This being the game franchise that has rocked the difficulty settings to the extreme, I did wimp out and play on Normal, but trying out Impossible and Classic difficulties I do have to say, This game will wreck you. just about everything on the higher difficulties goes wrong for you and right for the enemies. But I'll get to that later. For now let's talk story.
It is the near future, and mankind has been expecting hostile alien life to come to earth. That is why when life did come from outer space and start terrorising humanity, we joined together to create the XCOM Project, a coalition of countries coming together to form a defence against the aliens. You, as the player, are the head of this project and you control everything from what departments get funding to what soldier moves to cover in combat. The game doesn't really ever explain the enemies in depth and you have to perform autopsies on the enemies in order to find out what they are and what they want. This pulls from a very Dark Souls style narrative where you as the player have to look for your story. i personally love this, but a player who would want their story explained to them might not. In terms of environment and immersion, this game gives you the feeling of being in the world right from the start. You are in control of the soldiers and it is your fault if they die or get injured. You feel terrible when one of your soldiers dies in battle and you have to continue fighting. The game play reinforces this with the perma-death and the resource management.
Speaking of game play, this game has a definite theme of difficulty. There are two main aspects of game play. There is the base building part, and the turn-based combat part of game play. The base building aspect involves the mechanic that your whole operation is funded by the countries you are protecting, so you can actually fail the game by all of these countries leaving the coalition. You may be asking why they would leave. Well, there are some missions where you have to choose between several countries to save, and whichever countries don't get defended increase in "panic" levels. If their panic level reaches the full five bars of "panic", they leave. This adds a difficulty that can only be described as "you lose twenty minutes before you realise you've lost" Other than keeping these needy countries happy, you can build new facilities and upgrade your equipment. You have to research into new equipment and then start production on the equipment, as long as you have enough resources to build and enough engineers and scientists to research/build them. This is the most mellow part of the game, because even with the countries constantly threatening to leave, nothing typically goes as terribly wrong as in combat.
Speaking of combat, this game may be difficult in the base building portion, but nothing compares to the difficulty of the combat. Now old school players will remember how the older games are much more difficult. Well, I never played those games, so this game has to stand on it's own in difficulty. The combat consists of a turn-based cover shooter. You control your soldiers from a top down perspective. Your soldiers (without upgrades) can move a certain amount of spaces, and then either shoot enemies or enter Overwatch, which makes them automatically shoot at the next enemy to move at a slight aim penalty. There are also abilities such as grenades and rocket launchers, that allow you to either do some good AoE damage or break enemies cover. The combat is actually very in-depth, with strategies like flanking. The main reason that the game is hard is that your soldiers, at least very early on, can't aim. The enemies, however, have sniper-like accuracy. This means you have to be extremely careful not to rely on your character actually hitting something or the enemy missing because if you do, you will break your screen with anger. But this also means when you do hit something or manage to complete a mission with no casualties. This high risk, high reward game play can become extremely addicting to players looking for a challenge.
So as it would turn out, choosing to play this game was a good idea. The game really emphasises on the difficulty and the world is very immersive. I would have to say that to anyone wanting a challenge, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is for you.
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