XCOM is an unforgiving, tactical turn-based strategy game in which humans battle for survival against a hidden alien threat. Microsoft's Excel is a spreadsheet program used the world over for all kinds of number-heavy tasks, including XCOM, apparently.
An Excel wizard who goes by the name crruzi on Reddit has crafted a playable version of the strategy game using the program, complete with destructible cover. It's called Exlcom, and it's all kinds of awesome. Aside from the new top-down camera angle and the substitution of gray squares for walls, red squares for enemies and green squares for squad members, this is the XCOM players know and love. Fighters even have special abilities for even more tactical options, just like the in the real game.
"I just learned VBA for my job and wanted to get familiar with it," crruzi writes. "Because I love XCOM I decided to make it my project to code a complete XCOM game in Excel. The game is set between the events of XCOM:EW and XCOM 2, where a group of guerrilla fighters try to liberate their city from Advent control."
It's an impressive feat, to be sure. At its core, XCOM is always crunching gameplay numbers like chance to hit based on range and cover, critical strike chance and more. It makes perfect sense then for XCOM to work in a spreadsheet, as long as you are okay looking at colored blocks instead of 3D character models.
You can download Exlcom now free of charge, though keep in mind it's still in the early stages. If you do plan on playing, keep in mind that fighter stats and weapons are assigned randomly, and as crruzi puts it, the game is probably terribly unbalanced. The game only works in Excel, so if you are using Open Office or Google Spreadsheets for your number-crunching needs, you'll be out of luck. If nothing else, it should help make the wait for XCOM 2 next year a little easier.
