The XCOM: Enemy Unknown Iron Man war diaries: A tale of love, loss, death, glory. Mainly death.

OPM: XCOM can be an emotional experience. I knew that going into this. It’s not just about the attachment you get to your longest-serving little action-figure heroes. It’s not just the anguish you feel when one of them dies, or the gut-wrenching internal struggle as you try to decide whether to resurrect him with a reload or respect the poignancy of his death. It is about all of those things of course, but it’s Just as much about the way that mistakes, last-ditch tactical inspiration and the luck of the stats can blend together on the battlefield to manufacture bona fide war-movie drama as glorious, painful and exhilarating as anything you’ve ever experienced in a cinema.

[Pintheshadows]

You know the Willem Dafoe death sequence in Platoon. That's how I feel when one of my troops dies. I actually managed to lose a captain and major in a single match earlier where the stats were fully against me.

[ArchangelMike]

Iron man mode is the only way to really enjoy XCOM. I had a terror mission where I lost like 3 captains, a leutenant and a major... or some thing like that. I had no B-team, all my other soldiers were squaddies and rookies. Needless to say I eventually lost the whole gsme, there was just no comeback.

Call me a masochist but I love it still :)