Fantastic, brilliant game. Research and long-term development, base building, and a brilliant tactical game. If you can maintain the discipline not to save/load when you lose it's even more amazing. The game has no mercy. Your precious troops will die. But it's all your fault. You now get to throw a pack of green rookies at a horde of vicious aliens. But don't worry, rookies are cheap. Check out http://openxcom.org/ for a remake of the engine that uses the same game data.
Incredible game. Play it. Deep, developing story. Interesting characters. Scope for doing your own thing in each region within an overall linear story. Plenty to discover, lots of optional content and tricky places to find. Tricky gameplay. You're a vicious cyborg killing machine. But that's what THEY want you to be. Consider the soft touch instead... to truly experience the potential of this game, play it nonlethally with a stealth-based approach.
This game does a great job. It's a clean concept implemented well. It's challenging, balanced, and fun. The combination of space engagement and ship repair/boarding is great, and the game leaves you plenty of room for using different strategies to achieve success.
Fantastic game. Build rockets. Launch them. Build bigger, crazier ones. Visit new worlds and crash-land on them. Watch your creations explode horribly. Or try to rescue your kerbal when you realise one you reach a high suborbital arc that you forgot a parachute for the lander module ... and you don't have enough fuel to enter orbit. Only reason it's not 5* is some lingering bugs and gameplay issues (tech tree exhaustion, somewhat repetitive science system).
JA takes a little getting into, as the gameplay will be somewhat unfamiliar and the graphics are a bit dated - but seriously, give it a good chance. I played it for the first time last year, so I wasn't picking this up for nostalgia value. Initially I wondered what the heck I'd just bought, and that was only redoubled once I started playing it and wondering what was going on... but soon I was hooked. You have to think hard about your tactics - and yes, they matter. You will lose mercs you're attached to. You will come to truly hate deep water. You will develop an unhealthy love for sneaking up and knifing people in 8-bit glory. The game has some reasonably varied environments and it plays really well.
This is a really excellent game - a standout. Solid campaign, unlike the rather brief one in Deadly Games, but graphically there's a bit more there than the original JA. Lots of fun with attachments and with your mercs getting on each others' nerves.
The campaign is quite short, but it's otherwise really quite excellent.
It's a pretty good game - like Aftershock and Aftermath, it's generally a good game with some flaws. It's seriously hard when you first play it. Like, "oh my god, why are we all so dead" hard. Get used to using the "run away!" strategy and trying to turn it into "grab stuff / blow stuff up THEN run away". Once you figure a few things out unfortunately it can get very easy. "Gee, are these guys trying to fight back?" easy. Don't worry, though, that won't last; be prepared to have your confident approach turned into an "oh god run away" rout when you've settled nicely into your invincibility. Repeatedly. This game doesn't just match bigger health bars with bigger guns. It has multiple interesting opponents and game events, each of which require different strategies and different squad-level tactics. Relationships are fluid(ish). It has somewhat of a story, and it's quite fun. The engine is very memory hungry, but if you have enough RAM to throw at it then it'll work very well indeed. You'll probably find yourself playing this save-and-load style, at least at a mission level, because your pool of squad members is finite and very shallow, there are many missions, and death can be sudden and gruesome. It's plenty fun.
