Yes. XCOM: Enemy Unknown Is Really Good.

I’ve been shocked at just how thoroughly the new game captures the vibe and flow of the original XCOM, and how easily it undoes the missteps of the later games. The isometric viewpoint, the tense turn-based encounters, the despair at realizing how outgunned and often outflanked you are, the dread of losing one of your favorite troops—it’s all there. The story is told straight, but with good writing, great music, and a good sense of desperation that makes every moment spent in the world of XCOM tense and engaging. And base-management, with its anthill-display navigation, is a triumph—I love to see the Unreal engine used for things other than first-person shooters, because it can make stuff like the home base look so cool.

It is amazing how high the stakes feel because of this simple design decision. On a recent mission, a fast-moving enemy popped around behind my troops, out-flanking my Chinese sniper Jia Li Hu (seen above as a low-ranking rookie) and placing her right in the line of fire. Dread flushed through the pit of my stomach—she was hosed, and it was going to take some real guts and luck to save her.

I’m playing the game on normal difficulty, but this kind of occurrence makes the game feel much harder than it really is. Sure, I may lose a soldier or two, but the enemies will lose seven or ten, and I’ll still win the day. Acceptable losses, no? I’ve never minded losing troops in StarCraft… but then, the troops in StarCraft didn’t have names, faces, and in the case of Vasily “Chops” Vinogradov, a nickname. If you’re feeling particularly masochistic, you can even rename your squad after your friends. Sorry Jason! Stephen was supposed to be covering you but dropped the ball.

That permanence carries over from the battlefield into the command center—managing the invasion is a constant feat of resource balancing. Countries will call to you for help, and you will never have enough resources to help everyone. If too many countries panic and withdraw from the alliance, it’s game over, man.

All of this makes the stakes feel higher than in any game I’ve played in recent memory save perhaps Dark Souls. It feels almost exactly how I remember the original X-Com feeling, even though I have a feeling that game might not hold up so well all these years later. And with all this great framework in place, the developers capitalize on that tension and on your fear by really embracing the title of their game: Enemy Unknown

The unknown enemy drive much of the tension and excitement of XCOM. Who are these beings, and what do they want with us? You meet with stressed (but well voice-acted, interesting) engineers and scientists, who are trying to find you answers. And every time you go into the field, you’re going into the dark of the unknown. Every mission I’ve played in XCOM begins with my squad deploying into a disaster scene. A crashed UFO, the scene of an abduction, some other disturbance. Debris burns and smoke pours out of buildings, but not a living being is in sight. It’s quiet… too quiet.

So many alien invasion movies have that famous scene, where the troops silently move through the wreckage of an alien attack… they’re in perfect squad formation, moving up, trying to see what they see. Something chitters from the darkness, but they can’t see what. “There’s something out there,” one of them says… and them BAM! The aliens attack.

At the start of every mission in XCOM, you can cut the tension with a knife. You stack your team up and move through cover, hoping that you don’t stumble upon a group of enemies unprepared. And when the fighting does break out, you better think on your toes—you’ll need to flank, suppress, and flush out enemies, and it’ll take bold and sometimes risky moves to do it.

On a recent mission, an alien was suppressing my sniper with a constant barrage of fire. “Chops,” who had been injured in an earlier firefight, had made his way through a downed ship and was behind cover, close enough to make a charge but far enough away that he couldn’t take the shot without moving. Without hesitation, I sent him straight into the fray, setting him up just below the firing enemy. With a single shot, he laid the E.T. out—victory! But it easily could have gone another way.

What if an unseen enemy had been covering on overwatch? What if he had missed? He would have been wide open, and my longstanding squad leader and hero would have died. But still you make these choices, and while you feel a twinge of fear and duty, you don’t feel hesitation—this is what must be done. That alien isn’t going to shoot itself, and heroes aren’t born out of inaction.

So yes, this is all just based on preview code. I haven’t finished the game, and I can’t finish it on this preview code. Luke will be providing a full review in a couple of weeks. There are still some rough edges, some animations that don’t quite work, and a bit of jank to the way it looks overall. But still: This game is very, very strong.