Cover shatters much more, and more impressively.

Hopefully no more Defuse The Bomb tedium?

Completely procedural maps - both their geometry and their objectives.

Interested to see how this is reconciled and if there will be consequences to 'noisy' missions.

Sound of crowd screaming as XCOM's mission kicks off - it sounds like you're doing something monstrous.

Though active, it's about hiding, getting into position unseen and surprising the enemy, not just sheltering to mitigate damge.

You're a much more active force now, trying to bring about conflict rather than clean up after it.

'Double overwatch ambush.' A tactical trap - lure an unaware enemy out, then have them plough straight into your watching soldiers when they respond.

There are cutsceney bits mid-mission, showing how the city works, how and where enemies move around so you have some sense of what to expect as you move forwards and setup traps.

Your own soldiers appear on wanted billboards.

It's a very different dynamic to the slow lawnmowing of XCOM. You're the good invader.' This isn't just a theme thing: in battles, you're the faction which creeps and darts around sowing destruction and setting up ambushes.

Zoom in past that to get a similar essential feel - the run-crouch to cover.

Starker look aesthetically, a bit like Brink.

XCOM not just a diminished force, but actively treated as dissidents, hated by the populace.

The Advent Speaker, apparent leader of the Humans, looks suspiciously like a Thin Man to me.

In case you don't want to sit through the whole thing or work in a place which fires you should your computer ever makes a noise, I took a few scribbled notes on perhaps the most salient points we (by which I mean 'I') didn't already know: There's been a sort of inversion of the core tactics, and it's that rather than any plot stuff or new aliens which most has me thinking 'yeah, this is going to swallow months of my life again, isn't it?' It looks more XCOMy than I'd somehow expected, which I think is because the lazy and fearful part of my brain immediately went NO TOO MUCH CHANGE I COULD NEVER LIKE IT upon hearing about the switched-up 'the aliens won the war' setting. This comes via IGN, chatting to Firaxis producer Garth DeAngelis in their super-studio, and bundling five minutes of in-game alien-bothering too. That's just changed: here's footage there's footage footage now hooray footage Even though all we've been given so far is context. Clearly it's hardly a dead cert they'll get it right, especially given that Civ Beyond Earth eroded some faith that the studio is willing to go outside its comfort zone, but there's no game in vidyaland that I'm more excited about right now. Another lifeboat for me reach out to in the endless sea of E3 hype is Firaxis' XCOM 2.

Xcom 2 the speaker