iOS Universal, Android, PC/Mac/Linux •
The past couple of weeks have been tough ones for me, but this hardship has been completely of my own devising. Instead of going to sleep at a remotely decent time, I’ve been staying up well past 2am nearly every night playing War of the Chosen, the new expansion for XCOM 2. While we’re unlikely to ever see the XCOM sequel on our tablets, there is good news in mobile-land for XCOM fans: XCOM: Enemy Within was just updated to comply with iOS 11’s 64-bit requirement.
XCOM: Enemy Within puts you in charge of the titular XCOM, defending Earth (or at least trying to…you find out in XCOM 2 that you failed [insert sad trombone here -ed.]) from an alien invasion. Building squads from a roster of rookies, sending them out against Sectoids and Thin Men, and leveling them up are what the game is all about. Combat is turn based, and there may not be a more tense moment in gaming than pushing your soldiers forward into an alien ambush, watching them get shredded, and waiting helplessly for your next turn to roll around.
There’s also a strategic layer to the game that involves building your underground base and staffing it with scientists and engineers. Enemy Within is the full original game of XCOM: Enemy Unknown combined with the Enemy Within expansion. This expansion adds a new material to collect on missions, as well as the possibility of your base being overrun by the enemy. It also adds new factions and more, but considering that you can’t “turn it off”, it seems a bit weird to say it adds anything. Enemy Within is the game you get if you want to play on your iPad (and you probably do).
The app was updated this morning to 64-bit, but the iTunes blurb still states that the app isn’t iOS 11 compliant. What do they know? I’m guessing many of you have already downloaded and played through XCOM several times, but there’s never a bad time to redownload and play it again. It’s one of the best tactical/strategy games ever made, and the iPad version is just as good as its PC/Mac big brother. If you haven’t tried XCOM, or started with XCOM 2, stop right now and go download this.
Good to know - I’ll have to download it tonight when I get wifi!
Just talking about it has made me want to download and play through it again. I’ve forgotten so much about that first game now that I’ve been in XCOM 2 mode for so long.
Wish the second one would make it to iPad, but I’m not holding out hope.
I get massive slowdowns in the ship invasions playing this. Might try again
Is anyone playing this right now? I redownloaded, but it locks up on the main menu each time and I can’t start a new game. Just me?
I get the opening cinematic then it just sits here:
Working fine for me. (iPad Air 2, still running 10.3.3.) New game started without problem, opening mission launched.
iOS 10.3.3 iPad Pro 10.5 did start fine yesterday (played only tutorial mission)
All good here… 11.01 on the pro 10.5…
Thanks everyone. I’m running 11, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the problem either. Not sure what’s going on.
There’s an update for it in the App Store, just says it upgrades to 64 bit… but maybe it’ll solve your issue?