The thing is. If they actually manage to nail the gameplay, it may actually be worth it for me.

I bought an Arkham City code for $30 from someone and although I loved Batman AA, I'd probably get LOADS more playtime out of a well done X-com game than I'll ever get out of the Batman series, despite them being great games :)

So here's to hoping they pull it off.

Consider UFO:Extraterrestrials is less than a tenner and the entire UFO:After... series for not much more

More likely they're looking at the pricing of Matrix Games, Shrapnel Games and Storm Eagle Studios, who use the best way to dig a deeper niche for a niche genre.

I'd love it if the game were distributed by gog!

Agree 100%.

$10 instabuy, $20 wait for good reviews (and/or demo), $30 is... wait for sale territory. More then $30 is lol.... especially when I can grab something like UFO:AI for free.

But who knows? maybe it will be absolutely amazing.

NECRO! but for a good reason

xenonauts has just moved onto Desura and comes with a price drop to the much more appealing $20 or a special preorder for the old $29

How playable is the current version? I'm in a dire need of an X-Com fix.

I guess this game will be in Desura "Alpha Bundle", so I might just hold on until then ...

SimonG: tried UFO:ET and UFO:AI yet?

I have no Idea I'm one of those holding out to see if it's added to the alpha bundle...

Had very bad experiences with UFO:AI last year which somewhat made me wary of it. Would you recommend giving it another try?

And even with the BTman(?) mod ET just doesn't feel right. Nothing I can put my finger on, just wrong

The best "replacements" for me were actually the UFO series here on GOG, but I've played them to death already...

A note on xenonauts it's currently in alpha so nothing is set in stone yet but the graphics and comments I've read make it feel xcomish however comments have been made that the designers intend to make changes to the classic formula that may not be popular (to do with equipment etc)

This would be awesome ... :D

So, other than myself and wormholewizards and myself, has anyone else played the demo yet?

I just played it for the last 2 hours (still playing, just minimized to take a break) and it feels really good. Mechanics are solid - as with Enemy Unknown, you can blow up walls and objects, and they will have cracks and other signs to reflect their extent of damage. Playing on Veteran is what you'd expect from a game like this - starts off easy at first, then the difficulty starts to ramp up as you encounter more aliens. The random element of the game is well-balanced. Shame there aren't Saving Private Ryan moments, but there are still lulzy situations.

One of them was this: my 10-yo brother was playing just now. He's an X-COM newbie, but he got the hang of the game fast enough. He watched me play the first mission and saw that I only had to deal with one alien grunt (but that grunt had killed 3 civilians), so in his first mission he got cocky and dove straight into the crashed UFO with just one soldier. He found himself surrounded by 3 aliens (forgot their names) instantly, and we were laughing p. hard about it. He also learnt the basics of air combat fast, and then he got cocky again and sent a dropship (Chinook) unguarded. The dropship got blown up by a fighter.

Speaking of aerial combat, it's more tactical than X-COM's. The graphics are minimalistic, but the game is very fluid. No doubt it's RTWP, but it's very manageable. I'm not sure if you'll ever get to control more than 3 fighters.

All in all, it's really shaping up to be a very good game. I do think some aspects can be worked on, but it's really polished for an alpha. The sounds are very solid, and animations are smooth (though sometimes the game skips the animation for jumping over a barrier, which looks out of place). I'll play it some more later, then post a more solid AAR.

What is a RTWP?

Yeah what gameon said. It's not the most tactical combat system I've ever seen, but there are multiple permutations that you can adopt when fighting an enemy. One of the easiest, early ways to take down an enemy fighter with the basic aircraft is to lead him away with one ship, while using the other to fire at his backside. Your ships can bank-and-roll to dodge missiles, change their speeds and select which weapons to fire, but being this early in the game, I haven't seen a need to not fire everything at one go yet.

The thing about this is that you don't always get UFO wrecks when you shoot down a UFO, so the motion becomes a bit tedious if you know you're going to win everytime. I hope they find a way to make battles more interesting. And, while the music is nice, after a while it gets jarring.