It's as powerful today as it was in 1994 with the original X-COM: UFO Defense: The rewarding thrill of gradually turning the tide from playing as an outgunned underdog who takes horrific casualties on every mission, to a dominant force that captures the enemy's own lethal weapons technology using them to throw the scum off our planet. To many tactics-loving PC gamers, it literally does not get any better than that.
2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown takes a different approach in some ways, with a more focused, less sprawling strategy game to manage and a simpler movement system in tactical combat, but it retains that same intense turn-by-turn tension and the sweet, sweet sting of soldier permadeath. Few games can deliver the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in the way that XCOM does, and its resurrection has brought a very special kind of gaming joy back into the world.
Chief Criticisms: More bugs than we'd like, linear story.
That's it for GameSpy's 2012 Game of The Year Awards! Congratulations to all our winners, and to the many other great games we've played lately. (Need more award-winning PC games? Take a walk down memory lane with our GOTY awards for 2011.) Now that we've shown you ours, what's your game of the year?