The bold first-person shooter take on classic strategy game X-Com, long in development by BioShock 2 creators 2K Marin, has been pushed back another year by publisher Take Two to sometime between April 2013 and March 2014.
Turn-based strategy buffs should get a kick out of this trailer for Fray, which French developer Brain Candy officially announced for pre-order today. I saw this simultaneous turn-based strategy game last year at an event in New York and thought it looked pretty damn neat, so it’s good to see that things are progressing nicely.
We now have two titles raiding the treasures of the X-COM IP — a first-person shooter by 2K Marin and a turn-based one more in tune with the original at Firaxis. One has to wonder, with all this strategic alien arse-kicking going on, has anyone thought to talk to Julian Gollop, the guy responsible for it all?
As someone who was quite fond of what he saw of the re-imagined XCOM at E3 this past year, but who’s also excited about the Firaxis strategy reboot of the franchise, I am somewhat conflicted by this news.
Maybe you’re a fan of the original X-Com and met today’s news of the upcoming XCom: Enemy Beyond strategy title with great joy. Maybe you don’t know anything about the X-Com legacy and don’t know what the hubbub about either game is about. Which XCom is for you, then?
Legion of old-school X-Com fans groaned in frustration when 2K Games revealed that their re-imagination of the beloved strategy game would be a first-person shooter. But now, the publisher’s revealed a second title that goes back to the franchise’s roots.
XCOM is no X-Com. That is to say, don’t expect the upcoming first-person shooter XCOM from 2K Marin to be a new version of turn-based strategy classic X-Com. Why?
2K Games has just now gotten around to posting its 20-minute E3 demonstration of XCOM; the voice-over script is the same that I heard in 2K’s booth, so you may judge for yourself what this game really is, what it isn’t, and what it really stands for.
