GameCentral’s favourite game of 2012 sees the alien conspiracy expand with a great value mix of cyborgs, superpowers, and rogue humans.

With two new consoles due out this month it’s fair to say we’re pretty busy at the moment, and a complex strategy game that takes 10s of hours to play is about as ill-timed as they come. It’s the sort of thing we might have tried to put on the backburner, since it’s almost certainly going to get lost in both the Christmas and next gen rush. But we hope it doesn’t because, just as its predecessor was, this is one of the best games of the year.

To be clear this is not a full sequel, but instead a standalone expansion (except on the PC where it’s an old-fashioned you-need-the-original-game-to-play-it kind of expansion). But on the consoles the ‘Commander Edition’ includes the expansion, the original game, and all its downloadable content. Getting all that for less than £30 makes it not only one of the games of the year but also one of the best bargains too.

Rather than offer up a separate campaign, Enemy Within combines all the new and old features into the same storyline – creating a sort of extended director’s cut of the original. In fact for the first hour or so there’s relatively little difference between Enemy Within and last year’s game. But then the new elements start to creep in and the Enemy Within reveals itself to be an expansion of unusual substance.

As you’d expect there’s a bullet point strewn list of new features, but they’re all introduced with an impressive elegance. But rather than seeming like they’ve always been there it’s quite the opposite: many of the elements have clearly been introduced specifically to disrupt your normal playing patterns, ensuring that whatever tricks and shortcuts you’ve learnt with the original game will no longer work.

If you don’t know the original game then , but in short it’s a game with two distinct parts: a top level strategy game where you must manage XCOM’s research & development, engineering, and barracks in order to stave off a slowly escalating alien invasion. When fighting on the ground the game because a turn-based tactical game similar to the classic Laser Squad, where you control your troops directly.

In terms of the new features things start off innocuously enough, as you stumble across a canister of ‘Meld’ in one of the first missions. Once spotted it begins to self-destruct and you have only a few rounds to disarm and collect it. Meld then becomes a presence in most missions, working as a sort of secondary objective and the only means by which you can power a new range of cyborg and nanotechnology upgrades.

You’ll only be able to focus on one of these two lines of research at first but the ‘MEC’ power suits form an entirely new class of trooper that can be equipped with various extra powerful weapons and pack a mean punch. Although they cannot take cover and have no inventory.

The ‘gene mods’ encompass various superpowered upgrades such as robot eyes, two hearts, the ability to leap tall(-ish) buildings in a single bound, and what amounts to spider sense for aliens.

Naturally your opponents have access to equivalents of all the same technology, but this time the aliens are not the only bad guys. A shadowy human organisation attempting to use alien tech for its own ends becomes a new enemy, one focusing on the use of the new Meld-powered abilities. How much attention you pay them though is entirely up to you, as to find out where they’re coming from means spending time and money on special surveillance and covert ops missions. But if you don’t then your own base risks being invaded…

Too often video game expansions feel like they’re filled with failed ideas that were sensibly left out of the original, but here the additions work brilliantly to change the nature of both the story and the gameplay. Developer Firaxis has clearly been watching to see how people play and the introduction of the invisible Seeker alien (that looks like the robotic squids from The Matrix) is obviously a specific measure to stop snipers camping out at the back of a map.

The aliens also have their own equivalent of the MEC, while XCOM’s S.H.I.V. robots have seen an upgrade in abilities and usefulness. Also new is a medal award system, which you can customise to bestow perks to specific soldiers.

However, the promise of localised voice clips (so that someone from Spain actually speaks Spanish) are a little underwhelming as there’s only a handful of languages and no specific British voiceover for English. The multiplayer also continues to be an afterthough, which seems a missed opportunity given the legacy of Laser Squad.

The graphics remain a little rudimentary too, and although there are lots more maps now, and rejigged versions of the originals, the problems with texture pop-in actually seem to have got worse since the first game. Plus there’s a strange new bug where your soldiers pause for seemingly no reason before firing.

But these are minor problems in a game that is skirting the edges of perfection. In fact our only real issue is that the enemy artificial intelligence is still not quite as sharp as it could be and the strategy level base-building never quite as involved as the tactical level action. But that’s what sequels are for.

The fact remains that for the second year running a turn-based strategy game is one of the most atmospheric and thrilling games of the last 12 months. So if you missed out on it the first time round this is the best second chance you’ll ever be offered.

In Short: An excellent expansion to the already superb original, that cleverly weaves in new features that force you to relearn and adapt everything you thought you knew about Enemy Unknown.

Pros: All the new features work well, from collecting Meld to deciding how much time and money to put into MECs and gene mods. Plenty of smaller tweaks and great value for money.

Cons: Multiplayer still isn’t up to much and the texture pop-in problems actually seem to have got worse.

Score: 9/10

Formats: Xbox 360 (reviewed), PlayStation 3, and PC Price: £29.99 (£19.99 on PC) Publisher: 2K Developer: Firaxis Games Release Date: 15th November 2013 Age Rating: 18

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