Xenonauts

I enjoyed both the campaign/base building as well as the tactical combat. This game felt a bit more difficult than xcom due to it being more unpredictable when aliens might show up and attack your soldiers. Also, the mind-control aliens feel very unfair due to them being able to target your troops from anywhere, and there isn't a good way to counter it. One could argue this is a negative point, but I can see people arguing this makes the combat more interesting. My only complaint about this game is the graphics and UI presentation. It looks very old school, but that seems to be a deliberate art style. This really isn't a big negative and did not detract from my enjoyment of the excellent gameplay.

I was very excited about this title. Being underwhelmed by the XCOM reboot from Firaxis with the extremly reduced geoscape functionality, linear storytelling and boring research, i was looking forward to Xenonauts. The problem is: The game doesn't really deliver. The UFOs come in waves which are totally predictable, the airial combat is fine if used on auto but gives you disadvantage if you use it in manual mode (Which is sad, because the air combat looks really nice). Even the tactical is kinda boring and nothing in game is REALLY exciting. You have seen it all, often the old game does solve a specific problem better than Xenonauts and the biggest complain i have is: The aliens are to predictable and not agressive enough. Surely you now say: Up the difficulty level! But that does not change the agressivness of the AI. More ships and harder to kill enemies are not AI but tweaks that make em harder to kill/control, but not harder to predict. At nearly 50% in the game i had lost most of my motivation to continue, but i finished it anyway. While i played XCOM the original time after time, i'm not really tempted to play Xenonauts again. I think that is everything that needed to be said. The game tries hard to catch the spirit of the old game, but it's just a subpar copy that can't reignite the love i have for the old game. For the low price it's ok, but don't expect the soul and heart of the original.

Whoever said that Xenonauts was what XCOM:Enemy Unknown should have been was either lying or has some deeply perverted concepts of what makes a game good. I find Xenonauts nearly unplayable. The game is severely lacking in tooltips or other explanations. Stuff constantly gets in your way and if three guys at point blank range can't even hit a puny alien once then they can get lost. I'm only giving this game more than the minimum because I feel it geniunely tried to bring some cool ideas (back) to the XCOM formula. But it has missed the memo that added complexity needs to come with added polish. I'm exteremely glad I got this game "for free" through the GOG sale. I'd be pissed if I'd actually paid money for it.

I think I was still having fun with Xenonauts when I hit the 150-hour mark, but at this point I'm about to hit 300 hours, all in one campaign, and it's just a drag. I took a three-year break in the middle and it didn't really do much to reduce the drudgery. I just want to finish! I'm not sure even the modern XCOM games could sustain my interest if one campaign took this long (I'm not a Long War guy, of course), and Xenonauts lacks the extra depth provided by XCOM's classes and ability trees. My big problem is that there are so many UFOs. Every few days, five or so UFOs pop up simultaneously, and when you shoot them down they leave a crashsite for your soldiers to assault, which is your primary means of getting money (most of your funding from countries will probably go into base maintenance). There's also an option to just do an airstrike instead and skip the ground mission for an instant cash payout, but I've only just started using it to a significant degree because of how sick I am of the gameplay. There's an ingame hint that claims you get almost as much money from an airstrike as from a ground mission, but this is untrue, unless you consider $50,000 to be "almost as much" as $150,000. You'd run out of money constantly if you didn't do virtually every available ground mission. The way that hint is written suggests the balance is supposed to be you get about the same amount of money from either approach and the only reason to do ground missions is to level up your soldiers. I would prefer that design, but I guess they must've decided against it at some point after writing that hint. Or maybe it's the difficulty I'm playing at, I don't know. Don't remember if I chose a high one or not. Anyway, for what it's worth, the air combat is pretty engaging compared to XCOM EU and the original X-COMs.

A good unofficial remake of X-Com. It fixes some things that were annoying in X-Com- no more micromanaging bullets, for example. They deliberately made the game is easy to mod for example, just by editing text files- so if you want to change the starting $ or something else it is very simple. The only real negatives I saw as I played were this: The maps you can play on are not randomized like X-Com's and there are not NEARLY enough of them. They get repetitive quickly. This can be negated somewhat by downloading a map pack from the goldhawk forums. It is possible that the current version of Xenonauts includes the map pack now, I am not sure; I had to download it separately when I bought the game. The aliens are kind of dull, they are almost all various bipeds. Not as weird as the creatures in X-com. Other than those two points, it is a great game was lots of fun to play.