Let's Play X-COM Enforcer Mission 27

Le gasp!

Actual continuity!

We're apparently riding the plane we freed up last time. Why aliens are after this, we don't know, and I don't care. (If I'm going to complain about anything in this regard, it'll be all the Teleporters just lying around the plane: how did they get there unnoticed?) Why they want to kill the crew instead of just blowing the plane out of the sky with plasma fire we also don't know, and I still don't care.

The important thing is that this is like the second time the game has had a level obviously logically follow from the previous level. And we finally get to know that, yes, X-COM the organization exists in Enforcer's continuity! I mean, it's rather odd that X-COM talks to these pilots like it's no big to be phoned up by a secret alien-fighting organization asking about your UFO problem, but it's not untenably odd, and I think there might be some actual logic involved I'll get to when we get to the relevant evidence.

Not only that, but X-COM is being useful and doing something Enforcer can't! It's a minor miracle! (Though really what should have happened is an X-COM fighter craft flies up to shoot it down... but whatever) This is the kind of thing spinoffs often screw up quite casually, so that's genuinely impressive.

The level itself could be taken as a bit of a variation on that one other 'defend the humans' sequence much earlier on, only actually good. You need to not be too aggressive about ranging out or else some aliens will end up homing in on the pilots and kill them, instantly failing the mission -as illustrated in this video- but the only way to the pilots is a convenient chokepoint, enemies don't outright teleport on top of them, and you can actually go out and destroy teleporters to reduce the onslaught. It's actually fun and interesting and involves juggling priorities! My one complaint is that the initial portion of the level demands you rush over right away or else they're likely to end up dead, or at least half-dead before you can even get over to them. If the game would just convey that more clearly it wouldn't even be so bad.

It's also one of the easier missions to find all the Bonus letters and the research item on, in spite of the fixed time limit.

I also show off the ultimate weapon of the game: the Nuker. It has tiny ammunition reserves, but the rocket it fires explodes in a huge radius for massive damage. The mechanics are a bit interesting to me in that it clearly does damage over the course of the entire animation, with the explosion expanding sufficiently slowly that the net result is it effectively has damage drop-off without needing any such mechanic explicitly coded. That's actually really clever, naturally intuitive, and satisfying to see in action. It's also the most blatant example by far of friendly fire being non-existent: the only danger the Nuker presents to you is that it obscures everything, risking leaving you unable to properly respond to threats as they show up... which barely matters since anything you can't see is probably in the middle of dying. There's really no reason to not grab and use the Nuker anytime you can.

I'm a little disappointed the Nuker doesn't explode into X-COM-style skullsplosions, but oh well. It'd probably be pretty hard to do in proper 3D, and I'm still half-convinced the team that made Enforcer got substantially through the development with no real familiarity with the original X-COM so it would be more surprising if it did.

See you next mission.