XCOM: Enemy Unknown

So my friend Matt picked up this game for me. Thanks a ton, because this game was awesome!

The graphics were very good. Enough detail to see what's going on, and a great tactical view for planning out your movement.

 The voice acting was excellent, and tailored perfectly to the character rolls.

The controls are great, with just about every action bound to a hotkey for quick turns.

The gameplay was rock solid. Build a base to make better stuff, to give to soldiers, to kill aliens with, to make money and level up, and build more base. The tactics of combat were well balanced, with enemy AI playing a major role in bringing it all together.



What I would have changed

* Make it so that heavies and snipers can be equiped from dropped alien weapons in the early to mid-game. I ended up using support and assault classes for most of the game.
* Equipment management could have been a bit easier/less tedious in a few screens. The barracks screen was pretty solid
* Body armor felt like a waste of money until the end game. As a matter of fact, I didn't buy body armor until a few missions from the end of the game.


* Add a quick load key in combat that loads you to the start of last round, which can be used mid-alien turn. This would account for 99.999% of the loading I needed to do in combat. Alternatively, allow loading a save mid-alien turn

* Add camera orientation information to save files. This will help avoid disorienting the user on combat save file loading




What I loved
* Pacing of the game was good. Just the right amount of chaos happening at any given time.
* Classes were uniquely defined and well spaced in terms of abilities
* Base building required planning, but wasn't overly complex
* Random events are mostly random. So if you get a bad "random event", you can just repeatedly reload the save before the event occurs until you get a better one. It does seem to draw from a small pool, so you might need to settle for the best of the next 5-6 loads.
* Save files were small (I have well over 100 saves). Combat saves around right under 1MB, and non-combat saves are ~130KB

Overall, I highly recommend this game. It was lots of fun, and a great experience. It took me just around 25 hours to complete the game.