X-Com: Enforcer

People hate this entry, and it's just stupid! This is a good game with good old arcade gameplay. The stages are fast-paced with LOTS of enemies and technologies (weapons and upgrades) to collect and unlock as you progress. The Enforcer (yes, that's the character's name) also has some cool skins available to give it a unique look. And speaking of internships, there are many! So, don't pay attention to the negative reviews, BUY this great X-COM as soon as possible and let's hunt LOTS of aliens! I was almost forgetting... This is one of the creations of the Unreal engine and it looks great running on nGlide 2.10, unfortunately the GOG version comes with an obsolete version of nGlide. Finally, I want to leave a friendly message for the haters... "Take THIS to your Leader!" XD

It's a tolerable arcade shooter with pretty decent graphics for the time. However even without the X-Com baggage weighing it down with expectations, it has plenty of flaws. It's basic gameplay is load level, shoot aliens and their spawn beacons (transporters), maybe do a side objective, repeat. Occasionally it mixes it up with "rescue the civilians" or "survive on a platform" objectives but for the most part the formula is static. While blowing up aliens you collect "data" and search for various pickups such as new equipment/upgrades to research. Aliens frequently drop weapons (of which you can only hold one at a time), or powerups, and here lies my first complaint - some weapons are just flat out useless while others are absolutely "pick up now" kind of affairs, rendering a good portion of the arsenal useless and data spent on upgrading them wasted. One way to encourage replayability I guess but not my cuppa. However those weapons which are effective are satisfying to use even if ammo for them runs dry faster than beer during happy hour at a biker convention. Audio wise, the music is extremely repetitive but tolerable, but you're not losing anything by turning music off and running your own soundtrack. Gun sounds and alien sounds are also tolerable but nothing special. Voice acting is quite terrible and you may find your patron scientist's voice driving you a bit insane within a couple of missions. The environments have one or two moments where they impress you and there's some variety, but it quickly starts to blur in the mind and is wasted on the gameplay it supports. Overall graphics, especially with something like nglide and forced AA, isn't bad and might even hold up as a mobile game from a few years ago. Overall a mediocre shooter that probably would have gone to the bargain bin quickly even without disappointing X-Com fans. Not bad to play for a few hours but there are far better options out there for mindless alien blasting.

Make no mistake, this is no Deus Ex. Moreover, except for the name and the fact that you're dealing with aliens, it has nothing to do with X-Com, either. Enforcer comes from a time when MicroProse thought it would be fun to slap the X-Com name on literally everything. Still, there is fun to be had if you adjust your expectations accordingly. Enforcer is an arcade shooter through and through. No more than six buttons are required to play the game, and you can't even look up or down. There's not even a weapon selection—whatever you've picked up last is what you have equipped. Running on the stable and still nice looking Unreal Tournament engine, Enforcer looks and feels like a UT mod, down to the textures and the ability to dodge by double-tapping movement keys. Every single one of the 35 levels comes down to one thing: shooting everything that moves. Each level takes around five minutes to finish, and the only variety comes from the environments and upgrades you're allowed to purchase between levels. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really tell you what each weapon does, and since every additional unlocked weapon expands the pick-up pool, it's actually better to only unlock a select few weapons to increase the odds of the good ones showing up more often. And that's it, there really isn't anything more to this game. Regardless of the difficulty level, the game is never challenging to any degree, and thus never goes beyond mindless shooting. That's not a bad thing, however, and I didn't feel bored once. Thankfully, the game is quite self-aware of its own premise, and you even get to fight an alien boss in a stadium, which is an obvious reference to Duke Nukem 3D. The enforcer saying "You have been enforced" while mowing down hundreds of aliens alone is worth the price of admission. In short, if you're down for some tongue-in-cheek shooting, do yourself a favor and get this on a sale.

It's an early PS2-era arcade shooter with the good sense to not take itself seriously: it's dumb, simple fun, the perfect kind of B-grade title to spend a day of a lazy weekend on. There's some occasional frustration to be had, but it's overall worth the couple hours it takes to beat, to ride the wave of rising action.

X-Com Enforcer may feel like sacrilege to hardcore fans of the strategy games but in this day and age, it doesn't do any harm to anyone, especially since the series eventually went back to its roots in recent years. This game is fun. Pure and simple. It doesn't offer anything deep or complex but it is just pure, relentless third-person chaos. The body count easily racks up to hundreds per level, and it just feels satisfying to blow some steam off like that. It's a similar vibe to what you'd get while playing a Serious Sam game, only on a smaller scale and with a different tone. The game benefits from being built on the Unreal engine, which lends itself to fairly smooth controls that never feel like you have to wrestle with your character or get stuck on level geometry. I never experienced any serious bugs or crashes either so it feels pretty well-polished too, and with just a few seconds of tweaking in the .ini file, you can comfortably play this in full HD widescreen on modern systems. The only time when things got annoying was when I was ganged up on by a horde of enemies and it felt like being stuck in a mosh pit. The game is fairly easy, though, so it never caused me to lose too much health, and once I upgraded health pickups to max level, it became almost trivial. And that's probably its biggest issue because all you do here is blast your way through waves of aliens and beat levels at breakneck speed, rarely ever encountering any serious resistance outside of an occasional boss fight that serves more as a doorstop than a satisfying challenge. And while this may be fun at first, it's probably for the better that you can beat this game in about 5-6 hours. Any longer than that and it would get really tedious. Thankfully it offers a wide variety of enemy types and a decent unlockable system, so these things save it from mediocrity and raise it to a slightly above-average 90s shooter that's fun to play if you just want to unwind and have a bit of a nostalgia trip.