I'm covering Gene Modes and Medals in one page for two basic reasons: firstly, they're both soldier boosting/tweaking options added by Enemy Within. Second, they're both a little shallow, where I don't really feel they deserve a page apiece.

First up:

Gene Mods
Gene Mods cost Meld and cash and take the soldier out of action for five days while the Gene Mod is being installed. Most Gene Mods require you autopsy specific Aliens to unlock, as well.

You only get one Gene Mod per soldier for each of the five application possibilities. (ie only one of the two Brain options, only one of the two Eye options, etc). These are conceptually organized into modifying specific body components (Brain, Eyes, Heart, Skin, and Legs), though the pairs are... unreliable about making sense as a mutually-exclusive pair of changes.

Most Gene Mods are unlocked by Autopies, but three of the 10 Gene Mods are available the instant you build the Genetics Lab: both Eyes options, plus one Legs option. (Adaptive Bone Marrow, specifically)

Gene Mods themselves are broadly unlocked kind of insanely easily: you simply study Meld by itself, which can be done right at the beginning of the game with no other requirements, and this instantly unlocks the Genetics Lab. (And the Cybernetics Lab) You then build that, and there you go, you have three slots for putting soldiers in to get their Gene Mods.

Brain

Neural Damping
+20 defensive Will, the soldier will never Panic, and if an enemy uses Mind Control on the soldier, the soldier becomes stunned instead of switching to enemy control
Cost: 35$ and 20 Meld.
Unlocked by Berserker Autopsy.

The generalist choice compared to Neural Feedback since it applies any time a soldier performs any Will test or ought to be at risk of Panicking, and also primarily the low-Will choice. If you've got a soldier you want to keep using whose Will is too low to protect them from Mind Control, this is your go-to option.

Note that the Panic protection isn't amazing; Panic is pretty low-odds overall, so Neural Damping protecting against it can easily be a thing that never matters, especially since its +20 defensive Will already substantially erases Panic chance. (And, unfortunately, the game doesn't do anything to communicate when a Panic ought to have occurred but was blocked) Specifically, a soldier with 80 Will cannot Panic under any circumstances without penalties being applied to their Will, and Rookies start from 40 Will, so even a Rookie has at best a 40% chance to Panic unless something is penalizing their Will. A max-rank soldier has at minimum 54 Will, and averages around 75 Will if you don't have Iron Will purchased, and averages around 96 Will if you do have Iron Will purchased for all their levels. Also note that most Panic checks are generous enough a soldier can't Panic from them once they have 60 Will, which Neural Damping's +20 Will already brings your soldiers over; it's mostly Muton Intimidate that still has decent odds of resulting in Panic.

Will tests also just means Panic, enemy psionic action, and firing on Mutons and Muton Berserkers that are alive and functional so their Intimidate effect can function, so it's a little bit narrow of a stat boost. That said, a run will fight quite a few Mutons, and Muton Berserkers are basically impossible to one-shot, so the Panic immunity has decent odds of being rolled repeatedly; maybe give this to whoever is your preferred choice for softening up Mutons and/or Muton Berserkers.

I'm not sure why this costs twice as much Meld as Neural Feedback, though. It isn't quite as narrow as Neural Feedback, yeah, but double the Meld cost?...


Neural Feedback
Does damage to enemies who use psionic abilities on the soldier, and forces all their psionic abilities into cooldown. The damage is 1, plus 1 more damage for every 10 Will the soldier has.
Cost: 35$ and 10 Meld.
Unlocked by Sectoid Commander Autopsy.

The specialized anti-Psi option: at high Will it can do fairly high damage to enemies and regardless of Will it can take Ethereals entirely out of the fight for a time. (Everything they can do aside from move around is considered a Psi ability) Note that the enemy's Will is not factored into the damage. A soldier with extremely good Will rolls carrying a Mind Shield and wearing Psi Armor can do 19~ damage in retaliation. That will outright kill a Sectoid Commander, even on Classic/Impossible, and an Ethereal on Impossible will be down to 6 hit points, just 1 on any other difficulty level. Even a fresh-faced Squaddie will still do a minimum of 5 damage if this triggers, since Rookies already have 40 Will, which is a pretty respectable hit all things considered.

Notably, since everything Ethereals can do to your soldiers is considered to be a psionic action, it's very easy to bait them into triggering Neural Feedback, and anything they try is unlikely to work or will do poor damage to the soldier if you've stacked a ton of Will onto them. Simply ensure that the Neural Feedback soldier is the only thing in the Ethereal's view. The trickier part will be cleaning out the Muton Elite bodyguards without leaving anybody else in view of the Ethereal -unless of course you've got multiple soldiers with Neural Feedback.

Notably, Neural Feedback is pretty cheap to slot in. Its main problem is that doing stuff like upgrading your Mecs or installing Adaptive Bone Marrow is much more consistently relevant, and it's pretty easy to burn through your Meld stocks rapidly if you're careless about it, even if you aren't losing soldiers you've invested Meld into.

Eyes

Hyper-Reactive-Pupils
If the soldier misses, their next shot will have +10 Aim. Initiating Suppression always counts as a miss, and so always triggers this boost.
Cost: 15$ and 5 Meld
Available by default.

Arguably the generalist option compared to Depth Perception? It doesn't self-stack, anyway, so it's not some kind of sanity check ensuring that insane Defense can be overcome. It's just... there. Sufficiently small, situational benefit I question whether it's worth the Meld cost. At least it's cheap?


Depth Perception
If the soldier has the high ground bonus on their current target, they get an additional +5 Aim and +5 Crit chance against that target.
Cost: 15$ and 5 Meld
Available by default.

For soldiers intending to abuse height advantage. Too small a benefit to really care. Really, so small I have to question whether it's worth the Meld at all. It's admittedly Meld-cheap, but 5 Meld isn't nothing, and it adds up if you slap it onto multiple Snipers. Which Snipers are most straightforward soldier type to give it to, since if they're in a sniper nest it's basically a free, automatic benefit, however small it might be. It also goes well with Muscle Fiber Density, I guess, since such soldiers can easily move to get height advantage in many maps.

I still would've preferred a clearer benefit, though. Gaining a point of damage, say.

On a conceptual level, Depth Perception bothers me, too. The whole point of the way human eyes are positioned is to produce depth perception across most of the field of view. Exactly what is this Gene Mod supposed to be doing differently? The little graphic does nothing to clarify the point...

Heart

Secondary Heart
Soldier always starts bleeding out instead of dying the first time they hit zero HP in a battle, bleed out timer is 2 turns longer, and Critical Wounds don't lower their Will
Cost: 75$ and 15 Meld.
Unlocked by Cyberdisc Autopsy.

Great if you're not good at keeping your soldiers alive. If you're good at the game, it's a lot more questionable. It's also the go-to choice for anyone you want to be a psi soldier, to ensure they will remain at peak performance on their psi abilities.

It puzzles me that having a second heart ensures that you don't die the first time you drop to zero health. What about being shot in the head? Why would a second heart prevent that from being lethal? And... why does performing an autopsy on a Cyberdisc provide insight into how to install a second heart into a human being? The Autopsy on the Cyberdisc indicates it's actually a cybernetic organism, but that doesn't really explain why it provides the foundation for the Secondary Heart Gene Mod. There's a line about studying how the Cyberdisc "circulates plasma", but not only is the idea of plasma as blood faintly absurd, it still doesn't explain how the Cyberdisc autopsy leads to the Secondary Heart Gene Mod. Even taking into account the end-game dialogue further cementing that Cyberdiscs are cyborgs and therefore have organic components... uh, so? That doesn't imply they have a second heart or anything. It's really bizarre.

I really don't get why this wasn't unlocked via one of the Muton variants, like the Berserker or Muton Elite. I'm also pretty confused as to how a secondary heart is supposed to be extending the bleed-out timer: if anything, I'd expect it to pump the blood out of the soldier's body faster. This whole mess is... not great.


Adrenal Neurosympathy
When this soldier lands a kill, the soldier and nearby allies get a 2-turn bonus of +10 Aim, +15 Crit, and +2 Mobility. Additionally, if any affected Allies are Panicking, they will cease Panicking. Once triggered, there's a 5-turn delay before the given soldier can re-trigger this effect.
Cost: 25$ and 10 Meld.
Unlocked by Muton Autopsy.

A passive, reliably relevant, and fairly general ability. The bonuses are small, but you're going to be killing things, and the potential for it to boost the entire squad means that it'll "add up" fairly quickly. If you've got Meld to burn, it's definitely worth it, and even if you don't it's probably worth slapping onto somebody. Probably a Sniper, since they don't particularly benefit from Secondary Heart if you're using them properly and are already incentivized to pursue kill-shots in particular.

Adrenal Neurosympathy's range is huge, incidentally, and as far as I can tell the game's claim that its effect can be blocked by terrain doesn't actually mean anything. It's hard to say though, as the game's implementation of line of sight and line of fire are sufficiently wonky all-around it's entirely possible that it is, in fact, coded to be blocked by terrain, and it's just not obvious because the way the game determines line of sight is inconsistent and confusing anyway.

Skin

Bioelectric Skin
Can detect enemies through walls within a short range and is immune to Strangulation.
Cost: 35$, 15 Meld.
Unlocked by Chryssalid Autopsy.

Pretty nice. Perhaps a bit expensive for what it does, and on open maps that lack Seekers it's useless, but most of the time it's actually a pretty cool tool. You only need one or two guys with it, too, so the fact that Mimetic Skin is brokenly good doesn't mean Bioelectric Skin is simply out-competed. Giving Bioelectric Skin to your Snipers means you don't need to worry about them being strangled by Seekers when they're off Squadsighting by themselves, and also bolsters their relevancy in the indoor environments Snipers usually struggle to be an aid in. Alternatively you can give it to an Assault, particularly once you're late in the game and can give them Ghost Armor to provide a source of cloaking. With Bioelectric Skin they'll often be able to tell when they're going to encounter enemies soon anyway, and so are less likely to regret the lack of Mimetic Skin.

I do wish the detection effect had been handled differently, though. It's just a subtle rippling effect from roughly the tile a unit is being detected in, using a 2D graphic that is difficult to properly correlate into the game's 3D space (Which gets very frustrating if trying to blind-fire explosives to hit such detected enemies), and the rippling is sufficiently subtle it's genuinely easy to not even notice it occurring and so not realize a pod is through that wall over there. I'd have rather it was something like a brightly-colored icon on the ground, filling the tile, so you could readily see it at all and actually tell where enemies were.

By extension, I should emphasize that it gives zero feedback on what type of enemy you're detecting. This isn't a huge thing given how this game is designed overall, but if you were hoping to use it to precisely identify what a pod was before engaging it... nope.


Mimetic Skin
Soldier cloaks when moving into Full Cover if they weren't in line of sight of an enemy when they initiated the move.
Cost: 150$ and 65 Meld. (Originally 75$ and 35 Meld)
Unlocked by Seeker Autopsy.

Utterly broken. There's a reason a patch almost doubled its cost. Excepting Sectopods, no enemy has any way of coping with invisible soldiers, Mimetic Skin's requirements to be activated are fairly trivial -the act of becoming cloaked means that you don't need to worry about whether the Full Cover will be safe from a flank or not- especially for a high-level Sniper who treats all Cover as Full Cover, won't activate Alien pods that enter your line of sight thus allowing things like In The Zone Squadsight kills on enemies because they haven't had the chance to run for Cover, and is just... all the utility it brings to the table would basically require an entire page to itself to go over in full. It's incredible, and the developers seem to have severely underestimated it during Enemy Within's development.

The only substantial caveat to the effect is that Full Cover is sometimes not available anywhere in a fairly large area, particularly on some of the outdoors maps. Even so, even with activated pods about it's not that hard to arrange to trigger it. You just need to have that soldier break line of sight with the enemies, and then move to Full Cover. The Sectopod is basically the only enemy that can do anything about cloaked soldiers, and Mimetic Skin never times out. The cloak effect will remain until the soldier does something to end it, or until their Full Cover is destroyed. There's also a number of useful actions a soldier can take that won't break the cloak!

Going into Overwatch, tossing a Flashbang, tossing a Mimic Beacon, reloading the soldier's weapon, applying a Medikit, and using Psi Inspiration are all actions that won't break the cloak. While some of these aren't so useful (Mostly I'm thinking Mimic Beacon), effects like being able to reload under cloak are actually fantastic, and even Overwatching without breaking the cloak is a positive. +30% crit chance on incoming Aliens will stack with the +50% bonus for them being out in the open for a nearly guaranteed crit right there, before even adding in points like that Shotguns have an innate +20% crit chance. (Admittedly, this requires you're running Opportunist to matter, which realistically requires you're using Training Roulette if you want to combine it with a Shotgun...)

Legs

Muscle Fiber Density
Like Thin Men, the soldier can freely leap infinitely high to reach high ground anywhere, all for free as part of regular movement.
Cost: 60$ 25 Meld.
Unlocked by Thin Men Autopsy.

I'm not sure why this is priced so high, given that Skeleton Suits, Ghost Armor, and Archangel provide similar functionality. (Albeit Grapnel is buggy and does end the turn) It's also the second-most expensive Gene Mod, which confuses me; I'd really expect Secondary Heart to be in that position. Heck, a Skeleton Suit costs half the $ to make compared to Muscle Fiber Density.

That said, Covert Operatives can't take Armor and so that comparison is moot for them. Also worth noting is that Assaults can Run & Gun much farther out than a Grapnel can take them. The Volunteer might appreciate it as well, since they're not allowed a Grapnel-capable suit and the mobility has its uses in the final mission. It's also just plain more useful than Adaptive Bone Marrow if you expect to successfully minimize the ability of enemies to get in shots on you, since Muscle Fiber Density isn't dependent on being shot to be useful.

Honestly, though, to me the biggest appeal of Muscle Fiber Density is that it heavily chops down on how severely janking pathing is on many of this game's maps, letting your soldiers smoothly walk to locations they really ought to be able to readily reach without magic jumpy legs. The degree to which it makes soldiers more able to maneuver around each other without wasting a ton of Mobility is often kind of shocking.

I should also clarify that part of why I'm a bit down of Muscle Fiber Density is an issue of AI design. Your enemies in this game always know exactly where all your soldiers are (Even the soldiers not visible to any enemy), and always have a perfect awareness of exactly where your soldiers can move to and fire from off of one Action Point, and this awareness does in fact automatically include the effects of Muscle Fiber Density. More specifically, Cover-using enemies will almost never position themselves to be at risk of a flank from your soldiers unless multiple enemies are moving in force to flank one of your own units, where they're basically accepting you'll maybe kill one of them but still be flanked by the other. (Exception: EXALT's forces are kind of dumb, and much more prone to moving somewhere you can easily flank them from) As such, anytime you might be thinking, "If only I had Muscle Fiber Density on X soldier, they would be able to flank this enemy!" this is a reasonable thought but also completely incorrect: if you did have Muscle Fiber Density on that soldier, then that enemy would've just positioned itself some other location you still wouldn't be able to flank.

If the AI didn't have this obnoxious perfect awareness of your soldier mobility, I'd certainly rate Muscle Fiber Density as much higher. Or if it was simply one of the exceptions to this awareness, like how the AI doesn't 'see' Run & Gun on your Assaults and so they can get flanks in spite of the AI's obsessionn with not giving you free flanks.


Adaptive Bone Marrow
Wound recovery time reduced to a third, and the soldier will fully regenerate their core HP in combat, restoring 2 HP per turn.
Cost: 30$ and 15 Meld.
Available by default.

'Core' HP as in 'HP that isn't provided by Armor or Items'. This makes the regeneration noticeably less impactful than you might assume, as past the very early game a large portion of a soldier's HP will be armor HP, overall growing over the course of a run; a soldier in Titan Armor and carrying Chitin Plating can potentially take a couple of hits without actually dipping low enough to get any regeneration. 'Core' HP starts from 6/5/4/3 for a Rookie (Based on difficulty) and then leveling gives 4 HP. (Or 3, for Snipers) As such, core HP will be somewhere from 10 to 7 (Or 6, for Impossible Snipers) for a max-level soldier; late-game enemies all have the potential to kill a soldier who has only core HP remaining in one shot, if only on a crit. As such, Adaptive Bone Marrow is helpful for extending your Medikits (Let someone regenerate to full core HP, then apply a Medikit), but you shouldn't treat it as license to accept hits.

More of a design flaw with Adaptive Bone Marrow is that it encourages slow, cautious play (To give soldiers time to heal) having been introduced as a Meld-requiring upgrade in Enemy Within, where Meld Canisters were introduced to discourage slow and cautious play. Also, if you're doing slow and cautious play properly, Aliens will rarely get the chance to inflict damage. So there's a bit of a paradoxical nature to the Gene Mod's design.

Also, why is tweaking bone marrow giving Wolverine-esque super-regeneration? Bone marrow is where several cell types of note are produced, so I could certainly readily understand this, say, improvinng a soldier's immune system, but a soldier having a plasma blast burn halfway into their chest getting to shrug it off thanks to a bone marrow tweak is just weird.


This also feels like one of our first examples (Within the order of these pages) of the game expectinng the player to build dedicated tanks whose job is to draw fire, while not really providing the mechanical support to actually arrange such. If you could indeed build a soldier as a tank who reliably draws fire, then this would be an obvious addition to that dedicated tank. In actual Enemy Within... yeah, if you can afford it and you don't want Muscle Fiber Density on that soldier, you might as well install it at some point, but only because it's 'free' within their kit, not because it serves a clear, specific purpose for your squad's needs.

Medals

Another Enemy Within addition for tweaking your soldiers with a hard choice aspect, but you get it just kind of for free as you go. Once you earn a type of Medal, you go to the Officer Training School, click in to Medals, pick a name if you like, and then select what all copies of that Medal will forever do in your run. I'm not a fan; commitinng to a bonus for the rest of the run is not ideal for several reasons, such as how it makes it difficult for a player to actually compare their options in an informed manner.

Note that if you fire a soldier who has any Medals, you lose those Medals forever. If, however, a soldier dies, two missions later their Medals will be returned to you and you can throw them onto new people. As such, you shouldn't fire soldiers with Medals; if for some reason you want them gone, you should send them into combat and get them killed.

Further note that Will bonuses from Medals don't affect psionic abilities, whether for the offensive use of your soldiers or defending against psionic abilities. So don't think you can use the International Service Cross to power up your psionic soldiers, nor to protect your soldiers from psionic attacks.


Urban Combat Badge (Limit 5, provided every few missions)

+5 Defense in Cover.
OR
+5 Aim against enemies in Full Cover.

This choice is frustratingly skewed toward the first option: it will nearly always apply if you're not simply careless. The second one is a lot more narrow in where it applies, and frankly making Full Cover only +15 Defense compared to Partial Cover is pretty worthless. It makes a lot more sense to load up on ways to destroy cover or flank the target than it does to just suck it up and hope the Urban Combat Badge's slight increase in Aim saves the day. You'll never know when the first option helped, but you can count on it being relevant basically anytime anything shoots at you. (Unless you get flanked)

Notably, the second bonus is very specific to Full Cover. Enemies that don't use Cover -even if they have a lot of Defense- are never affected by it, and of course flying enemies are also not affected, and anytime you flank an enemy you're also not benefitting.

I suppose if you're going to lean into Sniper-centric play there's an argument for picking the second choice and dropping Urban Combt Badges on your Snipers, but the run-long commitmennt of Medal choices means you better be committing. Alternatively, Mecs can receive Medals and cannot benefit from the Defense bonus since they can't use Cover, so if you're going to focus on Mecs you might prefer the second option.

Regardless, This is one of the better examples of why I don't like a run permanently committing on Medal choices: if you could pass out the first version to your frontline soldiers and the second version to your Snipers, Bullet Swarm Heavies, and elite Mecs, it wouldn't be such a janky Medal.


Defender's Medal (Limit 3, issued when soldiers are killed or critically wounded, occasionally just when wounded)

Soldier never Panics in response to allies being injured or killed.
OR

Medikits and Restorative Mists restore 2 more HP when used on this soldier.

This is an odd one. As "natural' Panic is very rare in the game anyway, the first option isn't very useful, but the second option is weird. I basically feel the second one is better -just, it's hard to pin down who you should give it to, exactly. Assaults, I guess, since they are the most prone to risky actions? Mecs, since they tend to draw fire and have a lot of HP to potentially appreciate the increased HP?

It's another one of many bits to this game that make me think the devs were imagining a more RPG-esque combat flow where people are not only expected to take hits and be healed up afterward, but the player is expected to have a fair amount of control over who will get hit such that a Designated Tank is a real possibility. That's not really how this game is built, though; you can broadly expect Mecs and SHIVs to tend to draw more fire than your Cover-hugging troops, but they're the closest to 'designated tanks' you get. (And SHIVs can't receive Medals nor be healed by Medkits...)

That said, for a new player the first choice might be better, just to slowly erase the risk of 'somebody gets shot, then half the squad freaks out, and the situation spirals out of control'.


International Service Cross (Limit 2, requires missions have been done on three different continents)

+2 Will to the soldier for each different nationality in the squad.
OR
+2 Aim for each continent bonus X-COM has earned.

This basically boils down to "pick option 2", since you set a Medal's type of bonus for the rest of the game, and you'll eventually have all the continent bonuses in good play, whereas you can't guarantee having every member of the squad be from different nationality, and Medal Will bonuses are so, so narrow; up to +12 Will is both very mild and in this case it will literally only potentially prevent 'natural' Panic or Intimidate-based Panic. I guess it's nice to make nationality of troopers mechanically meaningful without turning to stereotyping? But it's the undesirable choice, so it falls a bit flat.

I should also explicitly point out that the Aim bonus is a minimum of +2 Aim since you do in fact always have your starting Continent Bonus. The Will bonus is also a minimum of +2 Will, of course, but, again, less valuable. Also, since squad size caps at 6 soldiers while there's only 5 Continent bonuses, the maximum Will bonus is +12 while the maximum Aim bonus is +10. A free SCOPE in the late game, basically.


Council Medal of Honor (Limit 2, requires a minimum number of Terror/Council/Cover Operations missions be completed)

+1 Aim and Will for each mission the soldier has participated in (After being given the Medal) in which no soldier died, to a maximum of +10.
OR
+10 Aim and +10 crit chance if no allies are within 7 tiles of the soldier.

I like the idea of this Medal. Build up to a long-term payoff that's always active once achieved or take an immediate payoff that you have to play a specific way to actually benefit from. That's a cool choice.

Unfortunately, I suspect the loner bonus is the superior choice overall. If Medal-derived Will appplied to psionic combat, I'd probably rate the permanent boost as better since it would stably protect against psionic threats and empower psionic soldiers, but without all that it's just a reduction in Panic chance that may well have no relevance because the soldier's Will is high enough to make them immune, or because you put Neural Damping on them and so that's making them immune. As such, while +10% to crit is mild and unreliable and the need to spread out can potentially be inconvenient, the loner bonuses are functionally greater in real play if activated, and Snipers, Assaults, and Mecs are all very good at attacking enemies while spaced apart from allies. So just going loner and throwing it on those classes can easily get the full benefits without you having to specifically keep the loner effect in mind.


Star of Terra (Limit 1, awarded upon completing the X-COM Base Defense Mission)

Entire squad gets +5 Will and +5 Defense. (Robots only get Defense bonus)
OR
All squad members below Lieutenant gain 25% more out of the mission completion experience value.

All buddies are slightly better, or all lower-ranking buddies grow faster. If you're managing to hold onto a stable squad of six experienced members the Will+Defense will be better, and the fact that Council missions can gift experienced soldiers means that if you have a low attrition rate you'll still not be benefiting from the experience gain advantage. (Lieutenant is, in fact, the minimum level for gift soldiers, so the Medal will never help a gift soldier level up!) The Will+Defense choice has the meta-advantage that it fits better to the assumption that you'll manage to keep the holder of the Medal alive -if you're expecting soldiers to die on a regular enough basis to outpace Council soldier gifts, you're probably not able to keep the Medal holder alive consistently anyway.

Basically, probably take the Will/Defense bonus and never look back.

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Gene Mods seem extremely ill-considered, advancing the transhumanism of the base game (Which was restricted to psychic powers and the amoral Aliens' cybernetic horror back then) in a context it's really, really inappropriate to. There are so many logistical and ethical difficulties in permanently installing major military hardware into soldiers who are intended to return to the civilian population after their tour of duty is up, and Enemy Within entirely ignores them. This is particularly painful when you consider that Dr. Vahlen will comment, when you come up against EXALT Elites, that X-COM would, "of course", never modify their people so extensively.

Never mind that the player can install up to five Gene Mods into each soldier, and EXALT Elites only have one Gene Mod apiece. Never mind that Mecs are based around Meld use as well, and the first step in creating a Mec is, for some ungodly reason, removing all their limbs to then replace them with metal versions. In fact, only the head seems to survive the conversion process! No no, EXALT has obviously modified their operatives far more than we would ever do, because even though we're transhumanists at heart, we totally do it less than EXALT as proof that we're more moral.

Sorry, no. X-COM only has the moral high ground over the Aliens in that regard, and honestly if you stop and think about Gene Mods and Mecs too hard even that point is debatable. Most of the ethical problems in installing military hardware into your soldiers are rendered moot if your soldiers are literally manufactured by and owned by the military, with no civilian life intended at all, as seems to be the case with the Aliens. For all that the gameplay of X-COM treats your soldiers as mindless extensions of the player's will, the plot of the game firmly places them as a conventional military or paramilitary organization -that presumably these soldiers you are turning into quadruple amputees (Only worse) will be expected to return to a civilian life at some point, and it's absurd to imagine that X-COM intends for their super-top-secret military hardware to be left installed in these soldiers. What, exactly, is supposed to be going on here?

The game tries to wave away the ethical problems with Gene Mods and Mecs by framing the beneficiaries as "volunteers", but this only addresses the short-term problem of consent. It doesn't address the long-term logistical problems, where you have to figure out what X-COM does with its soldiers when it releases them into the civilian population. The game dodges the issue by not covering the post-game world at all, and XCOM 2 starts from the assumption that X-COM failed its mission and so obviously no Mecs retired, but honestly an argument can be made that the Alien usage of cybernetics and genetic engineering is vastly more ethical than how XCOM goes about it. It's particularly jarring how the game attempts to insist that X-COM has the moral high ground over EXALT on the topic, when it most certainly does not and can even be argued as lacking the moral high ground relative to the Aliens on the topic.

Gameplay-wise, Gene Mods are kind of all over the place. Some of them are niche, but very good when they crop up. Some of them are incredible in general. Some of them barely matter at all even when they actually apply. I really wish they'd had a more coherent vision of Gene Mods in mind. If every Gene Mod was a small benefit, I'd assume the intention is that you're supposed to stack them onto an individual to get a clear benefit, similar to how in the original X-COM a soldier's per-mission gains are practically invisible but once accumulated they really matter. If every Gene Mod was an incredible game-changer in its own right, that would be cool too. If they were all fairly situational, sure, fine. But the combination of the three is... confusing. The Eye Gene Mods, for example, should probably be ignored unless you've got Meld lying around after having outfitted your core team with all the other Gene Mods, because they provide such a limited benefit, and only in specific situations, where other Gene Mods are more general and significant. The price-point difference is simply not significant enough to overturn this idea, either.

Medals, though they have their flaws, seem to be a more coherent concept, in terms of every Medal providing a small, somewhat situational benefit, excepting the Star of Terra, which you can get one copy of and so is justified as being an exception. If you really want to notice the effect of Medals, you kind of need to stack a few onto an individual. Fair enough, particularly since Medals are free -part of the problem with the Gene Mods with limited impact is that they demand resources and take the soldier out of action for a time, raising the question of whether such a small benefit is really worth bothering with at all. With Medals, the question isn't whether you're going to give them out at all, it's who will get what Medals and what bonuses you'll have the Medals provide in your run.

Both mechanics feel like a decent idea with a somewhat underwhelming execution. This is true of gameplay, but it's also true of more narrative/thematic considerations -my issue with Gene Mods raising ethical questions isn't that the game does it, but that it makes no attempt to address those questions. Aside from some vague muttering about the future of humanity and yadda, the actual practical implications of Gene Mods are just... ignored, beyond the gameplay implications. It's difficult to take seriously some of the game's attempts to suggest X-COM may defeat the Aliens, and in the process become just as bad as them (Enemy Within opens with a different quote from Enemy Unknown: "Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword."), when the whole thing isn't actually explored at all. There aren't even little touches -something as minor as the player being barred from sacking soldiers with Gene Mods or who have been converted to a Mec would convey that X-COM is treating these people as military property and be subtly creepy to anyone who ran into it.

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Next time, we cover Interceptors and their gear.

See you then.