X-Com: Final Opinion

I’ve already done a first reaction for X-Com, which you can find here, and followed that up with this actual play report. I’m going to try and do that for most games I review here on The Giant Brain and when I feel I’ve played it enough to really form an opinion you’ll see me post one of these things up. You see I keep my collection pretty small so if a game doesn’t gel with me or my group I’m pretty quick to get rid of it, so this will be my final word on whether it deserves a place or not.

I’ve played X-Com about 5 times now, which I think is enough to really get a feel for whether or not it should stay on my shelf. It will, for a good while I think. We’ve had some amazingly tight, tense games with this wonderful Co-op and whilst I love Eldritch Horror for it’s world spanning madness I equally love X-Com for it’s short play time and keeping the players on their toes.

I’ve managed to play all 4 roles now and each one feels very different. I’ll stick by my first thought that you will probably find that each role fits a particular player in your group but all are fun. There is just enough going on in each one I feel and no doubt the inevitable expansions, this is FFG we are talking about, will add a little more meat here and there to those roles (not too much though I hope). It’ll be interesting to see what they do expansion wise as I really feel the game is so tight that adding any bloat would be a really bad thing. Maybe just more cards, mission types etc.

The app is absolutely necessary to the experience as I am pretty sure that it dynamically manages the threat you are experiencing. It seems to back off if you are doing really badly one way or another but not so much as you think you are actually going to survive. It always feels really close which is exactly the sort of feeling I want from my co-op games.

X-Com is a keeper for sure and sits beside the longer Eldritch on my shelf as a great coop experience.