Ufo: Enemy unknown

I'm not even super into tactical games. I prefer arenashooters and survival horror games and the like. But this game has such incredible levels of suspense and dread when combing through levels after exploring a shot down a ufo, terror attack in a city, aliens invading your base or you invading an alien base. And this is all despite its adorable 90's graphics. A deep and challenging game that requires you to pay attention, weigh up risks and make good decisions. I also enjoy how much granular and versatile its systems are compared to the newer entries made by firaxis. Not a lot of games can compete. But be sure to play it using openxcom for some in my opinion mandatory qol features.

UFO is a perfect game. Specially because of high variety of available combinations either from destructible environment, by throwing smoke grenades or using obstacles to hide from line of sight, by attacking from multiple directions, day or nigh time, and much more. Every combat mission is like a short game by itself. Everything is random but with great game design which also includes incremental progress. This creates never ending flow of enjoyable, challenging and surprising situations. What is important for me is that You can have an edge in this game: High variety of weapons and munition are cheap, yet some very deadly. Your soldiers get promotions and improve their stats which makes huge difference. There is also base building, research, purchases, production, maintenance costs, funding from combat score and the pleasure to keep all of that in balance. There is always something to do. In the first few months I decided to clear a well hidden alien base on Antarctica which I discovered purely by accident. I took a bunch of total rookies but I equipped them with rocket launchers and auto cannons with explosive munition. All my marines got promotions and improved their stats a lot after such mission. Only one of them had mild injury and needed to stay in a hospital for few days.

Thats a Gem for me i played(highest difficulty) it for 15 years straight thats how good it is crafted ..at least you could(if you dare?) reload the fight and got a new experience playing it ...nothing stayes the same ..a marvelous Game it is and the alien and hardware wiki makes it even more colorful to sink into the story ... bravo ps: my only wish is this game 1:1 in todays graphics nothing else changed like they did with Diablo 2 hear me FIREAXIS

Endless hours of lost sleep when this came out... in diskettes, way back in the late 80's (or 90's ? I can't remember). True turn around game, great, great stuff. You cannot stop playing until you see the result of the science research going on... or until the next technological weaponry is available. Summary: play it !!!! Then play TFTD then Aplocalypse.

X-COM UFO Defense is a game where you'll suck a lot at first, losing your troops, failing to account for base-management/design, or placing your bases at less than optimal areas; however, once you get past the difficulty curve, learn the enemy movements and patterns, manage your troops better, and learn to place your bases at prime-locations, you'll find a game that rewards you and is extremely satisfying to master. Now how is this different from the rebooted X-COM games? Every troop member you deploy on a mission isn't someone you'll be as emotionally attached to, they'll die in a single-well placed shot till you research better gear, and your choice to defend an area against the alien threat will be far more rooted in how much money your org has, whether or not you'll have room for any loot, and how many troops you are willing to use on a combat encounter. So should you play UFO Defense? Yes, do use OpenXCOM as others have suggested, it'll make it run on modern systems plus if you want to go an extra mile use OpenXCOM Extended for mod support.