X-COM: Enforcer

X-COM: Enforcer is the fourth and final installment of the series' classic era, which went even further in experimentation than Interceptor. The elaborate tactical strategy turned into a simple third-person action shooter, where the player, as an android fighting for humanity, moves through linear levels full of alien enemies and destroys them with a growing arsenal of weapons. Both the story and the setting are reduced to a minimum and serve mainly as an excuse for a smooth sequence of action firefights.

The gameplay was built on constant forward progress, collecting upgrades, and fighting waves of enemies and bosses at the end of levels - principles typical of late-nineties arcade action rather than the thoughtful tactics the series was famous for. Enforcer also supported two-player co-op on a single computer, which was a novelty for the series and showed that the developers were trying to make the game accessible beyond traditional strategy fans. The levels are short and quickly cycle through different settings, so the game feels more like a sequence of arena battles than a cohesive story as a whole.

The game was released in 2001, after MicroProse had already ceased to exist as an independent studio under Hasbro Interactive, and its reception was very cold - both critics and fans saw it as a departure from everything that defined the X-COM brand. Enforcer thus became a symbol of the period when the brand sought commercial success by experimenting with genres far removed from turn-based strategy, before Firaxis Games revived it more than a decade later by returning to its original roots and the tactical gameplay that made the series famous.

Why play: Enforcer is interesting mainly as a historical curiosity for series fans who want to see how far the X-COM brand could be pushed away from tactics at one point - as a standalone arcade shooter it offers only undemanding, short-lived fun with no need for strategic thinking.