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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I've got mixed feelings about this one. It's a great game and the remake is amazing. They did a really good job refreshing it to the new hardware/software capabilities.

On the other hand they don't seem to care about what was released. The game has some crashing bugs (not on specific action - it just dies sometimes) but I haven't seen any update on android yet. They don't seem to care that the game is still marked incompatible with nexus 7. (even though it works on nexus 5 just fine) It looks like they just want to release it for every platform possible, but don't care what happens next. Support forum is mostly just users. I hope I'm mistaken...

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XCOM is an excellent game, but I'd argue that it fails as a remake. Despite the superficial similarities, it's a completely different game. It owes quite a lot to modern boardgames of the past 10-15 years, and not so much to the trend of highly detailed, simulationist computer games in the early 90s which had X-COM as one of its crown jewels.

Both the combat and the strategic phases of XCOM are very boardgamey in their own way. And it works, it's great fun. But in terms of game design, it's about as far away from X-COM as you can get while still retaining the same basic components.

What do you think are the biggest changes? To be honest I was too young to fully appreciate the original xcom when it came out, so I don't remember that many big differences. I think the update in soldiers levelling up is a big one. Very different approach to bases/hangars is another. Engineers/scientists as resources are newish. But that's in the planning part - what's so different in the combat phase apart from abilities? I think the areas were larger and the AI did more things than "attack" and "flee", but I'm not 100% sure. I don't remember enemy units being dropped onto the battlefield as the mission progressed either.

> marked incompatible with nexus 7

FWIW works perfectly on my 2nd-gen Nexus 7.

Not with 1st gen :(

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