Let's Play X-COM: Enforcer Mission 1

In which we meet the Professor, fail to learn his name, and run out to start killing aliens.

This is sort-of-not-really blind in that even though I have beaten the game once before, it was years ago and I only half-remember bits and pieces of it. So there's a certain amount of flailing as I try to recall how things work and what you can do and whatnot. Similarly, I actually kind of screwed up on this first video by cutting the video off before Professor Utonium-for-lack-of-a-better-name could explain upgrades. I actually didn't buy any upgrades, though.

In this first mission we've met 3 weapons: your core laser, the Flamethrower, and the Blade Launcher. There was also a Shotgun preplaced on the map, but weapon spawning caused it to be pretty much immediately overridden, so we'll talk about that next post.

The core laser is your default weapon, the one you fall back to with unlimited fire (Because X-COM!) anytime you don't have another weapon, whether because you've yet to pick one up or because you used up all the ammo on whatever you have picked up. It's appropriately terrible, with a solid rate of fire and decent travel speed but poor damage and hampered by lacking any of the special qualities found on most of your other weapons. There's really no reason to not be spamming it continuously at all times, just in case it destroys a piece of terrain or there's an enemy you can't see because of Enforcer's irritatingly limited camera, particularly if you're new to the game and don't know what's what. Unlike other weapons, the laser can't be upgraded as its own thing. Instead, one of your upgrade slots is special and provides completely different things at each step, one of which is a permanent upgrade to the laser.

The Flamethrower is, uniquely in the entire game, actually worse than the laser. It's painfully short-range, it fires many discrete projectiles that vanish on impact with targets instead of being a splash damage weapon like you'd expect a flamethrower to be, and its damage isn't really high enough to make up for the need to get in the enemy's face and let them punch you in your robot teeth. What's most painful, however, is that it comes pre-unlocked. If it was merely godawful, but had to be purchased, it would be a newbie trap you'd ignore when replaying the game or when using a guide or because hey you decided you were fine replaying the first ten or twenty minutes of the game to not have it clogging your weapon drops forever. Ironically, it's actually a very worthwhile weapon to upgrade, not because this makes it become a good weapon, but because one of its upgrade tiers causes it to fire triple the shots for triple the ammo and therefore you can get it out of your weapon slot three times as fast. (Also it's not completely useless when fully upgraded, and will at least outperform the laser)

The Blade Launcher starts out as a very solid weapon. Its shots are slow-moving, but they bounce, cleave right through enemies, and do decent enough damage. The Blade Launcher is one of the first things you should upgrade if at all possible, because its first upgrade allows its shots to pick up Data Points for you. Since Data Points fade fairly quickly and manually collecting everything is pretty much impossible, this upgrade will literally pay for itself dozens, maybe even hundreds of times over by the end of the game. There's a fairly lengthy portion of the game where you should ideally pick it up whenever you can and spam it anytime there's anything in range to shoot at, just for the Data Points.

Speaking of Data Points, they're money. Or research value in X-COM terms. Or whatever. They drop from enemies, you collect them, and then you spend them on upgrades that make you stronger, tougher, faster, smarter. (... maybe not that last one) The value is displayed on them, and that's how much you'll get when you pick them up.

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I actually like Professor Utonium even if I cringe at his exaggerated lisp/nasally voice. He's trying to figure out where to even start on explaining things to his killer robot, and that's genuinely a difficult question, and it's amusing/touching that he's trying to treat his invincible killing machine like a person. And in spite of the general silliness of the premise of a singular scientist producing a high-tech robot apparently single-handedly, the game does a surprisingly decent job of making it seem like constructing Enforcer was an actual engineering feat. We've got pictures on the wall that are probably concept art for the game but it makes perfect sense that Professor Utonium would have made sketches of Enforcer. We've got extra Enforcer limbs sitting on the wall, whether as spares or because Professor Utonium made several versions for any number of reasons or whatever. The special area for presumably working on Enforcer. It's nice touches.

The game doesn't do a very good job of explaining what's going on, not this early in the game. I personally kind of suspect the game was made front-to-back, the developers were initially operating off of like a broad description of X-COM and art assets to try to keep things vaguely consistent with it, and only later did they personally play the game, realize they really liked it, and start bringing the game in line with X-COM's lore and so on. Early Enforcer really just doesn't mesh with the idea of X-COM, yet later on the game suddenly makes a surprising amount of effort in that regard and is even fairly successful.

In any event, the basic shape of the plot is: Professor Utonium made a robot to fight off the alien invasion, the robot is super-cool-mega-awesome because that's just what happens when a lone scientist builds a killer robot, and you're off doing that. X-COM-the-organization exists, is fighting the aliens just as they do in their own game, but doesn't seem to have any connection to you and yours. I think it's suggested later on Professor Utonium is being funded by X-COM or something? I guess we'll see.

The plot does come together somewhat later on, I remember that much.

Onward to Mission 2.