So, in this game you are supposed to be a supersoldier, and in the intro cutscenes we get a display of your suit's powers--super strength, super speed, armor, and cloak. However, all these are very underpowered. Your armor barely protects you from more than a few shots, whereas the Koreans you are fighting are bullet sponges. At times you practically have to magdump on them to score a kill. But they can tear your "armor" to shreds, and kill you quickly. Who is the supersoldier with super armor here? It's not you... Your "cloak" also lasts for a pitifully short amount of time. Alright, so it drains quickly as you move--a little too quickly, but I can accept that. But it drains as you are standing still. Frankly, I think the cloak should regen as you are still. The game progresses very slowly otherwise. Your underpowered "armor" and "cloak" make you less of a super-soldier than the Koreans. You are forced into the worst-implemented guerilla warfare I've ever seen. You have to constantly save because your armor doesn't protect against more than a pipsqueak, and because your cloak lasts for so short a time that it can only get you from Bush A to Bush B, provided that Bush B is a short distance away.
1. Graphics have improved a lot. The developers really took advantage of the engine. 2. Gameplay is incredibly frustrating. Enemies tank damage, and the bugs invariably try to swarm you in each encounter. They are perhaps the most annoying FPS enemy I have fought in a while, yet the developers curiously chose to make them the most predominant force in this game. Why? This is Star Trek--there are myriad races to draw from. Fighting humanoid enemies provided a nice, albeit flawed respite later in the game, but sooner or later you are fighting the bugs again. 3. Level design is equally irksome. Near the end of the game, I had to quit because former boss enemies were being used as regular fodder, even appearing in pairs. I was expected to fight them without ammunition and while low on health--health or ammunition stations became quite scant for some reason in the final levels. This was a futile battle, as you might expect. Was this the result of a developer oversight or a cheap attempt at increasing the difficulty of the game? 4. The title is almost a misnomer. There is hardly an elite "force" you fight with in this game. Munro takes every opportunity to separate from his team, even in the most illogical of circumstances. A Klingon teammate even comments on the absurdity of this. Teammates must beam back to the Enterprise after taking shots in cutscenes that Munro can shrug off time and again. Past the second or third mission, you will be spending the majority of your time roughing waves of enemies alone. This is a huge departure from the first game, where you might fight with one or two teammates at a time. 5. There is a forced love-interest subplot that detracts from the story. You must choose between budding a romance with one of your comrades or a "doctor" that chooses to be scantily clad in all environments. 6. Character writing is lackluster. Picard seems more like a setpiece than an actual character. Interactions between characters is trivial.
+Friendly and helpful players +Fun when everything goes right -Incredibly buggy (9,999 server ping, game frequently disconnects you from matches, game frequently crashes, etc.) -Incredibly difficult at times, even at lower difficulties. Enemies do quite a bit of damage and your weapons often feel like toy guns -Devs seemed to have moved on to other projects
I really enjoyed my first hour or so of Xenonauts. The artstyle is nice--I really like the early 1980s vibe--but soon my impression fell flat on its face. You will find eventually that everything is stacked against the player in an unfair way. I can accept aliens being very accurate at long distances, but I cannot accept my soldiers not being able to hit the broad side of a barn--especially a barn they are an arm's length from. Who is hiring these bozos? We're trying to defend the planet Earth! When you manage your soldiers at base, many of them are described as having combat experience in this or that war etc. But that cannot be believed at all once you see how they perform on the battlefield. They have the same firearms experience as the isolated natives on North Sentinel Island. Unless you rigorously save-scum, expect to lose half a ground team each excursion. Ground combat is astoundingly unbalanced in other ways. For instance, Time Units, which manage how much your soldiers can do in one turn, were implemented in an astoundingly unbalanced manner. To illustrate this fact, you can't move your MG a few feet forward AND have him shoot a burst. Well, you can't count on anybody hitting the aliens anyway, so the MG is just a waste. Don't even bother to set him up in cover a few turns ahead--the aliens will insta-kill him in full cover regardless. Another poorly implemented feature is reaction fire. Expect aliens to fire on your soldiers when they cross paths during your turn; do NOT expect your soldiers to do the same on the aliens' turn. Sometimes they might, but their horrible accuracy precludes any effective resistance. Sometimes they will let an alien waltz out from his UFO, insta-kill one of your soldiers, and then waltz back inside. Why did nobody return fire? I guess Anton Dyban's experience in Afghanistan taught him to do otherwise. In any game based on X-Com, ground combat can make or break the game. In Xenonaut's case, ground combat is pure rubbish.
It is clear the developers furnished the game out of love for the period, but under the pretty medieval varnish the game falls short. Actually, it jumps headfirst into the ground. There are innumerable mechanics that were implemented poorly or just shouldn't have been included at all. For instance, the combat system makes this game a lesson in masochism. Even after learning the mechanics, it really is a pain to fight just about anybody. The system is startlingly unintuitive and unfailingly irksome. I appreciate their having a focus on realism--however, they forgot to make an easy enough system to accommodate this realism. It is simply too difficult to fight unless you are willing to spend a great many hours learning to do so, and even afterwards fighting will be a chore. Fighting more than one man? Forget it. You can only lock on to one at a time and the others are basically in your blind spots. Traditional saving mechanics were axed. I understand the notion, since in some games quicksaves are cheap workarounds to problems, but "savior schnapps"? You need these to manually save (unless you sleep), and they are hard to come by. They cost 180 groschen (which is a lot compared to the 2 gr spent on a room). This retards the fun of the game. Even STALKER allows easier saves. Finally, the writing is shabby. Despite growing up in the Middle Ages, Henry insults noblemen several times to their faces and suffers little punishment, because the writers couldn't think of how else to progress the story. You're inducted as a squire under Sir Radzig. Even the other NPCs can't believe it! In the extremely pious Middle Ages, almost every NPC is libertine with their swearing in front of others! They mostly use modern swears, of course. Why wouldn't they? You attract dirt like a HEPA filter and NPCs won't like it. But you can dress like a guard and they'll believe your saying that you're not one. I find I can't recommend the game. It is pretty yet also poorly designed and written.
