XCOM Shooter Will Be Re-Announced Soon

2K Marin's shooter based on the strategy series X-COM hasn't been cancelled contrary to popular belief. Publisher 2K Games announced today that they'll providing a "fresh look" at the game in a matter of days. They also sent out a new screenshot.

XCOM, first announced in 2010, is set during the Cold War era. Extraterrestrials are infiltrating human society and it falls to a secretive agency to find them and stop them. Players lead a team of customizable agents on missions throughout the world in a bid to stop this otherworldly force.

Fans of the X-COM strategy games weren't too thrilled that 2K wanted to make a first-person shooter out of the series. Series creator Julian Gollop called it a "great shame". He also likened it to X-COM Interceptor and X-COM Enforcer, the mediocre attempts by previous studios to expand the franchise into the flight sim and shooter genres.

In today's blog post, 2K said that the project has "undergone an evolution" since its last public showing at E3 2011. They didn't go into details, but described the game as "a high-stakes narrative experience imbued with core XCOM concepts."

I seem to be one of the few people that doesn't completely hate the idea of an X-COM shooter. An older gameplay demo showed that the game had some interesting RPG and strategy elements. There aren't enough squad-based, strategic shooters out there and this game could turn out to be a solid entry in that sub-genre.