Global-Map UFO Defense

Lore & Background

In the XCOM narrative, the UFOs that dot the global map are not random anomalies. They are the visible tip of a coordinated alien campaign. In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the game's campaign begins in early 2015 as a global alien invasion begins. Prior to the start of the game, a group of countries called the Council of Nations has banded together to create Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (XCOM), the most elite military and scientific organization in human history that is tasked with defending the nations from alien attack. The player assumes the role of the commander of XCOM and engages in a war against an extraterrestrial enemy with overwhelming technological superiority. A holographic view of Earth called the "Geoscape" allows the player to track situations around the world. Which situations the player decides to respond to influences the panic level of XCOM's member nations: responding in an area decreases panic while ignoring an area causes a rise in panic and potential for the nation to pull out of XCOM. Once a nation decides to leave it will never rejoin, meaning players will have fewer funds for the rest of the game. The game will end if eight out of the sixteen Council nations decide to leave. The player can better detect alien activity by launching satellites and positioning them over territories of the 16 XCOM nations.

In Their Own Story

The briefing room smells like cold coffee and ozone. You drag the cursor across the Geoscape, where a new alien situation has just materialized over a major city. You have enough resources for one response and nothing to spare. You zoom in on the situation. If you respond in this area, you decrease panic. If you ignore it, panic rises and the nation may pull out of XCOM. You click the intercept. The little green triangle peels off the map, climbs, and meets the red glow over the open ocean. A flash. A salvage icon drifts down.

Reader's Guide

Each turn, one or more alien situations appear on the Geoscape. The player may launch aircraft to intercept UFOs in flight or dispatch soldiers to engage aliens on the ground. A successful interception destroys the UFO and yields salvage for the research tree. If the player does not engage, the situation continues and panic rises in that region. A landed UFO must be cleared by sending a tactical squad on a mission. The squad fights through alien defenders, and the rewards—research, resources, or captured aliens—scale with the mission type. This interlocks directly with squad management: committing a team to a mission removes them from the field for its duration, creating tension between defense and offense. Strategically, the player must triage which situations to respond to with limited aircraft and soldier slots. The game has four difficulty levels: easy, normal, classic and "impossible". There is also an "ironman mode", which limits the player to one save. On higher difficulties, more alien situations appear per turn and some carry special payloads that spread alien influence or spawn additional threats, forcing harder choices. The player can better detect alien activity by launching satellites and positioning them over territories of the 16 XCOM nations. Passive bonuses can also be obtained by providing satellite coverage over each Council nation in a continent.

Did You Know?

• The game was initially envisioned as an exact remake of the 1994 game but the developers introduced improvements to gameplay mechanics and modernized the franchise.
• Development of the game began in 2008 and lasted for four-and-a-half years, longer than other Firaxis games because it was retooled several times during production.
• While the game uses procedural generation for enemy placement, all maps in the game were handcrafted by Firaxis.
• The game has four difficulty levels: easy, normal, classic and 'impossible', plus an 'ironman mode' that limits the player to one save.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown was often credited for renewing interest in the turn-based-tactics genre in the 2010s.