Strategy-game developer Firaxis has made a couple of small but impressive forays into iOS territory this year with turn-based titles Haunted Hollow and Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, but it's poised to go a lot bigger this summer. Specifically, it's bringing its 2012 strategy blockbuster, XCOM: Enemy Unknown (which debuted on Mac in April), to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch — and we've had a chance to take it for a spin.
Like its big-screen cousin, the iOS version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown lets players run a secret, multinationally funded agency formed to fight off a full-scale alien invasion of Earth. This involves directing research and development of new technologies, hiring personnel, allocating finances, building out a sprawling underground base, and — of course — commanding small squads of soldiers through tense, turn-based battles against hidden, murderous, and increasingly deadly alien monsters.
Seeing the game run on an iPad, it's immediately clear that not a lot has been lost in translation. There's a clear visual downgrade, of course — iOS devices aren't yet capable of console-quality graphics — but it's not all that steep, either, and things like destructible cover, cutscenes, customizable soldiers, and the ability to pan and zoom across the map (now with pinch-and-swipe touch controls) are intact. So are some of the smaller details, like the spent cartridges that fly out of machineguns as they fire, or the colorful effects of the aliens' psionic powers. And in spite of the trade-offs (or maybe because of them), it frequently loaded up missions much more quickly than the Mac or console versions.
The biggest sacrifice, according to publisher 2K Games, is in some of the map variety. One of the full-sized version's proudest bullet points was that it was possible to play through multiple times without revisiting the same randomized battlefields, but those had to be trimmed back in order to make XCOM a manageable download. 2K assured us it's still possible to play through once with no repetition, however (which, honestly, might be enough for most players).
Regardless of cutbacks, XCOM's turn-based approach to strategy makes it ideally suited for touch controls, and here it performed beautifully. Tapping the spots we wanted our troops to run to was easy, as was sliding a finger across the active soldier's onscreen name to switch to the next one. The new sliding combat menu (through which you can order soldiers to take an aimed shot, throw a grenade, go into "overwatch" to take potshots at moving aliens during their turn, and so on) took slightly more getting used to; without every icon immediately visible, it was easy to think (at first) that the soldier we were controlling didn't have a target to shoot at, when in fact we'd just accidentally slid the "fire" icon out of view.
There are a few features we didn't see, most notably multiplayer (which 2K isn't talking about just yet) and cloud saving, which will enable you to continue a single game across multiple iOS devices. But XCOM's new touch controls look and feel great, and after an hour of play – during which we tangled with alien Sectoids at abduction sites, dug out space for new base facilities, gave a few soldiers silly facial hair, and scrambled a jet fighter to shoot down a UFO before investigating the crash site – it felt just as complex and fun as the Mac version. If it can stay that good through an entire playthrough, this could easily become a new iOS obsession.
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