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[Man of Paper]

After beating XCOPS my opinion is firmly in the realm of “it is a game that succeeds at doing what it set out to do.” Its cheesy, and that’s not really out of place in old or nucom. Sure, nucom tries hard to be edgy just like everything else that came out in the past fifteen years, but can you really look at thin men and say “there’s no cheesiness here at all”? Or that a series that went from space threats to TFTD isn’t cheesy?

The problem I think comes from the fact that what is cheesy now is different from the cheese of a decade or two ago. Instead of dumb hair and tiny gray aliens and aliens disguised as alphabet men it’s people who talk like “buzzfeed writers” and aliens intrigued by human food and functions.

The game introduces some new mechanics for the games. The breach phase is a fun addition that could only add to the missions that it could be viable for, and the interleaved initiative, while I’m not sure if I prefer it to the team turns, is still nice to actually see in action, and it at least works well enough in this specific setting.

More importantly, XCOPS gives us a good window to the world we’re going to be seeing in the next full game, and the potential for a modern Apocalypse excites me very much.

[Soadreqm]

I think Terminal might actually be the deepest character in the entire XCOM series so far. She's really annoyingly cheerful, and never takes anything seriously, but if you read her bio and listen to some of the chats she has with Godmother and Blueblood, it turns out that she's traumatized by her family getting slaughtered in the invasion and doesn't really want to be alive. Her banter sounds so forced because it is forced. It's a coping mechanism.
Sure, it's not very sophisticated, but I can't think of a single other character in any of the games who wasn't exactly what they seemed to be at first glance.

[E. Albright]

Of course, video game and quality writing is what it is. It's entirely possible for me to see that this could just be people latching on to something to fault the game that they would have tolerance for if they liked the game better or just were more optimistically leaned towards it.

Speaking only for myself, that's not where I'm coming from here. It's higher volume of defined NPC chatter. NuCom had less of it - you could do plenty of missions w/o hearing anything in particular, but you get commentary before and after every mission here, and it's clearly intended to develop cardboard cutout archtypes as characters, where in NuCom2 and especially NuCom1 the cardboard cutouts had few pretensions of being anything but video game cliches. Those weren't as character-driven quantitatively or qualitatively. ChiCom wants us to care about their cardboard cutouts.

The writing has always been bad and shallow, but before ChiCom it was background and cutscenes. Now it's interleaved throughout and is plainly trying to make us care about specific characters, and it feels more hamfisted as a result.

[ZebioLizard2]

Honestly I kind of hope we get another spinoff of XCOPS, but as a FPS like SWAT4. I would genuinely love some weird alien SWAT 4 goodness going on.

[Chiefwaffles]

Nothing will ever beat Shen in Enemy Unknown saying “video games” with some of the greatest disgust I’ve ever heard in my life.

[umiman]

Nothing will ever beat Shen in Enemy Unknown saying “video games” with some of the greatest disgust I’ve ever heard in my life.

Hahaha!

I beat this quite awhile back. It was enjoyable but I don't think I'll play it again. Got quite tedious near the end. Also I was so ridiculously OP, even on hard difficulty, I absolutely obliterated the final mission. It was so easy I kept wondering when the boss would show up... except I killed him so fast I thought he was a mook.

I think in one of the missions, a Sectopod showed up and I was like... "meh". Killed in one shot from across the map.

Was too easy at that point. It's not like I can "just go win the game already" since the game is pretty railroaded so I have to slowly wait for the timer to tick down constantly.

I think the characters I liked were... Tsundere Snek lady. And that's about it. Everyone else was quite annoying. Ultra OP, brutal monsters even by NuCom standards, but annoying.

[Kruniac]

you lose the mission rather than lose the character

Nah.

It's bad enough that XCOM was not X-Com with it's special ability based stuff, no inventory system, etc. This is even beyond that.

/grumpy

[Dorsidwarf]

I like XCOPS and i dont know why everyones so grumpy about it

[scriver]

I'll probably pick it up once it gets a good percentage sale. I don't want not to play it.

[ZeroGravitas]

I like XCOPS and i dont know why everyones so grumpy about it

Besides finding the dialogue annoying, the stability is absolutely atrocious. It crashes about twice an hour for me.

[scriver]

About how long would you guys say the game is?

[Soadreqm]

There's a patch! They claim to have fixed the missing item bug. About bloody time, really.

[GiglameshDespair]

About how long would you guys say the game is?

I probably took around 25 hours to complete the game on Commander, without playing particularly fast.

I like XCOPS and i dont know why everyones so grumpy about it

Besides finding the dialogue annoying, the stability is absolutely atrocious. It crashes about twice an hour for me.

Unfortunate; I didn't have any crashes at all.