This is a fantastic game but is not for the impatient or those unwilling to break through the somewhat of a learning curve required to play this at its full potential. This is a somewhat lengthy review but if your are considering to purchase and cant make up your mind, its a must read.

The turn based gameplay can both be terrifying (staring a beserking alien in the eye with no available free moves left) and rewarding (as you watch your carefully laid out trap annihilate an unsuspecting enemy squad with ease). Risk takers and careless beware! Both glory and death are eternal. If you lose a soldier on the field, he is gone forever.

As your soldiers put down the alien menace you will receive experience and you guessed it, level up. Leveling up changes your ordinary run of the mill troops into one of four classes, Assault, Heavy, Support and Sniper. You can also unlock another set of abilities for a few lucky soldiers as you progress into the campaign.

The non combat aspect of the game focuses on resource management, construction of facilities and researching / re-engineering captured alien technologies to improve the survivability of your fielded troops with new weapons, gadgets and armour.

Research and construction times can be both costly and lengthy, so it is good to plan ahead and decide whether your soldier needs that new gun or armour and whether your engineering or research team need that new facility and man power.

There are a couple of downsides in my opinion. Gameplay can often become repetitive and dragged on and the lack of variety in the maps can have you feel like your playing the same scenario all over again.

It also has been reported that there are some graphical glitches and cutscenes can be jumpy, even on high performance machines. (I, fortunately, have only experienced the occasional over-the-top ragdoll effect normally reserved for when you fus-ro-dah an unsuspecting bear or bandit off a cliff in skyrim).

I would definitely recommend this game to friends and others and have had an absolute blast saving the earth from these alien invaders.

Thanks for reading! :D Steven

The original X-COM (with the hyphen) is my favourite game of all time, and every remake or re-imagining has been at the very least disappointing.

This one, however, has been carefully rebuilt from scratch with the sensibilities of modern gamers in mind, and it's brilliant. Buy it at once.

Kept me hooked for two hours initially. Gameplay was reminiscent of UFO: Enemy Unknown, but progresses a lot faster.

Maps feel a lot smaller, so there's not as much hunting around.

I haven't been able to play any more of it though – it now just crashes about a minute after starting, even just sitting at the main menu. Hence the low rating.