Xenonauts

Someone said "It's not X-com", he's right this is not X-com, but of all the "X-com like" games I've tried (and I've tried many) is the one that comes closer. "Backed" it a couple of years ago on Desura the game is now ready to be played, and is damn fun at it. I'm not very good at reviews so I'll just add this, this game has a soul and it shows: the graphics, the setting, the music, the Xenopedia and the actual gameplay (Intercept mechanic, Geoscape gameplay, base building and tactical maps) all contribute to make you understand the passion behind this amazing game.

Certanly this is the closest game to UFO: Enemy Unknown that I have played. And that's a very, very good thing. It even gets rid of some repetitive micromanagement and much improves the air battles. However, I cannot give it 5 stars. It is because the game is ridden with bugs (game version says v1.65W, dunno why GoG says v1.63 at the moment). There are not a lot of crashes (although there are some). But you will see all kinds of glitches which (for me) heavily detriment the experience. You will fly through the roofs, see through walls, auto-resolve-win battles where you aren't carrying enough ammo in the first place, see dancing soldiers, have your rifles magically reload themselves, read countless text-typos, ... I've seen at least 23 different bugs and glitches in a single playthrough. It's impossible that this was missed 'by coincidence'. Assuming the bugs ever get fixed, add another star. Until they are fixed, I'm not buying Xenonauts 2. Because unlike the game authors, I do care.

All right I played lots of XCOM based games and new XCOM but none of them was as good as this one . The new XCOM was undercooked , short , without anything new or upgraded just a new graphic shit arbeit the long war changed that . Other games were closer in various degree but not enough to make it the right successor . They had their pros and cons but still It was not enough . Then I found Xenonauts and I must say that I praise the day I found it . It is hard , check . It is based in even more interesting era , check . It has better and harder air fight than original UFO check . It has new kind of weapon even more powerfull than plasma , check . It has new aircraft , check . It has multiple bases and freedom of building them , check . You don't have to go to the smallest ufo and you can bomb low priority targets , check . It has all that previous UFO had , check . Now about the cons - aliens are not as interesting as in UFO , check . New things to weapons like accessories , night vision , armor upgrade or foundry are not present like in UFO aftershock and afterlight - check . Aircraft armament which could be done better , check (Mig-31 is capable of carring machinegun and bombs and in those times building one purpose aircraft became useless . More vehicles like mechs or tanks could appear , check . Psychers and augmentation could appear , but in more beefy form than in new XCOM , check . The final mission could be better , check . Still despite it's cons Xenonauts is far better than any new XCOM and XCOM based games . The fighting mechanics is the same , the soldiers can die even with great armor (but unlike in UFO the weapons are balanced ) the game has various difficulty levels . This game is a true successor of XCOM franchise . It didn't screw up the old good elements but It removed and replaced all bad elements . And to those fanatics of UFO . Remember that old XCOM also had a cons . Same difficulty , unbalanced weapon , you had to go to every UFO .

Big Picture: Xenonauts is basically a reskinned original X-com with adjusted mechanics to emphasize real world tactical combat. You lose a chunk of the original creepy ambience and research pathways (and with it some common ways people tackle the original X-com). You gain higher res and bigger maps. The TL;DR is that you may enjoy this if you want X-com with a twist or you are a new player that enjoys old school hard core mechanics that are intuitively playable. If you are an Iron Man person, you are likely to have to be the type that enjoys punishment, especially old school unfair RNG. More Details: My level of enjoyment with this game was a roller coaster. The initial parts were fun but I missed the atmosphere of X-com. Then the difficulty jumped and since I had played efficiently I wasn't sure I'd finish because I was suddenly getting my butt kicked. But then came the best part of the game, thankfully, which was gaining technology and skill. It had that "just one more turn ... oops it's dawn" kinda feel the old games had like Civ or HoMM. That lasted a while until the enjoyment slowly waned to a somewhat meh feeling-ed grind that I rode into the end game. End game is overly long and economy issues further suck out the joy. Most things work fine but let me whine a moment about that last stage. I grew up in the uncivilized world of the early PC games where they could be merciless and I kinda like it. But Xenonauts leans a bit too hard into that and the difficulty spikes tend to drift heavily into rigged mechanics rather than enemy strategy you can counter. Aliens know exactly where you are whether they should or not. Line of sight difference is colossal BS. They see muucchh farther than you, mostly. Combine that with grenades and 1 shot kill aliens and you get killed even playing well. You cannot counter psychic attacks. Now consider that you are very dependent on slowly leveled up characters. This is a bad combo. Light recommendation.

By and large a faithful re-make of the original, and the biggest criticism I would make is that not much was added. However, having played the original, I can say that is does play differently - or, at least, that the subtle mechanical differences meant that I played it differently. This is probably best illustrated with an example: in the original, you shot down UFOs so that you could capture the wreckage and use it to make plasma cannons or whatever - which I then usually sold for money. As such, once I had my production lines set up I really didn't mind how much I got from my backing countries. In Xenonauts, selling manufactured goods is always at a loss, so you are entirely reliant on funding and UFO salvage. This meant that in Xenonauts, I shot down UFOs so that they didn't upset anyone - and I would usually airstrike the crash sites, as it brought in almost as much money as (or sometimes even more than) sending in ground troops. So, at least for my style of play, Xenonauts was more focused on shooting down as many UFOs as possible before they did too much damage, with ground missions done on an as-needed basis, whereas the in the original as long as I shot down one UFO I was happy. As such, I found Xenonauts much more tense, and the little notifications that 'HMAS Victoria strafed - 27 dead' really meant something. Reading some other reviews, I must say that apart from a few bugs (you can sometimes see inside UFOs from the outside) I didn't have any trouble with line-of-sight - when stood next to a corner a soldier can usually see around it quite well, and there were none of the 'Can he shoot from there? No? Why not?' problems that I had with the Firaxis game (sometimes they shot through walls, and other times they wouldn't shoot something that they could actually see - still a good game, though, if not quite my taste.)