer/LOTR/40k) where a wall would be a wall and it would give you 100% cover, and flanking it would give you 100% more of a chance to hit.(small cover would amount to something akin to 50%) Add to it that just about every unit in this game has 60 to 75% aim, and the fact that the 20% and 40% is a simple reduction(not a multiplcation or such, simply: 75% is your aim, -40% is cover, 35% chance to hit. And 1 hit mostlikely means dead) and you quickly find out that hiding behind a wall has very little actual power, at which point it becomes clear that the direction of engagment is rather a minor detail. What about height? Well, the game gives you a set boon for being 'above' an enemy, but do to its very simplistic nature that 'Above' is often rather wonky. An enemy can be in 'high' cover, getting a 40% defense boon while being two floors below you(meaning you could easily shoot over their 'high' cover as it is not as tall as the object you are standing on) While you are in 'low' cover, still two floors higher. In the end you will both have the same odds of hitting each other and even if you have 'high' cover while being on a roof, all you got is an extra 20% hit chance. Do you see the general theme? Anything and everything you do moves the hit chances up or down by such minute amounts that they really have very little impact. Throw a smoke granade(of which you got 1 per mission in early game) and you get 20% more cover for two turns. In what sitersations is a 20% shift really that important? Because often those 20% is all you can change when it comes to winning or losing your 10 hour long campaign. The dice throwing is also made much worse by the fact that all engagments are very small scale, while in a game like Warhamer you would throw 30 dice and 30 units, you throw 5 or 6 here, of which any can decide the whole game. The more dice the more likely things will even out to be reasonable odds, here they never do. So, playing this game pretty much amounts to playing a extremely simple(to the extent of being almost completely binary in logic) board game that doesnt even have the curtesy to let you infulence it. It gives you a lot of strategic options but most of them will have such minor impacts on the dicethrows that the most important strategic advice for this game is 'never trigger more then one group at a time'(As implied by that, the game is also full of really bad design decisions which I won't even touch on as those are commenly complained about) Besides that it is worthy to note that big oversights were never fixed in this game even though the expansion 'fixes' it. The example being that there is no button to easily disarm all your troops so you can re-equipt things.(Which is a UI oversight and should have been patched, not an expansion feature). Look at Xenonauts, look at this and give it some thought, you'll figure out why I called this game 'simple' and a 'bad board game'.Show moreShow less
99.5 hours at review342 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
You know this game did something right when characters that have no backstories and barely even talk die and your first reaction is to feel deep pain. Not because of the gruesome death that a wild Chryssalid can make, not because of the large grenade explosions or the laser beams of a Sectopod, but because an XCom Operative, a squadmate, a friend, will not see the end of the war that got us all together. Feels/10Show moreShow less
39.3 hours at review950 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really don't know what to write about XCOM: Enemy Unknown. One one hand it is a great tactical strategy game with some cool features, on the other hand it seems to be either unintentionally broken or designed so horribly that it basically makes the turn-based gameplay pointless. Visually XCOM is great, mostly. The designs, weapons, armors, vehicles and bases in addition to most of the aliens are really nice looking and have variety to them. The human characters, mainly the male soldiers are rather unnerving in appearance. The female soldiers are mostly ok and the story characters work well. The music sets the mood and there are some good standout pieces (especially the "Ready for battle" song). Now, I know that the franchise is a meat grinder of sorts, fighting tooth and nail to win one battle at a time with the ever-looming threat of making that one bad call and getting a TPK even on a regular search and destroy mission. And I am fine with that. 1. Not being able to choose the class of your soldiers when they start ranking up. You would think this is an OK feature and perhaps if it worked well enough it would be. Now it is completely random (or at least I haven't found out how to affect it through my own actions): I started a new game, played the first few missions and leveled up my squad only to find out that 2 of them became snipers, one went to become a heavy and another an assault class. Ok, so early in the game that is not a big problem but when I bought an additional squad member position to my team and picked the next rookie to go on a mission things went from "silly team composition" to "how does this even work": I now had 3 snipers in my team in addition to the heavy and assault. A basic abduction mission is easy to handle even with an uneven team but when I have to race against time to save civilians of disarm a bomb and three of my squad members can't move and shoot/overwatch at a low level is a big problem. Sure, I could have picked other rookies and started to level them up but once you play few missions and every perk you gain when leveling up is of great importance, you rather choose the ones you have as high level as possible to ensure that a TPK doesn't happen. Especially since the panic levels increase fast in the first hours of the game. 2. Me see evil; me no shoot evil. I have come to learn that unless you have a 100% chance to hit a target, you will more than likely miss. It doesn't matter if the percentage is at 90; out of 10 shots with 90% probability to hit the target, your soldiers will hit maybe, just maybe, half of them. Even if the target is standing in an adjacent square. And what is absolutely baffling to me is that your soldier can stand only one square away from the enemy unit that is standing in the open and your soldier's hit percentage is only 65. I witnessed a case where 4 of my soldiers were surrounding a Muton (the big green hulk) that was hiding behind a one square sized cover (an alien artefact that needed to be salvaged so no rocket launchers). The soldiers were positioned so that only one of them wasn't flanking the enemy unit aka the cover was between them. The other three soldiers were one square away from it, flanking from the sides and behind with no cover )this would mean a red shield if it was a player controlled soldier). It took all four of them to bring down the Muton that had already lost half of its HP. Two of my soldiers, the one not flanking and one of the flanking soldiers missed and the rest to managed to hit and kill the Muton. Now, if this was to happen the other way around, 4 enemy units surrounding one of the soldiers, the soldier would have been killed instantly, no misses. It is as if the aliens have a naturally better chance at every shot they take, no matter how good my soldiers' gear is. Also, when an alien like a sectoid is half the map away from my soldier (that would have maybe 10-15% chance to hit the sectoid if it was the soldier's turn) and the sectoid not only hits my soldier who is behind a cover and deals critical damage, I call BS. It seems that when the distance grows, the likelyhood for my soldiers to hit the target diminishes, fairly quickly I might add (which in itself is logical). However, it seems that no matter how far the enemies are, they are more than likely to hit you, no matter the elevation difference. Also the "higher elevation boost" for soldiers, especially snipers is ridiculous. I have only once seen it give any advantage and that was when the sniper was only few squares away from the enemy unit that wasn't behind cover and even then with the S.C.O.P.E. the hit probability didn't rise to more than 80%. 3. Bullet trajectory. A minor but most irritating and definitely a design flaw in the game is the way bullets, plasma, lasers and whatnot fly when someone is shot. If the game calculates the hit/miss before the actual animation is shown, it would be nice to not see bullets or other death rays to hit a target and then see "Missed" in the notification. I mean, how hard is it to program the animations to "miss" when the statistics state that the shot missed the target? It is really confusing to see my soldier take hit from a volley of plasma and then get "Missed" when I was already mentally prepared to see the soldier die. It is just bad design. 4. Statistical cover and visual cover. Sometimes it seems that no matter how well in cover you are, you get hit. I don't fully know how the cover works, perhaps full cover is nothing more than "a crit denier": you take hit but don't get hit with a crit, similar to "hunker down". Sometimes the bullets and whatnot seem to hit the environment, sometimes they travel straight through it and hit the target. It is rather difficult to place a sniper in a good position to overwatch when you can't tell for certain if a wall is just there for level design purpose or if it is actually a wall/cover. One time my sniper was in a place I never would have expected for him to be able to shoot anybody but surely enough he just calmly stood up and shot an enemy unit through a couple square thick spaceship wall. 5. No free aim. This might seem a pointless nitpick but I think that removing the possibility to shoot other than just visible aliens is a silly thing. The game has destructible environments, the rocket launchers and grenades have free aim and there are features in the maps that can become environmental hazards for both the XCOM and the aliens. 6. Overwatch works some of the time. The idea of overwatch is important if one wants to survive the missions and more than once it has saved my squad. However, I find it ridiculous that every soldier shoots at the same time if a target comes into their field of view. Once I had 3 soldiers, 2 assaults and a sniper take a shot at a single target: the assault with a plasma rifle slaughtered the target, the second assault and sniper therefore shot at nothing remarking "I've missed the target" which is funny since the target was already rendered into atoms. Oh, and most times, if the target isn't less than 5 squares from the soldiers, they are more than likely to miss, even if the target is in the open. 7. Enemy movement on my turn. How this feature got through the QA is beyond me. How can you make a turn-based strategy game when the enemy units always get a freebie when you spot them? Wouldn't it be more logical that they move around the map even when you have not yet spotted them instead of creeping in one spot and then scattering around like cockroaches when you finally spot them? I find it immensely bad design that they can move to a cover and then take a full turn after the player has completed their turn. Many more times than I want to remember, I have spent my actions covering my units while assuming the enemy coming from the darkness only to spot them with my last soldier and see them reposition themselves flanking me and then have a turn to TPK my team.Show moreShow less
31.6 hours at review248 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.