The new XCOM is a free-to-play mobile game

While Firaxis is presumably busy working on the rumored turn-based Marvel game, a studio called Iridium Starfish has soft-launched an official XCOM spin-off on the Google Play store. XCOM: Legends is still in development and only available in some territories, but gameplay footage is showing up on YouTube already.

The first thing to note about XCOM: Legends is that it's played vertically, and the second that, while it is turn-based, the only movement or positioning involved is deciding which of your heroes to put behind cover as they rush from one five-on-five encounter to the next. Also, repositioning has a five-turn cooldown.

XCOM: Legends is set in the XCOM 2 timeline, and has various familiar faces of the resistance pop up between missions. During the tutorial you discover an alien device called the Archway. What does this powerful psionic tech do? It lets you summon legendary heroes or artifacts in exchange for premium currency. XCOM: Legends is a gacha game where you supplement your regular squaddies with more powerful premade characters.

When you're not playing, gear and resources from the battlefield are collected by the "Integrated Drone Looting Experience", or IDLE for short. Just typing this sentence has made me feel deep-down tired in my bones.

Of course, if you want an XCOM game on mobile both XCOM: Enemy Within and XCOM 2 are already available, as are plenty of other neat turn-based games like Hoplite

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

Read more
XCOM's creator wants to know where XCOM 3 is just as badly as you do: 'I'm sure there's an audience for it'
Chip and Clawz pose heroically against a comic book background.
Done with apocalypses, the new game from XCOM creator Julian Gollop is a bright, Brutal Legend-style action-strategy inspired by Pikmin and Clash Royale
New art of Harry and Kim from Disco Elysium, with Harry holding a lit molotov cocktail.
Despite Disco Elysium Mobile aiming to 'captivate the TikTok user,' it looks surprisingly decent—but it's still insulting to Disco's ousted creators
Two adventurers face off against a pair of undead scallywags in Frosthaven
X-Com creator Julian Gollop unexpectedly takes over sequel to sprawling board game adaptation, and you can try out the closed beta next week
A space marine battling a chaos space marine in Space Marine 2.
Hasbro is working with Saber Interactive on a 'tentpole' IP using Space Marine 2's swarm tech
Top-down view of a ship in Duskers.
The best unofficial Alien game is getting a spiritual successor where you carve up derelict ships and manage drones with 'personality quirks'
Latest in Strategy
Battle Brothers
Nearly 2 years after its last update, the excellent Battle Brothers gets 'a bucket load of fixes' and free new content
King wielding his axe against would-be assassins in Norland.
Medieval colony sim Norland is getting a 'damn big update' that completely overhauls the game's mechanics: 'We're rolling out some radical changes to the core gameplay'
Age of Empires 2
Former Age of Empires 2 dev claims Microsoft demanded its first expansion should have a Korean faction, because 'StarCraft sold 3 million copies in Korea'
Endless Legend 2 Kin faction reveal
It's turtle time: Endless Legend 2's first faction is the fortification-loving Kin of Sheredyn
A massive beachhead assault in indie RTS Beyond All Reason
Over 110 players and 10,000 units clash as this free RTS celebrates its growing multiplayer scene with some of the biggest multiplayer battles ever fought
A castle being beset by horrors.
Cataclismo review
Latest in News
assassin's creed shadows review
Assassin's Creed Shadows streamer goes viral after confronting whining commenters: 'Normal people don't get upset about this sh***'
Assassin's Creed Shadows change seasons - An upper-body shot of Yasuke looking cheerfully up into the distance.
'This is just the beginning': Assassin's Creed Shadows dev team thanks fans for their support and promises more to come in the future
Geralt sitting on a wall wearing a Cyberpunk jacket modded by TheRealArdCarraigh
The Witcher 3 devs had to practically remake the game engine to make official modding possible
Serana from Skyrim, modded to look like a desiccated corpse.
Skyrim realism mod fixes your vampire girlfriend, giving her a voice and look more suited to someone who just got out of a coffin after 2,000 years
Gabe Newell looks into the camera, behind him is a prop of a turret from Team Fortress 2.
Gabe Newell's cult of personality is intense, but a Valve exec who worked with him says his superpower is how he 'delighted in people on the team just being really good at what they did'
Image for
'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon'