Preview code has been with me for a week now, allowing freedom of play up until a specific research-based cut-off point, and I?ve collected about forty hours of new stories. I want to tell you about the time my squad entered the burning ruins of a large UFO, searching the rooms slowly and methodically, travelling deeper into the interior, all smoke and the sinister glow of mysterious power sources. I want to tell you how they didn?t find a single living thing until they reached the very centre of the ship, how they heard the sound of movement and followed it.
Whatever was scurrying about in the wreck seemed to be on the run, perhaps the last survivor, an engineer or a pilot, not ready to face Earth?s best. Then I?d tell you how we lost track of whatever it was we were following and I?d gesticulate wildly as I told you how those men and women died, suddenly surrounded by noise as a trap was sprung, the broken ship now a tomb not for its crew but for us, for my people, for the poor bastards I failed.
It was chrysalids, you see, and they were coming out of not just the bloody walls but the bloody ceiling as well. It wasn?t a set piece though, they?d been waiting to strike and if I?d been smarter, I wouldn?t have sent my soldiers into that claustrophobic, smoke-filled labyrinth of twisted metal, I would have drawn whatever was inside out.
My sniper, who had been with XCOM since the very beginning, turned zombie on us and chewed the throat out of a young rookie. As the remaining members of the squad tried to blow a hole through the chitinous wave of death and devourance, one of them blew the ex-sniper?s infested guts out with a well-placed grenade. It didn?t feel right to leave her like that.
It feels so good to have new chrysalid stories, even if I?m still not entirely used to these scuttling insect incarnations of nineties nightmares. A terror mission turned from bug hunt to zombie horror when a pack of the blade-limbed monstrosities decided against peeling off our armour and instead darted down an alley to find softer, fleshier incubation chambers for their spawn. It didn?t take long for the civilians they discovered, the ones we were supposed to be protecting, to surround the grocery store in which we were taking cover, engaged in a deadly firefight with a gang of floaters. Then it was a case of cover-be-damned as eight hungry corpses bore down on our position. The dead don?t die easily and ammunition burned down quickly. The sound of each clip locking into place was like the cough that clears the throat at the beginning of a eulogy.
