UFO: Aftermath

The Good
Cool premise, and some nice video work, though the only graphical aspect i felt was executed really well was soldier animations. The animations are smooth and blend well, leaving you with some very lifelike characters.

The Bad
I bought the game about a week ago, and i'm having really mixed feelings. On one side, i was deeply in love with UFO: Enemy unknown on the amiga, but i also sucked at it, horribly. It still kept me coming back though, even though the micromanagement and many in-depth aspects went way over my head at the time. It's very hard for me to see Aftermath as anything other than a spiritual sequel. It may not share the same lingo, but the gameplay is incredibly similar. Where it doesn't match up is in the way it handles base building (bases are established as rewards for certain completed missions) and in the pseudo-realtime combat system. Being so deeply affectionate about the "forefather" makes it tough to accept the shortcomings, but i've given it an honest, truthful attempt. I still come off disappointed.

The biggest problem in my opinion is the premise. Where UFO charged you with figuring out the increasing frequency of UFO sightings and abductions, leading up to full scale invasion, Aftermath starts off with the attack well underway. The strange thing here is that wow, almost all humans have been destroyed, yet it takes little to no effort to regain control of most of the american continents within the first couple of weeks. There's a leap of faith required on the player's part that i had severe issues with.

In addition, the research is delegated strangely. When you have 12 research bases you'd think you could run several projects at once, but you are forced to take them one at a time. Same with developing new technologies. you have x number of engineering bases, but they all cooperate to produce a single suit of armor? Eh?

A final lapse of logic is that while you protect the whole world from alien attacks, you have one squad of soldiers and one chopper with which to fly them to their destinations. So all in all the "strategic game" as the manual calls it is an overly simplified and broken down version of the XCOM global view game dynamic with no resource management whatsoever, contrary to the box blurb.

The tactical game is equally simple. You guide your troops around the battlefield in a jilted on/off fashion as the game auto-pauses for you on a bazillion different occasions. Often you have to unpause the game up to 7 times in a row to get back in control of things. The interface sorely lacks basic features, like telling a soldier to guard an area. Instead the game will auto-pause for you whenever a targeted enemy enters or leaves line of sight. Very very annoying. "No you damn idiots, you don't need to do some spectacularly intelligent thing, all you need to do is keep your gun pointed in the same general direction and fire again when he pops back out!"

Another strange function is the "manipulate" button. There are no objects in the game to use other than doors, and doors are opened with a right click regardless. Why there is a "use" function at all is mind boggling.

In addition, there is no way of moving while crouching or going prone, making crouching pretty a pretty worthless maneuver. The game world itself is randomly generated, and it shows. Missions are all markedly similar, and buildings cannot be entered, making the game bound to street level. There are levels where you enter crashed UFOs and alien bases, and the interiors leave a lot to be desired.

The sound work is also lackluster. The music is about as scary as your average episode of MASK, although you can sense it really tried, rock ballads during aerial dogfights and all. The voice work moves between atrocious and good. For some reason the game attempts comedy at odd times. Some characters are stereotyped so bad it aches, including the ditzy blonde and the ahhnold german. It really doesn't fit the game's post-apocalyptic setting or overall graphical execution.

A final blow is the uninterested and matter-of-factly way the game addresses itself. Missions aren't presented as a game world element, but rather as "tasks for you to finish before the game can proceed". Objectives are given in a simple, to the point way that is overtly generic and undescriptive, making what could have been a "The laboratory ship downed over Poland has crash landed in central Krakow. Investigate the crash site and secure it for our science team" a case of the "You must eliminate a certain number of enemies to complete this mission". Very sad, and a total atmosphere killer.

The Bottom Line
All in all, Aftermath gets certain things dead on, but they are all minor. The gameplay remains too simple and random to be truly satisfying, and the lapses of logic make the storyline a bit hard to swallow. I'm pleased to be playing a new UFO game, and i hope they do a sequel to this one, but it feels like a work in progress solution.