I never played the original x-com but as soon as played the remake xcom I fell in love with it. It has the perfect combination of smooth game play, easy to use UI and perfectly executed B movie aesthetics that I love.
If you don’t know XCOM is a 2012 turn based action game with some light base management mechanics. The premise is that you are in charge of a secret military organisation responsible for protecting the earth from alien invasion (xcom).
The remake takes a very deep and complex game and boils it down it down to its purest form, and adds a real b movie aesthetic. Destructible buildings and complex inventory management for each solider is replaced with cover based combat and a simple gun armour equipment slot system. The cast is the classic old male American engineer, the female German scientist and the shadowy figure who controls the funding for you organisation. The alien autopsies are performed with chainsaws and one of the aliens is a surreal versions of James Bond type spy.
Sectoids are the basic enemy in XCOM. They are the classic Greys archtype of the 50s and 60s.
Thin Men are a parody of the Men in Black that would fight against such Greys!
I’ve been recently looking to play some more 20mm wargaming. I have a fully painted Falklands era British platoon, and a number of building more appropriate for British Isles (they are model railway buildings originally) and I have started work on modern Irish army platoon. I have used all of these in Cold War gone hot scenarios but it isn’t the most believable setup and my building paint jobs are not the best aesthetic (bright and primary colours) for it. I finally got around to painting my modern Irish platoon and was trying to see if I could use them with my British for some sort Irish/uk or uk civil war, but I felt the tone of that would be wrong.
My Falklands era British patrolling the local DIY store.
My modern era Irish squad take aim!
Then I had the amazing inspiration to do an xcom wargame! I can use all my modern soldiers and building as the setting would be anachronistic. Why there are modern Irish, 70s British and futuristic tech fighting in rural English countryside is a lot easier to explain when they are fighting aliens! My hope is this project will give me some focus for writing blog posts and will tie together my wargaming material in an original and hopefully fun way. Now to find the pieces I need!