Managing your scientists and engineers is the nucleus of the metagame. Until I could pull one out of another downed UFO, at least.
My soldiers had more HP, but I'd sacrificed the opportunity to let my scientists tinker with the device and discover new technology. To fully outfit my team with Carapace Armor, I sold my only UFO Flight Computer on the gray market. On Classic and Impossible difficulties especially, almost every investment is a chin-stroker: your commitment to a long-term strategy is regularly called into question as opportunities to unlock something that'll help you immediately present themselves.
Between ground missions, time in this bunker is spent allocating resources to research, air assets, and toys for your soldiers (who, I like to imagine, are putting their ear to your office door, listening with crossed fingers, hoping to catch word that you're investing in barracks upgrades that boost their survivability or experience gain rate). XCOM's secret underground base is where your action squad lives. Managing and developing a relationship with a team of soldiers resurrects the childlike joy of commanding a squad of action figures, and sending them on dangerous missions to your kitchen. But overall XCOM's turn-based campaign is more coherent and elegant than anything the genre has granted us in years. They've oversimplified the aerospace metagame to get you to focus on the great ground combat, and your base is visualized with all the detail of a screensaver. Not all of Firaxis's new ideas are this successful. Combing the map is now less a frustrating hide-and-seek and more a murderous Marco Polo. This change eliminates the impatience that arises when you can't figure out what rock the final alien's hiding under. Every grid of movement steadily pulls back a curtain on things that want to kill you unseen enemies, however, will occasionally indicate their general direction. Firaxis also has a clever approach to the fog of war. The old action-points system has been recast in a less arithmetical form: in combat, any soldier can move once and take an action, or they can make a single, longer move instead. It actually features a Ring video doorbell.Firaxis keeps these spiritual details intact, but it also has the guts to melt down and modernize some of the series' mechanical details. You can reserve one now, but it’s a very pricey proposition so I’d recommend waiting until we see more.Ĭorrection (January 6, 2022): This article originally said that the Masonite M-Pwr smart door featured a Nest video doorbell. According to The Verge, the company hopes to enter production in 2023. Labrador’s two robots, Caddie and Retriever, are currently in an early testing phase. While there’s utility for everyone in that, Labrador clearly sees its robots as an aid for people with mobility issues who may need help carrying things around the home. The Retriever, the more expensive of two Labrador robots, can also pick up a tray from a specialized base, allowing it to pick up and carry things from one room to another. The Labrador Retriever is literally an AI-enabled, self-driving shelf on wheels that drives around your home in preset intervals. At CES 2022, I am comforted to know that there’s at least one robot that’s more focused on helping than being a flashy tech boondoggle.
After Amazon announced the Astro last year, I finally accepted that the robots were coming to invade our homes.