10 Tough-As-Nails Strategy Game Missions That Made You Wave The White Flag

XCOM is, at the best of times, a difficult game, but for even the most experienced players Portent came as a nasty surprise.

It is the second month of the campaign. Your troops are green as grass, their aim poor, their guns rubbish and their armour made of tin foil. The opposing force is composed almost exclusively of Thin Men, which are more accurate, are terrifyingly mobile and can spit deadly poison.

Your mission is a reconnaissance in force into a devil’s garden of maliciously placed alien pods that, once activated, are guaranteed to send Thin Men scurrying for the most inconvenient – and lethal – cover available. And that’s before they start dropping out of the sky on you. When they do, the real pain begins.

Each Thin Man drops with overwatch enabled, meaning that any move made will provoke a shot, and because they might well drop behind your soldiers you have to kill every active Thin Man, that turn, without moving.

Success demands that each and every drop be memorized and each move made with millimetric precision. It’s a vindictive, pitiless beast of a mission, this, but to quote project lead Jake Solomon: "That’s XCOM, baby."