Let's Play X-COM Enforcer Mission 28

And now we're at a military base somewhere the cold frozen north!

It's not properly explained, but I'm pretty sure the idea here is that the plane we were on came here. I've always interpreted this as an X-COM base that got overrun -I don't think there's any specific evidence for it, it could just as easily be an American military base in Alaska, but it makes sense, and it is called the arctic base- particularly since it would explain a lot of what seems a little off back in the prior mission. The plane isn't a civilian plane the aliens are randomly interested in, it's an X-COM plane delivering supplies to an X-COM base, and the aliens were tailing it in part to try to find the base and perform an Alien Retaliation Mission! Or something like that. The dialogue in the previous mission is a little difficult to reconcile with that scenario, but it's kind of difficult to make coherent sense of the dialogue regardless, just due to the 'X-COM not being treated as secret' aspect of it.

The military base is the second-most memorable chunk of Enforcer -discounting The Worst Level Of The Game, anyway- and is where the game finally turns Just Plain Good. Suddenly bosses are returning, no fanfare, no nothing, just boss enemies all over the place and they still have all their immunities so you can't constantly cheese everything with the Freeze Gun or Lightning Gun. This is where it finally becomes likely you'll die to combat, rather than the game having to rely on instant-kills from falls and so on to kill you, and it's a big, chaotic, glorious ride. The military base is why I remember the game fondly, and it's why I'm doing a Let's Play -the game actually gets good, it's just it takes until you're more than 2/3rds of the way into the game. This is one of the big reasons I suspect the game was built front-to-back, as every mission after this consistently plays more to Enforcer's strengths, as if the developers didn't understand their own game all that well until they were nearly done with it.

There's not a lot to say about Alpha Quadrant in specific. It's fun, it's hard, it's chaotic, it's what Enforcer should always have been.

Interesting point I didn't realize until about here: in the Muton boxing match Bonus game, there's a finite supply of Mutons! 16, to be exact. Makes it easier to focus on collecting Data Points as you progress through the game and your firepower rises.

See you next mission.