My team was infiltrating the gutted wreck of an alien craft, the largest we'd ever picked up on our radar. The Skyraven had set them down almost directly inside the wide-open remains of the nose of the craft. A couple of Outsiders put up little resistance, but a group of nasty Floaters tangled with the team as they breached the main chamber of the craft. The sniper was off securing the perimeter to the right, and one support sergeant had worked his way up on the left, downing no less than three of the Floaters and earning himself a promotion when he got back to base... assuming he did, of course.

The chamber was full of stasis equipment, surgeries, all sorts of stuff we'd never even seen before. Morale was high but ammunition levels were low. But before the team got their power cells swapped out, three six-legged insectoid aliens burst from the door at the other end of the chamber.

I hate Chryssalid. They're incredibly aggressive, tough enough to shrug off anything short of a full laser LMG burst, and they can generally one-hit-kill any poor bastard they can catch. (And, naturally, they're fast as hell too!) Before you know it, they'll turn half your team into Chryssalid Chow and you'll be on your way to the reload button.

The team could have managed to down one Chryssalid with the dregs left in their power packs, but three was totally out of the question. We only had one hope - the anti-personnel rocket slung on the back of Major Sanchez, the squad's heavy and current world-champion alien-killer. But firing the warhead into the three bugs would also frag half the squad (probably not killing them outright - all except the FNG were wearing the latest carapace armor - but laying them up for a month healing would be a serious blow to the XCom program nevertheless.)

I made the snap decision, and Major Sanchez fired his frag - directly into the middle of the chamber, killing two of the bugs and incidentally wrecking most of the equipment. The lone surviving bug staggered over to the FNG and tore him in half before being brought down by the rest of the squad. Ah, well, that's what they're there for...

The howls from the research team were cut short when they realized that, even though we failed to recover most of the alien experimentation equipment, the -engines- were all intact... filled with priceless Elerium. And within hours, our techs had the hull stripped apart, its supply of alloys busting wide open the research bottleneck I had been worried about. Now they're fighting over whether to start working on plasma rifles, a laser gunnery tank, or powered armor.

I'm starting to bend the difficulty curve with better technology, but at the same time I've taken big morale hits in Europe. No telling if I'm going to be able to pull this off long-term.

So, yeah, game's pretty good. "Worthy successor", even, for all that some of it has been simplified.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 04:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 512 words, total size 3 kb.