XCOM: Enemy Within EXALT Enemies Revealed, Trailer and Previews

It looks like XCOM: Enemy Within will introduce a new human threat to the gameplay mix of the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown, as showcased in the new “Security Breach” cinematic/gameplay trailer that 2K Games and Firaxis released today:

A few press outlets have had the chance to try their hands at fighting this new faction for preview purposes, like Kotaku:

Seriously, their suits are quite dapper. In other news that’s probably more relevant to you: they’re also incredibly aggressive in all manners of the word. In both character and battle behavior.

The Exalt are hellbent on using alien technology for technological advancement (and a bit of what sounds like world domination) and they don’t care who dies in the process. In Enemy Within, they’ll hide Cells in random countries, which build towards launching an operation against your team. What that means is: if you don’t attack once you see the threat of a Cell pop up on your radar, they’ll take advantage of your hesitation and board your ship first. Or they’ll attack your cash reserves. Or terrorize people with propaganda. Or undo progress on your active research projects. They suck, basically.P

So you do what any wise strategist would do: you attack first. This means assigning one of your soldiers to a covert operation of your own against the Exalt. I consider the soldier with the bone marrow genetic modification (which gives a boost to health regeneration) but move on to a tried and true soldier before setting out to infiltrate Australia, where a Cell was hiding, to gather intel.

GamesRadar:

The Exalt operate from hidden cells around the globe, which you’ll have to spend XCOM funds to track down–funds you could’ve spent on satellites, equipment upgrades, or other crucial resources. The more Exalt missions you complete, the closer you’ll get to discovering their headquarters and stopping them for good. Choose to ignore them for long, though, and they’ll send entire nations into panic, causing them to back out of the XCOM project.

What Exalt forces lack in firepower (which isn’t much, truth be told), they make up for in numbers. You’ll want to send your most experienced units to take them on, as they’re quick about surrounding and overwhelming you. You’ll have to use everything at your disposal, including new items like gas grenades, which poison enemies, and ghost grenades, which provide a few turns of stealth on whomever they’re used on, if you hope to survive their onslaught. As if facing a relentless army of murderous aliens wasn’t already hard enough.

Polygon:

“We went through a number of design iterations for the EXALT; we tried cobra-style with weird night vision goggles and webbing, urban camp stuff, all of that,” Gupta explained. “We said, ‘Okay we can ship this…’ but it didn’t really communicate what we wanted to about EXALT.

“We wanted to communicate two things with how they looked,” he said. “One, that these guys fighting for EXALT, they’re not soldiers you are fighting the believers themselves. And two, it’s a covert ops system. These guys were sitting in their offices at the bank, at the PR agency, or whatever, and then the call comes … and they stand up, go to the closet, push the button, put on the bandanas, and go.

“EXALT have day jobs; they fight as part of a secret society. They are like the Illuminati. These are people that you could have been standing next to on the street and you didn’t know they were a part of this power-mad group bent on ruling the world.”

Pitting humans against their own kind also fits within the “enemy within” narrative. Gupta said that it would make sense that not everyone would react to an alien invasion the same way. XCOM took their route; EXALT is taking their own.

“Some might see it as an opportunity rather than a threat, and we wanted to capture that,” he said. “You [XCOM] are the good guys, but not everyone else on earth is the good guys. We wanted to have this shadow war going on at the same time as the alien invasion. It’s very cloak-and-dagger with EXALT.”