Imagine that aliens are invading the Earth and you’ve been put in charge of the defense of the entire planet. Players manage the paramilitary XCOM project, deciding what new technology projects to research and produce so that the XCOM troopers go into battle with the best equipment possible. That daunting proposition is at the heart of Firaxis and 2K’s excellent tactical strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which came out last year on PC and consoles and is now available on iPad and iPhone. You can read our full review of that version here. Impressively, the content for the iOS version is nearly identical, minus some graphical detail and the uninteresting multiplayer mode, and the touch controls are fantastic.
Turn-based games like XCOM are practically made for touchscreen controls, and the implementation here is brilliant. Issuing orders on the tactical map is as natural as can be, particularly given the smart interface layout and convenient shortcuts. It’s true that the camera controls aren’t terribly responsive, but once I accepted their limitations, it wasn’t too hard to orient myself and my viewpoint on the battlefield.
The graphics have taken a noticeable step down in the translation to the iPad, almost entirely in terms of the texture resolution. Things can get a bit muddy in some of the close ups and cutscenes, but the soldier and alien animations and the effects of the various weapons and abilities make this one of the better looking games on the platform. If you’re naming your soldiers after close friends, be prepared to watch them fall – permanently – under a hail of brightly colored laser fire.
Despite the lower-res textures in the iPad version, the actual levels are full of interesting visual details and a wide range of environment types. There’s even less variety in the levels on the iPad version than in the PC or console versions, but there are still enough levels that you likely won’t be seeing many of the same ones in the course of a single campaign. That said, the sheer destructibility of those environments is phenomenal, and the iOS version carries that over.
XCOM on iOS has one problem its console siblings don’t, however, and that’s battery life. One mission can drink up as much as 25% of an iPhone 5′s battery, so don’t expect to be able to play long sessions on the road. This also isn’t the most complete version, in that it’s lacking not just the mediocre multiplayer mode but also all of the DLC content, from the weak Slingshot missions to the invaluable Second Wave mutators, and even the ability to change soldiers’ armor coloring . It’s not known when or whether Firaxis and 2K will add in the few missing features, but even if they never come, XCOM is a far larger game than nearly anything else on iOS.
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