XCOM: Enemy Unknown
BANGER · Strategy · 2012
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $14.99.
- Length
- 26.7h
- Value
- $0.56/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT / ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT or greater, 20 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
The XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Slingshot Pack is Now Available!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
April 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $1.49. It has been discounted 105 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 84 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. Among the games that feel like it, X-COM: UFO Defense ($4.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats XCOM®: Chimera Squad ($9.99, scores 32).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $20.90. It costs $14.99.
Steam's global achievement data puts 48 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 1 was written by a buyer who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2024 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 64 percent of the 936 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 2 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic, finite spend); the score docks it lightly for that.
The main story runs 26.7 hours. Doing everything runs 70, 2.6 times as long.
It came out 14 years ago and 590 were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
87% start to 48% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
590 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Argueably harder than the second game but a rewarding, classic turn based strategy experience if you can survive what it throws at you
In retrospect, I have no idea why I had put this aside for so long. I super enjoyed the game even as a noob of the genre. Normal was challenging enough to make me think yet even the difficulty spikes as I had progressed through the campaign did not frustrate me much. The only cons I see are very minor and most of them can be solved (as far as I read) by mods - such as no line of sight, the pods of enemies activating...
Definitely worth a shot even if you don't typically play turn-based strategy/tactics games like me. The basics are quick to learn and you pick up new tricks to... Oh! - Time for a terror mission! Bye!
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown scores 86/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/200510/xcom-enemy-unknownThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.