Fortunately, Enemy Within doesn't waste much time before dropping in the new stuff. It'd be like having to reintroduce myself to an old friend: no thanks, let's just get straight to the drinking and the in-jokes, please. Much as I'm extremely fond of XCOM, I didn't fancy playing the meatgrinder and glacially slow tech-up early phases all over again. I admit I was grumbling at that before I went in. That means existing savegames and troop rosters are no use: you'll start anew, rookies, no satellite coverage and all. Its purpose is to have you replay the campaign again (in my case, that meant for a fifth time), with new abilities and fewer repetitive missions, rather than to provide a brand new campaign. To reiterate though, this sizeable expansion for Firaxis' speeded-up, more action-focused XCOM do-over adds cyborg soldiers, genetically modified soldiers, a rival human faction and a smattering of new setpiece missions into the game. While I will cover the key points again here, that and this are really two halves of one mega-verdict. It's probably worth reading my recent preview of Enemy Within before embarking on this wall o'words, as the code I had then was so close to complete that both details and my take on it was pretty damned clear there. Saving the world with a big, pink, French cyborg: this perhaps isn't the XCOM expansion we asked for, but I think it's the one we needed. This time around, we get robo-folk and genetic modification, and one giant leap further away from XCOM's parentage. Enemy Within is a proper expansion - like in the olden days - for last year's XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was a very different reworking of 90s ultro-classic X-COM: UFO Defense.

Xcom enemy unknown vs enemy within