Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games. And, with a retail price of $19.99 and a launch sale price of $9.99, it might be the best value in video gaming since Valve’s legendary Orange Box. The result is an engaging and surprisingly diverse experience, one that is substantively different than every XCOM game that has come before. But it does manage to successfully remix the franchise’s most vital elements into something fresh. XCOM: Chimera Squad, Firaxis’ latest entry in the 25-year-old franchise, doesn’t quite rise to the same level of excellence as War of the Chosen. I wasn’t sure where the series could go from there, or what would be gained by more reinvention, remakes, or reboots. I called it “the definitive XCOM experience” in my review. Since then the team has moved from strength to strength, most recently with a narrative-heavy reboot called XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It successfully reinvented the classic turn-based gameplay of the 1994 original for a modern audience, merging fully 3D environments and characters with lavish animations and challenging tactical gameplay.
Firaxis Games’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown, first released in 2012, was a stroke of genius.
