Holy hell, someone made an XCOM game in Microsoft Excel

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This is one of those moments in which you just have to applaud someone's work. But you'll applaud a little too hard because, secretly, you're absolutely furious that you've never done anything even nearly as impressive. Fellow people in the adoring crowd would nudge each other and nod their head towards you, raising eyebrows, questioning and worrying as to why this dude is clapping so hard until, finally, agonisingly, you are the only person making any noise amidst an otherwise nervous silence. Oh, and you're screaming now, too.

Why the display? Well, Reddit user crruzi has made a functioning, lo-fi XCOM game entirely inside Microsoft Excel. For fun. Even more sickening/incredible is the fact that, two months ago, they couldn't write a single line of code.

"I just learned VBA [Visual Basic] for my job and wanted to get familiar with it", crruzi explains. "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."

As you'd expect, it's not quite as graphically fully-formed as you might remember from the series, but seems to contain just about the full complement of XCOM's tactical options. Currently, the game's not readily available - crruzi says that only the tactical portion is done, with the management sections presumably in-progress - but going by past evidence, he'll have it knocked up in a couple of days, with no apparent difficulty. The bastard.

Personally, I think fellow Reddit user, Tongfa sums it up best, saying: "As someone who is learning VBA now for an internship, this is the dankest shit I have ever seen and you are a fucking legend. Vigilo Confido you based god." Quite.

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Joe Skrebels
Joe Skrebels
Joe first fell in love with games when a copy of The Lion King on SNES became his stepfather in 1994. When the cartridge left his mother in 2001, he turned to his priest - a limited edition crystal Xbox - for guidance. And now he's here.