X-COM (Video Game)/Characters

Central Officer John Bradford
Central Officer Bradford is the main character that XCOM players interact with. He tracks the status of soldiers, missions, and the XCOM agency itself, and reports it to the player.


 * Audience Surrogate: Bradford is not a brilliant scientist like Vahlen, either of the Shens, or Tygan, so they get to explain things to him while we listen in.
 * Drives Like Crazy: Some of the Avenger chatter in XCOM 2 paints him as this, but he says that anyone who has a problem with his flying is welcome to take the helm...
 * Memetic Outfit: His green sweater.
 * The Watson: In XCOM:EU, much of his dialog is asking one of the doctors to explain what something is.

Dr. Vahlen
Dr. Vahlen is the chief scientist of XCOM. She's quite enthusiastic about getting to research aliens and their technology, and not terribly concerned about the human cost of the missions to retrieve them.


 * Last-Name Basis: We know the first names of the other officers of XCOM, but not hers.
 * Mad Doctor/Mad Scientist: She's primarily a research scientist, but she is also apparently responsible for overseeing the operations to turn soldiers into MECs, so she must have some medical background.
 * Stop Helping Me!: She will "helpfully" chide players who use explosives on aliens that she hasn't dissected or interrogated. Presumably, she'd rather sacrifice a few troopers to get the corpses in better condition.
 * Volcano Lair: Apparently, this is where she spent her time between XCOM:EU and 2.

Dr. Raymond Shen
Dr. Shen is the chief engineer of XCOM.


 * My God, What Have I Done?: The lengths that XCOM is willing to go to -- splicing humans with alien DNA, or chopping them up into cyborgs -- inspires this feeling in him.

Sectoid
In the original X-COM and in XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within, Sectoids are the basic grunts of the aliens. They're not particularly strong, but their plasma weapons are no joke against rookies and they do have some psionic talents, which develop as the game progresses. In XCOM 2, they've been made much tougher with the addition of human DNA.


 * Fan Nickname: "Ayys". After their more muscular forms were revealed for XCOM 2, they were also nicknamed "Pectoids".
 * The Greys: Sectoids are basically these -- in fact, if the Roswell incident really was an extraterrestrial UFO encounter in the XCOM universe, they might actually be the Grays of conspiracy lore.

Viper
Introduced in XCOM 2, Vipers are the "true form" of the Thin Men deployed in the initial invasion. Now that the aliens openly run the world, there's no need to blend them with human DNA to infiltrate; they can just strut (er, slither) in their full reptilian glory.


 * Fan Nickname: "Snek".
 * Non-Mammal Mammaries: To be fair, the Vipers are not from Earth, so they could be mammals after all. Their breasts might not necessarily be mammary glands, either.