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X-COM: UFO Defense

aka: Laser Squad 2, UFO: Der unbekannte Gegner, UFO: Enemy Unknown, X-COM: Enemy Unknown, X-COM: Michi Naru Shinryakusha, X-COM: Terran Defense Force
Moby ID: 521
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

In the year 1998, the amount of reports of UFO sightings has been drastically increased. Stories about abductions and alien attacks became more and more widespread. Finally, after various nations of the world have failed to intercept the UFOs, their representatives met in a conference of global importance in Geneva, Switzerland. It was eventually decided to organize a secret paramilitary group, dubbed Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-COM). Starting with one base, two fighters, one transport, and a few soldiers, X-COM must locate the aliens, learn about their origins and technology, find out where their base is, and destroy it.

X-COM: UFO Defense is a strategy game featuring separate but interlinked elements. On the strategic side, called GeoScape, you get a rotating view of the globe, where you see all visible UFOs (those that are within your detection range) as well as major cities and your base(s). You order movements from here, such as sending out fighters to intercept UFOs, transports with soldiers to assault/recover UFOs, and perhaps assaults on alien bases (if you find any). You also control your research, as you must invent better weapons (the Terran weapons are just no match against the alien weapons) quickly, not to mention all the other cool tech you can recover from the aliens. You also need to control your budget, as you can't afford to overextend your reach. Researchers need to be paid, engineers (who build the new toys) need to be paid, base(s) need to be be built/expanded, planes need to be bought/maintained, supplies need to be replenished, and so on.

You can earn money by selling unneeded stuff, and you receive funding from the nations of the world; however, a nation can decrease its funding if it decides you aren't operating efficiently enough within its region. It's even possible that a nation gets so fed up with you that it signs a pact with the aliens and ceases funding altogether.

Once you join a ground battle, the game switches to Battlescape, which is an isometric view of the battlefield with realistic line-of-sight calculations and turn-based combat. Your mission is usually extermination of all aliens on the battlefield, though if you can capture a few it would surely help your research efforts. If you win, you also recover any alien artifacts left on the field, which can then be researched.

In combat, each of your soldiers has a specific number of Time Units. Doing anything (moving, shooting, turning around, rearranging objects in the inventory etc.) costs a number of TUs. Once a soldier is out of TUs, he cannot act any more this turn (he gets all his TUs back on the next turn, though).

Spellings

  • X-COM 未知なる侵略者 - Japanese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

24 People (22 developers, 2 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 45 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 380 ratings with 26 reviews)

A classic game of excellence. (die sectoid scum,die)

The Good
Hell, this thing was the best strategy-tactical game out there. Researching aliens, using their technology, deploying soilders, hiring scientist, building bases and the never-forgettable GeoScape. All this was BIG back then and a milestone that inspired many games now.

The Bad
The sound wasn't too impressive. Other than that, this game rocks.

The Bottom Line
The strategy genre at its best. An instant classic.

DOS · by Zsolt Pardi (6) · 2000

The BEST game of all time.

The Good
Everything good about this amazing game has already been quoted by the other folks wriing reviews. It's tough to describe to the 'uninitiated' how good the game is, because you'll keep going off on tangents about the bazillions of game features, and little perks that keep you glued to the screen. How good is it? Well, being the year 2001, and being a game developer myself, I've seen, played, and created more than my share of games. Each year games make new leaps in technology, surpassing their predecessors. We see every technology-related buzzword imaginable (and a few that have yet to be coined) pop up in public relations blurbs. The latest polygon pushing graphic engines, 3d sound technology, megapixels, terra-hoo-hahs... Know what? It all doesn't matter a damn. Having never played X-com until this year, after we have 1.5ghz processors and hudreds of megs of ram stacked in or machines, a far cry from the old 386 X-com needs, when it popped up on Classic-Trash.com, I thought I'd give it a whirl.. after all, all the 'old' magazines and gaming vets said it was great... It's free, what could there possibly be to lose?

Well, weeks later, as I write this bleary eyed and exhausted, I'd have to say that it's the best 3.5 meg I've downloaded. Many games come close to beating out X-Com in my mind, notably Bullfrog's Syndicate, Sid Meyer's Pirates, Lucas Arts' Sam n' Max Hit the Road, Maxis' SimCopter, Ion Storm's Deus Ex, and Blizzard's StarCraft. But none will ever edge it out. the ambiance, atmosphere, gameplay, and nail biting terror beat out any qualms you might have about the graphics or dated engine. After all, no matter what the game, the 'good' graphics and 'bad' graphics alike will fade in your mind after you play the game, and the gameplay will rear it's ugly head. The good gameplay is the keeper, and the forgettable will be shelved for something new. Snazzy, cutting edge graphic fests will always be superceded by the next generation, but incredible gameplay is timeless, and that's the key.

IGN.com has done a very nice job of outlining the brilliance of X-Com, and why they too named it the best game of all time. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt in explaining it.

"There are four things that make X-COM great that still haven't been surpassed in other games.

1) The sense of attachment to your troops

Almost better than any RPG, you care about your characters in X-COM. Once stories start happening to your characters, they take on a special significance. The best computer games don't necessarily tell you a story, but they let you create your own memorable stories. You'll remember the time a new squaddie single-handedly took out a roomful of aliens with a suicide grenade. You'll remember being ambushed before you could step off the ramp of your Skyranger. You'll remember the time a bad ass female soldier mowed down everything in sight with an auto cannon. You'll remember the time you just flattened an entire building because you knew an alien was hiding inside. You'll remember the time a rookie with a med-kit dashed into harm's way to save the lieutenant. You'll remember your early attempts to train and use psionics against the aliens. You'll remember those tense hunts as you pair your men off and spread out into back alleys and farmhouses. You'll remember your first raid against an alien base and your first visit to someplace further away than you thought you go.

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Because the characters improve through battles and accumulate stories, it's not always about how big your gun is, something first person shooter and many RPGs can't see past. Instead it's about where a character has been and how far he's come. As in real war, a brutal and senseless process of natural selection winnows the lesser soldiers out, leaving behind the strong and the lucky. X-COM was made to be played over the long haul as an ongoing story that is just as much about your characters as it is about an alien invasion.

It's a seemingly minor detail that you can name your characters, but this makes a big difference when it comes to giving them a place in your imagination. Everyone has probably used the names from Aliens: Drake, Vasquez, Hudson, Hicks and Apone. Maybe even Gorman and Frost. Did you get as far as Dietrich, Spunkmeyer and Wierzbowski? For a really weird experience, name your troops after people you know, your friends and family, your boss or your co-workers. It's pretty demoralizing when your mother gets shot or your best friend gets mind-controlled and you have to put him down.

2) The way the gameplay unfolds in the campaign

The way you play X-COM changes as your hard-working scientists climb the tech tree and give you new ways to play the game. It starts out small with your men taking up rifles against Sectoids in small UFOs. But X-COM keeps throwing in new twists, like motion scanners, hyperwave decoders, and battleships with full complements of well-armed Mutons and their Ethereal overlords. Bigger guns and psionics come along as you're facing more powerful enemies, but there's always a sense that your resources are limited and you have to spend them wisely. Time is just as precious a resource as money as you fight for the hearts and minds of the countries of the world.

Some of the fun is sucked out once you learn some of the tricks like how to manufacture laser rifles for a thriving economy or how to build a base optimized for defense. But even then, there's a lot to do between battles. X-COM is a long game and you'll probably fight over a hundred battles by the time it's over, but they're held together and driven by a strong and compelling strategic shell.

3) Atmosphere

X-COM rode in on a wave of renewed interest in aliens and conspiracies a la X-Files. It conveys perfectly the feeling of being on the fringe of a horrible vast plot from somewhere else. You get a real sense that those little alien bastards are poking their noses into international affairs, that they're up to something as they flit about in their nimble ships. The actual incursions are just moving dots against a map of the world, but it completely works from the point of view of someone sitting at the base and tracing radar contacts while sending out interceptors to shoot the offending UFOs down. It works even better once you start to appreciate the cause and effect relationships between the different alien ships and how they influence the political and financial scene. It's really a surprise when the little boogers come gunning for you at your own base.

During the actual missions, X-COM used darkness and limited visibility to good effect. What you couldn't see would kill you, so every door and dark alley was an unnerving potential trap. Nighttime missions were especially frightening. Death could come quickly in X-COM, especially in the pre-armor phases of the game. The sound during the missions deserves special mention: shrieking victims, slithering hissing aliens, and an eerie pulsing soundtrack. Even the sound effects in the shell screen were great. How many times have you heard a control panel sound effect in a movie or TV show and thought to yourself, "Hey, that's an X-COM button!"

4) The way you can break stuff

An important element in an action sequence, particularly one with guns and other things that go boom, is how you clearly demonstrate the destructive power of a battle. Bullets wreak havoc. They break glass and shatter the bottles on the bar. An explosion can knock over a wall and a molotov cocktail can burn down a house. But in a first person shooter, all this has to be scripted and it takes up precious CPU cycles. There's a strange irony in the fact that it takes a staid turn-based game like X-COM to really capture the mayhem of combat.

Things break in X-COM and the game captures this beautifully. It's one thing to shoot out windows and punch holes through walls with your gun, but destroying the entire side of a building with a rocket is uniquely satisfying. Throwing a grenade is truly an event. My first shot with a blaster bomb was one of those rare peak gaming experiences that I'll never forget.

Because X-COM captures these four elements so well, it remains the best turn-based squad-level combat game you can play."

The Bad
It's too good. Everquest has nothing on this puppy.

You'll lose sleep.

Deal with it.

The Bottom Line
Like I said, the only way to describe X-Com to others is as the BEST game of all time. Hands down. Three meg download. Do yourself a favor (unless you like sleep).

By now, there shouldn't be any reason for you to not get this game. Well, what are you waiting for?

Now, you must excuse me, for my heavily equipped Avenger is approaching the Alien's European base, and it's time for The Captain to kick ass and take names.

DOS · by The Captain (3) · 2001

It's aged but it's still a classic

The Good
Very strategical combats, excellent AI, graphics like UFO cartoons

The Bad
Becomes hard easily

The Bottom Line
If you like turn-based strategy games, you will love this game but if you don't you will hate it.

DOS · by esural (9) · 2000

[ View all 26 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
in between ranks MerlynKing Jan 25, 2019
The original X-COM was cancelled, but development continued in secret Freeman (64945) Apr 27, 2017
Uh, shouldn't the title be UFO: Enemy Unknown...? Simoneer (29) Oct 8, 2010

Trivia

1001 Video Games

UFO: Enemy Unknown appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Difficulty Level Bug

DOS version of the game has a bug in the difficulty settings. Regardless of which difficulty level you choose, you always start at the easiest level. Surprisingly, the official patch of the game does not correct this problem. However, there is an unofficial patch available for solving this issue. Problem is also solved in The Collectors Edition Windows port (also commonly known as UFO Gold or CE).

The game contains many different other bugs. All of them are gathered on UFOPaedia.

Cancelled successor

A new version of the X-COM series dubbed X-COM: Genesis, focusing on some of the gameplay features found in the original, was in production at Hasbro/Microprose in 1999. The project was cut during mass-layoffs for the company.

CD-ROM version

The CD version may include a partial install version and a full install version, depending on which CD you got. The partial install version leaves some datafiles on the CD to save disk space. However, the "full install" version is also on the CD in the HARDDISK directory.

The CD version of the game for DOS was not different from the original floppy one. However it contained animated introduction (the very same which was later used in Amiga CD32 version and (from the Playstation version) and the executable file was patched and some bugs were eliminated.

Creation

Jullian Gollop, designer of X-COM: UFO Defence tells how X-COM was created (taken from the Mythos Games web site):

We showed a demo of ‘Laser Squad 2’ on the Atari ST to Microprose in 1991. The idea was to produce a sequel to ‘Laser Squad’ but with much neater graphics using an isometric style very similar to Populous. They liked what we had done so far, but they explained that they wanted a ‘big’ game. I said "what do you mean by ‘big’" and they said "well, you know – BIG". They also said that it had to be set on earth, like Civilisation or Railroad Tycoon, because people could relate to it much more. So we went away, scratched our heads and thought about it. Then we came up with the idea of adding on a grand strategic element to the game, very firmly set on earth, in which the player managed an organisation that defended the planet against UFO incursions. I bought quite a few books on UFOs for research purposes so that we could give the game an even more ‘authentic’ basis.

The project started reasonably well with myself and Nick designing and programming, while the art was to be done by John Reitze and martin Smillie at MicroProse. Soon we had some problems because Microprose did not understand our game design and they asked for clarification. Several documents later we were not much better off and I had wasted a lot of time. Certain creature types were removed, including the ‘Men In Black’ and others added. Then the whole project was nearly axed when MicroProse made some cutbacks due to financial difficulties. Everything proceeded reasonably smoothly for a while until Spectrum Holobyte acquired Bill Stealey’s shares in the company. Our producer was made redundant and the game was nearly axed again. Finally we had to spend a couple of months working very long hours at MicroProse in Chipping Sodbury to get the game finished by the end of March in 1994.

Element 115

Ten years after the game was released, a real element 115 was discovered. Unfortunately, it wasn't named elerium like in the game, but ununpentium.

GeForce problems

GeForce owners have probably encountered display problems that render the game unplayable. This can be fixed though; go to the Windows Control Panel and the DirectX settings. Switch off DirectDraw hardware acceleration and the game should work fine.

Don't forget to switch acceleration back on afterwards, though.

Geoscape

The game is actually Geoscape, the rotating globe and resource management, generating the battlefield conditions for BattleScape, where you conduct tactical combat against the aliens. If you press Ctrl-C (as suggested by the hint "level skip") while in BattleScape, you interrupt the BattleScape program, preventing it from writing the "results" file. Thus you will get the same result as your previous battle. This is a result of the developement history (see the other trivia entries), whereas MicroProse decided that the tactical combat is not enough to be a game in itself, and asked Mythos to write a strategy game around it.

Influence

The game is heavy influenced from the TV series UFO . It's about a secret UFO defense base which sends out military aircrafts to shoot down UFOs, sending out squads to seek the wreckage and kill or catch aliens to analyze them.

Multiplayer Workaround

You can actually play "multiplayer" X-COM long before e-mail X-COM... By using sort of a "hack". As the game actually plays through turn by turn on both sides, it is actually possible to take the saved file right at the end of a turn, edit a pointer, and play the "other side" using the engine. And if you exchange files back and forth, you can have a multiplayer game.

http://www.tacticalplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?xcom/multip.zip

Novel

A novelization of the game was published through the Proteus imprint of Prima Publishing. It written by Diane Duane and first published in December of 1995.

Patches

The last offical patch changed the sound effects of the game. Many people didn't like the new sounds.

V1.4 patch removed the document check copy protection.

Releases

A complete version of X-COM is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine. - There was a "Limited Edition" of UFO: Enemy Unknown for the Amiga CD32 that included a Microprose travel alarm clock.

Technology

X-COM: UFO Defense is one of the few 256-color DOS games to implement dynamic lightning. By using 16 shades of 16 different hues (16 x 16 = 256) as the palette, artists could create isometric tiles whose colors can be gradually changed simply by incrementing each tile's palette entries by 1, 2 and so on. In this way, the same tiles can be shown darker and darker simultaneously on the screen.

Awards

  • Amiga Joker
    • Issue 02/1995 – #2 Best Strategical in 1994 (Readers' Vote)
    • Issue 02/1996 – Readers' Special Award for 1995
  • Computer Gaming World
    • May 1995 (Issue #130) – Game of the Year
    • May 1995 (Issue #130) – Strategy Game of the Year
    • July 1996 (Issue #144) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary Issue) - #22 on the "150 Best Games of All Time" list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) –#1 Top Sleeper Of All Time
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #3 Best Game of All Time (Editors' Choice)
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #10 Best Game of All Time (Readers' Choice)
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • January 1996 (Issue 78) – Game of the Month (Playstation version)
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #35 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #73 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • IGN
    • March 2007 - #1 PC Game of All Time
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #15 on the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
    • October 2001 - #3 on the "Top 50 of All Time" list
    • April 2005 - #8 on the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/1995 – Best Genre Mix in 1994

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Andrew Grasmeder, Der.Archivar, Entorphane, Kasey Chang, Lord FlatHead, Heikki Sairanen, Martin Smith, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, robotriot, Rola, rstevenson, ZuljinRaynor

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Related Sites +

  • OpenXcom
    An open-source clone requiring resources from the original game.
  • UFOpeadia
    A whole wiki-based Database containing nearly everything one wanted to know about the game and beyond...
  • X-COM Tactical Command
    X-COM Tactical Command has an excellent range of content, now including information on hexediting UFO's files, as well as strategy guides and more.
  • XCOMUTIL Homepage
    The homepage for Scott T. Jones' fantastic XCOMUTIL utility: Re-vitalise and expand your X-COM game! :)
  • XCommand
    One of the most popular fan-sites for the X-COM series.
  • XCommand
    XCommand features various files for editing UFO, as well as strategic aids and the full contents of the UFOPedia.
  • devisraad.com - X-COM Page
    Download complete sets of new alien spacecraft, for X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror From The Deep.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 521
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Contribute

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by IJan.

Windows added by Shoddyan. Amiga added by Rebound Boy. Amiga CD32 added by Martin Smith. PlayStation added by Adam Baratz.

Additional contributors: xroox, Kate Jones, Kasey Chang, Josh Day, //dbz:, Alaka, Игги Друге, 88 49, BostonGeorge, Patrick Bregger, mailmanppa, Rwolf, FatherJack, Evolyzer.

Game added December 4, 1999. Last modified April 1, 2024.