Is XCOM turn-based or real time

Turn-based. You move your soldiers, the game moves the enemy, and nothing happens on the map while you are thinking.

That is true of the 1994 original and of every modern XCOM that people actually mean when they use the name. The exceptions are real but they are side doors, and they are at the bottom of this page.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, published by 2K, 2012) gives each soldier two actions a turn: move and move, or move and shoot. Cover is worth a stated bonus and the odds of a shot are printed on the screen. Nothing moves until you tell it to.

XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, 2016) works the same way and adds a turn limit to most missions, so you are racing a counter rather than the clock. That distinction matters: the pressure is turns, not seconds.

XCOM: Chimera Squad (Firaxis Games, 2020) is the one variation worth knowing. Instead of your whole side moving and then the enemy's, individual units take turns in an order that mixes both sides together. It is still turn-based, but your squad never acts as a block.

X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) is turn-based with time units: each soldier has a pool of them and every step, turn of the head, reload and shot spends some. Keeping units in reserve is what lets a soldier fire during the enemy's turn, so even the shooting between turns is paid for in the same currency.

X-COM: Apocalypse (Mythos Games, 1997) is the interesting one. It shipped with both: you could fight a battle in the classic turn-based mode or switch it to real time with a pause, where the clock runs until you stop it to give orders. That was 1997, and the series never offered the choice again.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (2K Marin, published by 2K, 2013) is not turn-based at all. It is a third-person shooter set in 1962 where you aim your own weapon and slow time to give orders to two agents. It carries the XCOM name and it is a different genre.

If you searched this question because of a trailer and the soldiers were running around while a man shot a pistol, that is the game you saw.

The X-COM formula does exist without turns, just not under this name.

The three UFO games from Altar Interactive, Aftermath (2003), Aftershock (2005) and Afterlight (2007), rebuild the whole thing, globe and research and all, with combat in real time that pauses whenever you want. Afterlight, which puts the colony on Mars, is the best of them.

Aliens: Dark Descent (Tindalos Interactive, published by Focus, 2023) is the strongest modern squad game that runs on a clock, with slow motion instead of a stop. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (Micro Forte, 2001) lets you play the same fight either way, which remains unusual.

And if what you wanted was the 1994 design kept faithfully, with turns, Xenonauts (Goldhawk Interactive, 2014) and Xenonauts 2 (Goldhawk, published by Hooded Horse, 2026) are the restatements, while Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) is the original designer's own return to it.

Because its whole appeal is that a loss is your fault. Turns let a player see every piece of information, weigh it, and commit, which means the soldier who died was killed by a decision rather than by a reaction time. Permanent death only feels fair under those conditions.

Real time can be just as exact, but it has to work for it, with a pause that stops itself at the right moments rather than asking the player to watch for them. That is a harder engineering problem, and it is the one this studio has taken on.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished.