Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic lay...
Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic layer allows you to co-ordinate the defence of the planet, using your interceptors to shoot down UFOs and researching captured artefacts to learn about your foes and unlock new combat equipment to use on your missions.
Xenonauts is a spiritual successor to the classic X-Com strategy games from the 1990s. We aim to improve the graphics, add new content and streamline the interface whilst still retaining all of the key mechanics of the original games. Devoted fans should love this game, but we're also keen to introduce the joys of old-school grand strategy to a whole new generation of players who might not otherwise experience it!
Ground Combat: Xenonauts delivers tense turn-based combat across realistic, varied and fully-destructible battlefields, against almost fifty different variants of enemy. Missions range from capturing crashed UFOs or alien bases to defending cities (or even Xenonaut facilities) against alien attack. You'll experience the chill of encountering a new alien for the first time and the joys of test-firing a new weapon for the first time. Deeply asymmetric combat keeps the battles interesting - after all, you're fighting intergalactic invaders with 1970's ballistic technology!
Persistent Soldiers: Soldiers in Xenonauts are persistent from mission to mission, improving their stats and gaining ranks with combat experience - but their deaths are always only a single bad move away. You will grow to care about the brave men and women under your command as they slowly grow from green rookies into hardened veterans, but that only makes it more painful when their heroic tale is cruelly cut short by a burst of plasma fire...
Research Tree: Xenonauts has an extensive research tree with almost a hundred projects to unlock, each with its own unique description and painted artwork. It slowly reveals the intentions and origins of the invaders, while also unlocking new battlefield equipment, aircraft and vehicles for you to use as you harness alien technology and turn it against them.
Just a good game like Ufo and X-Com. But: After a good long fight with many aliens you find out that there are so many more outside that this become very boring sometimes. Ironmode ist not an option at this moment. Why? Because you make the mistake to make it quickly and everybody dies. It makes fun but I look forward for Xenonauts 2 to make this better.
I just finished the Vanilla version (no-mods) of the game with patch-level 1.59 so following comments apply to this kind of setup.
Xenonauts is a good (almost great) remake of the original X-Com (in Europe Ufo - Enemy Unknown) classic. It took me approx. 30 hours to complete the game on easy difficulty. 75 % this time was quality gaming - 25 % was boring grinding with too familiar ground maps.
Almost all the areas work well and all in all I like this game more than Firaxis version which I played last year.
I only have following negative comments about the game and I guess most of these might be issues which could be fixed with mods:
oRepetitive maps (you get way too familiar with the maps after hours of grinding them)
oPsionics and the lack of countermeasures for psi-powers. Aliens can take control of your soldiers and you cannot do literally anything for this. In original series you were able to have your own psi-soldiers and also equipment which helped against psi-powers
oReapers and ship invasions (when you storm downed enemy ships the reapers and their 100% kill-rate-attack gets so boring after they use the teleport elevators to kill you soldiers)
oToo narrow tech tree (more stuff to research would be nice)
oAir Combat balance. Too difficult in the beginning and too easy in the end. Also the actual air-combat mini-game is not so nice and I used automatic all the time
oSoldier development. You cannot influence how soldiers improve and you as you cannot influence what skills and attributes you get you don't get attached to your team (I only noticed who had the most time units - rest of the attributes in my team were pretty much a "black box" to me)
I haven't even played X-COM, so I was blown away by how new, how awesome the very premise of the game was. So much fun, and so addictive too. There was always one more battle, one more weapon for a soldier etc
The game was always tough, but never unfair. But there was always the urge to save scum until you won every battle with no casualties. More experienced soldiers are so much better than rookies, but it's probably just me obsessing over it. You can win through the game with one reload per hour rather than eight.
I don't think anyone who's into turn-based squad combat can play this game and not like it.
Strongly recommended.
The full review can be found on Start 2 Continue: http://start2continue.com/posts/2015/7/6/review-xenonauts-pc
Excerpt:
Xenonauts is a non-canon throwback to the classic XCOM: UFO Defense in aesthetic, difficulty, and execution. You find yourself as a commander of an international paramilitary organization during the Cold War, dedicated to repelling spacemen from beyond the stars. You choose a location to set up your HQ, build extra facilities, plan squad loadouts, hire and fire support staff, and manage research and development--to name just some of your new responsibilities. Your objective, as you can imagine, is to keep the aliens from conquering Earth. Each playthrough follows the same rough story and difficulty progression, but the circumstances and outcomes can vary dramatically depending how well you can react to everything the game throws at you.
I gotta hand it to Goldhawk Interactive: they certainly know their way around a strategy game. The level of depth is on-par with Total War and other grand strategy games, requiring you to make tough decisions and sometimes finding yourself having to choose the lesser of two evils. As you progress, you'll be able to salvage alien technology for research and reverse engineering, allowing you to upgrade your troops and equipment. Despite your soldiers being absolute garbage in the beginning (to their credit, M16s weren't too good against plasma rifles and you'd be a little nervous too fighting aliens for the first time), most enemies can be overcome through the use of defensive tactics, clever ambushes, and keeping behind cover.
...
At the end of the day, Xenonauts is a must-have for fans of the alien defense and turn-based RPG disciplines. From its nostalgic visual and story appeal to its deep-yet-intuitive gameplay mechanics having you command multiple operations around the world, Goldhawk's game is a welcome and refreshing addition to the library of anyone who's looking for a good challenge.
Very well executed strategy games that combines the hardcore old-school gameplay of the original UFO: Enemy Unknown with enough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown's streamlined nature so that it can fit into the modern gaming industry.
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