UFO: Aftershock

Well, to be short, this game is really good under many aspects, but on the other hand it surely misses something to be a great game. Considering the price it surely worth the buy just to try it, personally i like it overall. I think this game is very interesting until half game or past it, then it starts to become very repetitive and also a lot easier as even if you will face more "geared" enemies your squad will be so skilled that the "tactical" aspect of the game will become not so important. The bases menagement, research and develop of new items are very well done imo, i was impressed about the variety of weapons and stuff you can research and create, it reminded me to "space empire IV" as research / develop. The mixed real time / turn based tactical combat is working very well and the GDR aspect about leveling your team also is very well done. The problem of this game is that the huge number of tactical random combats that you will have to face before having a new "step into the story" at a point will start to be always the same, in example the "capture an enemy" mission 95% of times is to grab the same sniper enemy in the same 2/3 maps, and it happens to do it twice in a row sometimes. Btw i played it using from start the shadowarrior rebalancing mod, so i never played it without it. At the end i like this game and i spent about 2-3 weeks playing it quite every night before being a bit bored, and im sure i will return on it from time to time, im only a bit disappointed it could have been a true masterpiece with only few additions.

....... bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs AND YET STILL MORE BUGS! First off, if there is a mod out there that fixes some of those, USE IT. Do NOT play vanilla! Many of the weapons, items etc just do NOT do what it "says on the tin". Entire swathes of the game's content are USELESS. For example, ALL of it's "stat booster" items do NOTHING. All alien weapons and items that state they require special research to become useable, DO NOT actually need said research. This leaves a good portion of the entire "tech tree" as meaningless. Many things simply "don't work" or never unlock. Stuff you'd expect to get near the game's start won't turn up for ages - if at all. The game itself plays like the other two UFO titles (Aftermath and Afterlight). They do not play like the far superior X-Com titles. (Well to be fair, Afterlight isn't that bad - much better than Aftermath and Aftershock - but you need AM and AS for the game lore!) Basically AS is set 45 years after AM and assumes you went for AM's "join with the Reticulans and allow them to cover the Earth with their biomass" ending. "More variety of enemies than Aftermath" says the blurb? BULLSHIT! Though what it does have are not so "samey" as each other as in AM. Could have still included more of our transgenant friends from AM though. Same with the weapons, AM had loads of hand guns and assault rifles - but basically they were all "the same". AS cuts out a lot of such deadwood. Graphics are better than in AM, but the maps are smaller and more repititive. Difficulty is usually a lot less than AM, but when the IMMENSE difficulty spikes strike - you'd better enable the cheats! Which DO work, unlike AM. A great shame, such a waste of potential. Mmmmm, "Altar Interactive" again? Need I say more?

I know this game form the time it was unplayable due to the famous bug on the Wargot ship. More or less to this point the game is indeed nice if we forget about some annoying bits like grenade throwing mechanics. The pressure on you is considerable and game well balanced but later on this changes... . I do not want to spoil the story but after the wargot ship the authors destroyed all they were working for through the game. It is like meeting stunning girl, inviting her to your home and finding out in bed that she is in fact he. Soo if you invest in this game just enjoy as much as you can and do not be surprised.

Unfortunately I'm forced to give this game a poor rating because the game doesn't support wide screen resolution. the maximum resolution is 1024x768, and there are no known fixes for this issue. I'm sure the gameplay is fine, but because of the poor resolution I'm unable to play this game and enjoy it.

AVOID LIKE A PLAGUE. DOES NOT WORK ON INTEL GPUS AND HAS REMAINED UNFIXED FOR 15 YEARS. IT IS CHEAP BECAUSE IT SUCKS. NONE OF THE PATCHES FIX ANYTHING. A -1/5 technical garbage-fire and ripping off of Microprose's creations. Used to have the system-killing Starforce copyprotection crap to ultimately prove how much it was about money instead of creating something unique and worth playing. BTW, zero guides how to get the wine going. No, does not work outta box, had to guess cmdline options. (OOtB: THE CMDSStream error.) Review over. The rest is to help the fellow scammed men to get it to work on Linux. Here are the steps. 0. Download and extract a custom, non-numbered widescreen patch zip (unless you want to play with a F'd-up, 50%-of-the-right-side-missing screen). 1. Download Lubuntu 20.04 and burn it on a 8+ GB USB stick with Rufus (MBR+BIOS settings req.). 2. Set BIOS (smash F* keys or DEL to get theere) to disable Secure BOOT, enable possible Legacy BIOS and ACPI modes and enable CSM. Then boot with your USB stick. 3. Select to start without installing (any changed data will not be saved on the stick). 4. Install wine32 and winetricks. 5. Use 'sudo winetricks' to install "windows components" and select 'dsound' and 'directmusic' and to change the sound to 'alsa'. 6. Get the UFO.exe of the selected res into the game dir. 7. Go open your UFO's hard drive (opening it automounts it, very important). Then modify and apply the following cmd to run Aftershack: sudo wine /media/lubuntu/[hard_disk_partition/path/to/UFO_dir/UFO_720p.exe --options multisample=4 anisotropy=8 loadall=FALSE video_caption=TRUE loadall=FALSE nointro=TRUE fullscreen=FALSE nointro=TRUE nosound=FALSE (No sound without 'sudo' even with sound on, weird.) Change to: nosound=TRUE if it fails to find a sound system. At least it plays then. F the devs for not fixing all this. P.S. Gameplay-wise: MUCH WORSE than Aftermath. Early Difficulty Spiking Broken Pathfinding Feature Creep Busywork etc.