Let’s take the flamethrower, traditionally one of the most useless videogame weapons. At level one, for instance, you can choose to give them either a giant pneumatic fist or a flamethrower. Other than the skill tree choices, your MEC suits are upgraded periodically as you research the usual stuff, with each of the three levels for these giant murderbots offering a trade-off between two pieces of kit built into them. MEC Troopers also have a trade-off between skills, though. I’m going to assume that this 1960s reference makes more sense if you’ve played The Bureau. Going through with this changes the class of the augmented soldier to MEC Trooper, which has an entirely different skill tree and entirely different equipment. Your engineers, on the other hand, saw this amazing gene-altering gel stuff and immediately thought “GIANT FUCKING DEATH ROBOTS.” What they do is saw the head off a soldier and staple it onto a giant robot body, which does absolutely nothing to counter my belief that XCOM’s R&D facilities are staffed with mad scientists. These fall into a sort of Deus Ex augmentation thing that can be applied to any basic soldier a trooper can have one eye augmentation, but you have to choose between giving them a bonus when they have a height advantage, or giving them a bonus to Aim following a missed shot. Your scientists want to use this stuff to genetically modify your soldiers, giving them magic eyes and brains and legs and noses (except not the last one). Meld gives you access to two different types of upgrade trees, one recommended by your engineers and one recommended by your scientists. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a bounty. You’ll have to scour some maps in small groups rather than sticking together and carefully covering each other. You’ll have to make mad dashes over to it, exposing your soldiers and leaving them in vulnerable situations. What this means is that the usual XCOM pace of “move very slowly from cover to cover, inching forward, making sure to reload all weapons after every shootout” doesn’t work if you ever want to get Meld. Secondly, these canisters are (for an equally inadequately explained reason) rigged to self-destruct after a certain number of turns, and you don’t know how long you have until you’ve seen the canisters. The problems surrounding this are twofold: firstly, you don’t know where on the map the Meld canisters are. One of these makes more sense than the other. Genetically modified soldiers have no sleeves. MECs are huge, and talk in robotic monotones.
0 kommentar(er)
