And while
X-Com: Enforcer isn't the deepest game ever made, it's an absolute blast for the time it takes you to beat it. The ability to play multiplayer is mildly entertaing, but the main draw of the game is the entertaining single-player campaign. Most expert gamers will blow through it in a matter of a day, but it's fun while it lasts, and unlike many games nowadays
X-Com: Enforcer is fun to pick back up and blaze through again--the bite-sized segments it's broken into keep it all fresh.
The basic plot is straight out of the campy version of the X-Com universe. One of the scientists creates a super-robot, the Enforcer, and before he can put the finishing touches on it, the aliens invade (again). It's up to the Enforcer to blaze through all of the levels, stopping the alien menace, picking up chips to give you new abilities and weapons to tear through the game with. Sometimes you have to rescue citizens; you almost always have to destroy 'teleporters', which are dangerously similar to the Spawners in Kiss: Psycho Circus and Gauntlet.
Fortunately, unlike Psycho Circus, Enforcer makes it worth your while to blow all of the enemies and generators up. Most aliens drop numbered chips, and these chips can be used between levels to unlock new weapons and upgrade existing ones. This sort of progression helps keep the game intriguing, as it's always cool to see what new weapon you'll get and what the next power-up level does to the game.
The game itself is strictly fast-paced shooter fare. You have either your basic weapon or one of the additional ones, and you hold down the left mouse button to send out waves of death. The mouse is used to turn around; the keyboard is used for strafing. Blow everything up, pick up the weapons and power-ups you like, and save the good guys. Weapons and power-ups spawn randomly into the maps, instead of having specific locations to pick them up in, and they all have limited ammo. You can only carry one at a time as well, forcing you to choose the one you want.
There are a few twists in the gameplay--there's one level that you have to keep some humans from being killed, and there are a few 'survive the timer' levels that send wave after wave of beasties at you and force you to stay alive for the entire time. But for the most part you run through a large series of maps, wiping out all the enemies that you can. Most of the levels have the letters in BONUS hidden in them; collect all five in a given level and you get to go to a bonus level, which is often reminiscent of classic video games--Pac Man and Frogger being two of the games cloned. It helps break up the other levels.
There's multiplayer support, but Enforcer isn't the sort of game that multiplayer works terribly well with--it's all about the single-player action, and while there are a ton of single-player levels, it's over soon enough. That's where the replay value kicks in. Each level takes a maximum of ten or so minutes to beat, and you can always play back through the game when you get bored.
