Gadgetory

back in what was it I guess 2011 I saw a game at e3 called XCOM now it's not the excom that we all know from last year the real x turn-based strategy game this was a game that took that original XCOM brand and turned it into a first-person shooter so this specific game was actually in the works to be a first-person oh yeah and then they switched it right and I got to see the game and play a very significant amount of it wait so you said it's not a first person shooter anymore so it is it's a third person tactical shooter where you're in charge of a team of a team alright so there you have it there doing some really interesting stuff of this game and the whole thing with XCOM is that it's this very uh you know it's a sort of secret agency that gets test with dealing with the sailing invasion during the 1960's and it's not like major American cities they're these you know sort of sub suburbian you know not really that's not Manhattan there they're out in the west around the Midwest and you control a character who basically has to man entire team and the gameplay is sort of it's like it's like real-time strategy meets third-person shooting where you can pause time and load up the sort of wheel kinda like sort of like Mass Effect Dragon Age games yes exactly okay but the thing is is like it's all really happening in real time so you can totally thought when you open the wheel it's everything still going on right but it's slow it's slowing down almost to a crawl and in that wheel part of that pie is controlling all the case your other characters so when you choose let's say target you know you can have one character shooting at a target and you assign the targets and the other character you can you know move away on the mat when you enter that mode you sort of hover over the playing map and can sort of just drop him where you want um so there's a really interesting element with that I spoke to Nico bihari who is the senior producer of this game and he had some really insightful stuff because you know this game there's a big history of X com and this game is is definitely honoring that you know conservative sort of style of gameplay but at the same time it's bringing it into a level where I think people will identify with it most because of games like mass effect if you played mass effect you're gonna like this game just because it controls in a similar fashion you're really going to be able to be like wow I have total control over this team almost more so than mass effect because you can literally place them where you want messe fig you could so how does that work there like in a helicopter and I know so you have a team on the ground uh-huh and you also they just run to that location right but you can sort of when you're paused in that in that um you know you kind of do this like quarterback move where your they call it combat quarterback right yeah so you sort of pause the action and then you move out basically a cursor to anywhere in the map and the view got us tonight to the writer flank to the left you assign these guys to go do that so it's really kind of cool in that regard because they it's it's also responsive and it really makes sense when you're playing it it's a little intimidating in the beginning because you're sort of given a lot of responsibility and a lot of options at once and I just want people to know that this is not a game we could just go in guns blazing you're gonna get wrecked yeah you're gonna get messed up real nice you gotta be tactical and got to be strategic and you gotta really plan out your your your attack um you know from from the beginning uh so you know there's an interesting sort of element I really like the era it's taking place in that sixties sort of environment where everyone's wearing jeans or flannels well that was like everyone's got like the suspenders and they're just like they just look like they're at a Mad Men yeah you know what I mean it's sort of like madmen meets american horror story in the sense that it's got that set that sixty sensibility juxtaposed against this really bizarre paranormal alien invasion so I think there's a lot that people are going to dig with that and what does this come out this comes out Augie August twentieth for Xbox 360 Playstation 3 and the pc