Let's Play X-COM Enforcer Mission 3

This time I show off a Bonus game, and it's one of the better ones in terms of potential to get a lot of Data Points out of it. It's also decently fun. It's very silly, so it's a good thing Bonus games seem to be entirely non-canon things with no intention of pretending they're a part of the story. They get sillier, don't worry.

It's also a sneak peek at a regular enemy we'll be encountering eventually: Mutons!

Yes, regular Mutons run around naked, tower massively more over Sectoids than they have any right to, and try to punch you to death instead of carrying plasma weaponry or Blaster Launchers. This is one of the bigger examples that makes me think the initial 'draft' of the game was made with no familiarity with the actual X-COM game, because it's so bizarre if you're familiar with X-COM, but it makes sense if you're just looking at art assets and seeing there's a big purple Hulk sort of alien in the roster and extrapolating an enemy type from there.

The actual mission itself introduces the idea of rescuing civilians. That's right, we're not just a murdermachine, we're a hero to the people! I'm not sure why they instantly trust the murdermachine instead of worrying they're caught in a crossfire between two alien invaders, but hey. Thankfully, civilian rescue mechanics are extremely generous: they're invulnerable, there's no timer, you just need to walk up and touch them and they're instantly rescued. It also introduces us to the idea of enemies spawning in without needing an actual spawner; this happens a lot when civilians are involved, and it can be a bit annoying because they'll just spawn wherever with no obvious rhyme or reason.

I also actually show off the Shotgun in this mission. It's a shaky weapon with some of the weirdest shotgun physics I've seen in a video game. The spray is huge, and the spread of the pellets is not merely random but bizarre, with it being completely normal to have wacky stuff happen like a third of the pellets go shooting off in a relatively tight cluster off to your left while the remaining two-thirds are all off to your general right, with the region you were actually targeting being completely and totally missed. It's a decent enough weapon anyway, with a perfectly serviceable rate of fire, good enough damage... and it's placed in a game where, as you might have noticed in this mission, it's pretty routine for the player to be facing mobs of 2 dozen+ enemies at a time. As such, you'll routinely be in situations it's pretty much guaranteed to hit things. It's still one of the worse weapons in the game, enough so that an argument can be made you shouldn't unlock it in the first place, but it's nowhere near as bad as the Flamethrower is.

This is the first mission in the game that's genuinely just fun, so it's a bit unfortunate it's the third mission. It would've made for a much stronger introduction to the core gameplay than the previous desert level, especially since Enforcer's engine does a perfectly fine job of presenting human-shaped environments in a relatively believable way given the timeframe the game was made in.

See you next mission.