Xenonauts

I like the clean art and graphics and the cold war aesthetic, and it's interesting to see a more in depth air combat system. That said, it completely lacks the atmosphere of the games it was inspired by. There's no suspenseful music to go along with colorful and frightening alien designs. The sound design is weak and lacking. The UI is very clean, yet somehow manages to be unintuitive and hard to read. Now onto the game: It feels like a lot of RNG right from the start and not in the fun way. You have no idea whether you are doing things wrong or if the difficulty is part of the narrative. Many of the first ships you detect on radar will easily outspeed you, absolutely wreck your aircraft when not on autobattle. You would think the early game would slowly ramp up like in the UFO Defense. That's just good game design, but here you are thrown into a pool and left to figure out how to do things. Problem is you can't respond to many events sometimes because your craft can't even reach the areas far from your base. There's such a fine line between buying enough personnel vs not enough which will quickly cripple your efforts. The ground combat suffers from similar tedium and randomness. Your troops just plain suck and you only get 8 of them to begin with. I often found myself missing shots from point blank and aliens spraying across the map and getting lucky instant kills. They are also stronger than your troops in every way. Without the horror element like in the original it simply felt annoying instead of scary. I can't imagine having a fun playthrough without save scumming and dumping hundreds of hours into it. Never had that issue with OG XCOM or TFTD. The journey is long and it isn't enjoyable.

I love the original X-com games and was really looking forward to playing Xenonauts as I have heard it is the closest option to the original available right now. Unfortunately the font size makes this game unplayable for me. I have a 26" screen at 1360x768 and have to learn forward to be able to read the text and I still have to strain to read it. I don't have the greatest vision but I wouldn't call it that bad. I hope this is fixed in a future update as I would really like to play this game, but as of right now I just feel like I've wasted money on another game I can't play.

I don't know much about the original X-COM games, but this seems like a mediodcre implementation of an otherwise excellent game. Seems like GOG only allows 2000 characters per post, so I'll have to be short. The game itself has many good addictive features; soldier management is definitely one of them. The Jagged Alience 2 feel of the ground combat gives you an illusion of realism. The air combat is unrealistic, but still good enough. The reason I can't rate Xenonauts good enough, is because of some of the wrong decisions on the dev's side. I feel that the devs are obsessed with giving more challenge than anything else. As a result, the game is mostly made for the die-hard fans of X-COM. Is there any problem with it? Well, yes, the strategic aspect of the game is very rigid - you are supposed to build exactly 3 bases; not 2, not 4, 5 is right out, otherwise you're doing it wrong, etc. There's an "optimal" build in the game, and you must obey this to avoid getting fucked. Not only that, I must mention the one utterly broken game mechanic that is Psionic. Apparently, the psionic in the original X-COM was so OP and the devs decided to remove this mechanic from the game - only in a half-assed way. The aliens can still use this mind-fuckery while you have little means to defend. You have a 50% chance of resisting Mind Control at best - Once. Every. Turn. The dev's justified this by saying "You don't complain when your soldiers die from a blind plasma cannon round came out of nowhere" Which is bullshit because a plasma cannon round must be shot by someone who had a proper line of sight. And this doesn't happen by freaking 50% each turn. All in all, the game is fun enough, but grindy, and the dev's made some delusional decisions. Unfortunately, I guess much of the fun comes from the original X-COM game rather than the reimplmentation. If you've enjoyed this game, you might enjoy the old X-COM as well, but I'm afraid not necessarily the other way around.

Not worth 25 bucks in my opinion. While the game looks great, it's extremely repetitive and requires a lot of slogging through missions that became boring very quickly for me. The design of the alien mother ship looks too much like an office for my tastes and I was pretty under whelmed by the final boss battle.

If you want to play X-Com: UFO Defense, buy X-Com for a quarter of Xenonauts' price. Xenonauts makes a few changes, some improvements and many worsenings Good points: - You no longer have to make ammunition. - Stores micromanagement is mostly eliminated. - You can determine the rank of aliens from what they wear. X-Com did this with weapons but it's nice not having to stun an entire base just in case one of them is the Lobsterman Commander you need to get to T'Leth. Bad points: - There are fewer enemy types in this game than in X-Com, incredibly. - The cartoony portraits of your units clash with the wonderful artwork of the aliens. - NO PSIONICS FOR YOU. The point where you get to turn the tables on the aliens in X-Com: UD and TFTD was one of the most satisfying parts. None of that here. - Needing to manufacture soldier weapons but not craft weapons is jarring. - Flat world map (ok) with realistic sun cover (ok), but radar ranges are fixed circles over a distorted map. - Nothing happens for days then 7 ufo groups appear at once. But you can't tell where because the dialog box is huge, so you don't know the best place to send interceptors from. - So the game is: nothing at all for days then 5 minutes of interception then 2 hours of moving your units from the right side to the left side of the battlescape. And this means that the game becomes a chore. Which X-Com never was. - There are still game-breaking bugs. It's commendable that they still work on issues after 8 years, but that they still have to is alarming. Characters getting stuck off the map edge on the very last mission made the game unwinnable until I reloaded and did the whole mission again... I wasn't highly motivated to reload. - The person on the workshop page has the very definition of a backpfeifengesicht. I'm not giving this game a one-star review because it's clear that love went into this game. Love alone isn't enough to make this game worth playing though. Especially not at this price.