Review: XCOM for iOS

Be all that you can be.

There’s a lot riding on this shot.

It’s night in Mumbai. We’re in an army depot. Tanks parked in neat covered-and-aligned rows smoulder like spent fireworks, giving off an eerie orange glow. Captain Javier “Hex” Soto is resting his sniper rifle in the crook of his arm, lining up a standing shot on a monster.
A chryssalid is a half-again as tall as a man and sports a spidery assortment of arms, legs, and fangs — it’s responsible for the unnerving soundtrack of screams provided by the terrified civilians who dart between the columns of burning tanks looking for somewhere to hide.
The chryssalid in question is standing right next to the rookie, a kid from Russia named Gusev whose shaky aim emptied a magazine into thin air when he tried to kill the monster himself. If Soto misses this shot, that chryssalid is going to tear Gusev in half (if he’s lucky) and Soto will be the last man standing from the five that I landed in Mumbai ten minutes ago. If Soto misses this shot, he probably won’t make it back to the Skyranger alive to bug out. The government of India, already shaken by the reports of alien abductions and terror attacks will almost certainly withdraw from the multinational project that funds my team. And if India follows the other nations who’ve already withdrawn, I may not have enough money next month to keep pace with the inexorable advance of the alien horde. I will lose, and humanity will lose with me.
Don’t miss this shot, Soto.

XCOM is fond of night missions — which means you’ll turn the brightness up on your device, which eats battery faster.

This is XCOM, the 2012 PC & console re-make of the 1994 Microprose classic. XCOM is the story of an alien invasion and the men and women you lead in an attempt to repel it. Like its forbear, XCOM is a strategy game that gives you a remarkable set of tools, and then gets out of your way to let you tell the story yourself. Unlike its forbear, I’m playing it on my iPad.
2K and Firaxis were entirely up front with us when they announced this port a few months ago. XCOM for iOS was going to be the full-fat console/PC XCOM — with a few concessions. To run on the more modest iOS hardware, affordances would have to be made, meaning that some of the less crucial content would be cut out.
Gone are the alien autopsy and interrogation videos and the custom colors for armor. The cars found in urban missions don’t explode with the same verve that they did on the PC, and the smoke from smoke grenades doesn’t billow as much as it used to. These details were wonderfully immersive, but ultimately just window dressing. The important stuff is still there. You are still the XCOM Project’s all-powerful administrator, training troops and assigning research priorities. You are still the battlefield commander, making every tactical call in the turn-based battles. The game doesn’t include the Second Wave options that were added as a free DLC after the PC/console release last year, unfortunately, but the game’s difficulty settings are still brilliantly calibrated: Normal for those who prefer their AI opponents to lose gracefully, Classic for players who enjoy living on the knife edge of failure, and Impossible for utter sadists.
There are fewer unique battlefield levels than there were in the PC version, but only those who replay the game again and again are liable to notice. It’s possible to run into the same maps twice in the same playthrough, but because you are constantly evolving your forces to keep pace with the new monsters that the aliens throw at you, you won’t have the same tactical challenge repeated. Maybe you’ll be fighting sectoids and floaters with slug-throwing rifles the first time you see the graveyard map — if you see it again later you’ll be hunting mutons and cyberdiscs with heavy plasmas and alloy cannons.

Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.

For all the good things that XCOM for iOS has borrowed from its predecessor, it’s also inherited some of its quirks. Inventory management is still a boondoggle that will have you hunting through your barracks one locker at a time to find the soldier that took the last medikit with them off-duty. The idiosyncratic way that the game spawns bad guys is still there, too: squads of aliens pop out of a terrifying jack-in-the-box when you reveal the tile they’re hiding in — a system that punishes noobs and that experienced players find easy to game.
XCOM works beautifully on iOS. The controls are perfectly set up for a touchscreen, and it’s satisfying to discover iOS control metaphors turning up in unexpected places: you can switch between soldiers on the battlefield by swiping their names, or use pinch-to-zoom to explore the subterranean XCOM base in the strategic layer. Every once in a while you run into a hitch that reminds you that you’re playing a game originally designed for another platform (pinch-to-zoom has a tiny bit of lag on the tactical screen, and the game’s loading times are prodigious), but by and large it’s hard to spot the seams in the port.

The “ant farm” base is more fun to explore on a touchscreen.

Like Soto’s rifle shot, there’s a lot riding on XCOM for iOS. This is the second time that XCOM has been forced into the role of coal mine canary. Last year, industry observers scrutinized the game’s launch to see if the gaming public was prepared to pay top-dollar for a AAA turn-based strategy game, a genre that conventional wisdom had consigned to the dustbin of the 1990s along with AOL dial-up CD ROMs and Lucasarts adventures. Now XCOM for iOS is a weathervane for determining if Joe iPhone is ready to spend $20 on a mobile game. I hope he is, because XCOM is worth it.
XCOM for iOS might be burdened with a few irritating telltales of its console origins, but it’s a close enough to a native experience that those foibles are worth putting up with. It is one of the deepest and most satisfying video game experiences you can have on a mobile device, and despite the details that have been shaved away in the porting process, it’s still capable of generating true drama.
Don’t miss this shot, Soto.
SCORE

5 out of 5

The Evil Within preview

3:28 AM Activision Blizzard, cheats, pc game, review, simulation game, simulator, top No comments

Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami takes survival horror back to its roots in this terrifying psychological thriller.

Formats Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
Developer Tango
Publisher Bethesda
Released 2014

Recent years have seen horror games drift towards gunplay and action. Dead Space 3 and Resident Evil 5 were good games, but ones that slipped away from their original promise of terror to join the hegemony of big guys wielding big guns. The Evil Within wants to find frightening again, taking away the empowerment that has diluted the horror genre.

While “taking ‘genre x’ back to its roots’ is a well-worn PR line, when it comes from the godfather of video game horror, you have to sit up and listen. This is Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami’s first horror game since the superlative Resident Evil 4, and the first game for his new Tango Studio.

Proper, scare-your-socks-off horror is what Mikami promises with The Evil Within. And this first look turns those words into more than a hollow boast.

You play Sebastien Castellanos, a grizzled detective called to a disturbance at Beacon Mental Hospital, a gothic pile that has ‘creepy’ woven into its architecture. Strolling through the pouring rain towards the hospital doors, Sebastien cuts a confident figure, a little swagger embellished by the swish of his long raincoat.

The doors swing open to a bright, sterile reception area. Blood spatters the walls and floor, the corpses of patients and orderlies alike lie dead on the stone floor and wooden benches. Sebastien’s swagger has turned to a creep, as the head of one figure sitting stock still lolls lifelessly towards him as he walks past.

Sebastien then catches the apparent killer on a CCTV monitor, a ghostly, hooded figure that cuts through a screaming squad of cops as they fire blindly at their assailant. Then, he’s gone, before appearing behind Sebastien and jamming a syringe into his neck.

When Sebastien comes round, he’s hanging upside down in a grotesque butchery. Blood cakes the entire room, while other victims freshly butchered stare blankly at him. A dull, wet thud echoes around the room until a gruesome squelch. Then a grotesque, hulking man sidles into view, holding an enormous cleaver and dragging a severed torso, sticky blue entrails leaving a dark, bloody streak.

The butcher takes his trophy to his work bench, back turned to Sebastien, and begins to turn the man into kibble. Spying a knife embedded in the chest of the poor soul in front of him, Sebastien swings towards the steel and wrenches it from rotting flesh. After cutting himself down, Sebastien creeps up on the butcher to steal his keys, exiting the workshop apparently unnoticed as the monster goes about his gruesome work.

No such luck. An alarm warbles through the dank corridors, drowned out only by the rev of a chainsaw. Which the butcher uses to slice through the back of Sebastien’s calf

Injured, terrified and unarmed, Sebastien must then play a terrifying game of cat and mouse with the crazed butcher, whirling that chainsaw above his head to smash through furniture and obstacles.

Sebastien’s sneaking somewhat reminds of the recent The Last of Us, hunkering behind cover as the beastly butcher tries to flush him out. Sebastien throws a bottle to distract before hiding himself in a closet, every step of the butcher shuddering through the silence.

This early scene is brilliantly paced, veering from the harrowing tension of hiding from the butcher, to heart-thumping terror as you flee down a corridor decorated with whirring razor blades.

It’s fabulously terrifying stuff. A later scene deep in a woodland cabin then shows off the combat, which has Mikami and Resident Evil 4 written all over it. The camera snaps close to Sebastien’s back as he aims at staggering monsters, before setting fallen beasties alight to make sure they don’t rise again. The scene earnestly recalls the famous cabin siege from Resident Evil 4, as Sebastien lays mines under windows as an army of monsters clamber into the building. The same tension is there, Sebastien desperately back-pedalling while popping off shots before running downstairs for the briefest of respites.

But while this action sequence is a direct tribute to Mikami’s earlier work, The Evil Within as a whole appears more than a Resi throwback. After the battle, Sebastien is running through a forest path, with every door into a cabin spitting him back outside, until one unleashes a river of blood that comes thundering towards the screen... And then we’re back in the sterile corridors of the mental hospital. A grate falls, and creeping out of it comes a grotesque feminine figure with eight limbs, long black hair obscuring its head, stalking, stalking... and then the demo ends.

It’s a terrific first glimpse, with Tango bringing together the thrill and tension of Resident Evil and the psychological terror of Silent Hill. Such a combination is survival horror’s dream ticket, and with Mikami at the helm, we can be confident that he and Tango will be be turning it into a nightmare. The very best kind, of course.

“Call of Duty” maker Activision going independent will intensify the battle for video game dominance

10:18 PM Activision Blizzard, Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bobby Kotick, Call of Duty, cheats, Electronic Arts, review No comments

Bring it on AP Photo/Activision

Activision Blizzard, the video game maker most famous for its Call of Duty franchise, has finally broken free. After months of negotiations, its owner, Vivendi, agreed to sell most of its stake in Activision back to the company for $8.2 billion.
The deal should make Activision a more nimble company, which will heat up the already intense battle with rival Electronic Arts.
Activision’s shares rose by more than 14% on the news. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and his investment partners will also have a stake in the company as part of the deal. The new Activision will have about $3 billion in cash on its balance sheet, a nice stockpile to use for investments in the company, M&A, or other purposes.
Arch rival Electronic Arts is also doing well, and recently reported better-than-expected earnings. But the company has been going through a bit of a transformation, and laid off some staffers earlier this year to streamline operations. Electronic Arts is also still searching for a permanent CEO after John Riccitiello left the company.
Still, the company managed to beat analyst estimates, even though its Battlefield 3 game, a competitor to Call of Duty, is almost two years old. The company is pinning a lot of hope on the release of its FIFA 3 soccer game in China. It will also be launching Battlefield 4 later this year, which will go up against Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts.
The one gaming company that has fallen behind is Zynga. Its shares continued to fall today (they are down by about 17%), after announcing that it would not pursue a license for online gambling in the United States. The company—and many investors—had hoped that real-money gambling could help turn it around.
Interestingly, Zynga’s new CEO Don Mattrick is rumored to have been the front runner for the Electronic Arts CEO position. So far, it looks like Mattrick may have made a questionable choice in picking Zynga. He is overhauling Zynga’s strategy and warned it could get ugly at times, but said Zynga will be better off in the long run.