But overall XCOM's turn-based campaign is more coherent and elegant than anything the genre has granted us in years. They've oversimplified the aerospace metagame to get you to focus on the great ground combat, and your base is visualized with all the detail of a screensaver. Not all of Firaxis's new ideas are this successful. Combing the map is now less a frustrating hide-and-seek and more a murderous Marco Polo.

This change eliminates the impatience that arises when you can't figure out what rock the final alien's hiding under. Every grid of movement steadily pulls back a curtain on things that want to kill you unseen enemies, however, will occasionally indicate their general direction. Firaxis also has a clever approach to the fog of war. The old action-points system has been recast in a less arithmetical form: in combat, any soldier can move once and take an action, or they can make a single, longer move instead. Firaxis keeps these spiritual details intact, but it also has the guts to melt down and modernize some of the series' mechanical details.

Xcom enemy within or unknown