UFO: Aftermath

The Good
The best thing that can possibly be said about UFO: Aftermath is that, even if the developers claim otherwise, the game is a spiritual successor of the classic X-Com. However, the guys at Altar obviously thought todays gamers would be overwhelmed by the multitude of options and repelled by the time-consuming turn-based battles. Said and done, geoscape was reduced to a minimum. For example, funding now isn't an issue, you needn't worry about the layout of your bases any longer, you just set them to one of three (in the late game four) basic modes-of-operation and be done with it, squad management is now a breeze, because you can never have more than one single squad anyways, etc. Likewise, the squad-battles themselves have been turned into RTS-like fashion, essentially they now play very similar to the combat seen in Baldur's Gate. In an effort to bring in a tad strategy, "important" events, like a friendly unit under fire or the sighting of a foe, will auto-pause the game. All these events can be disabled, though. The graphics, while not exactly top-notch, are nicely done, but you're very likely to be playing at the maximum zoom-out, so you'll miss a lot detail. What you'll notice is that Altar has gone great lengths to give city missions in different locales a memorable outlook, and they succeeded, cities in Russia, Australia, North America and Asia all look entirely different, which is a pleasant feat.

The Bad
If you're out of Elementary School for any amount of time, you'll likely feel that the game has been dumbed down a bit TOO much. Apart from the aforementioned base-simplifications ... You can only produce a single item at a time, and can only have a single research project going. In the late game, you'll have a dozen manufacturing bases around the globe cooperating for a day to solder together a single laser pistol. And you can't even tell them to keep going until 10 are ready. No, single items only. A single squad, 7 members, will be on all your missions around the globe. Sure, you can let it consist of various group-members at a time, but only one active squad is allowed. (And still it's very likely three of your seven squad members have exactly the same voice...) These are only a few examples for the nuisances on geoscape level. But what about the squad-battles? In order to allow for the freely-rotatable 3D real-time environments, a lot of tactical possibilities had to be sacrificed. Remember the height levels in X-COM? Gone, just a "flat" map now. Remember the possibility to enter every building, from the gas-station to the toolshed? Gone, only bases and UFOs can be entered now, effectively switching to an entirely different map. Remember the possibility to take cover? Gone, the aliens will hit you hard, no matter if you're standing upright on open ground or if you're kneeling behind a car-wreck in the ruins of a city, if they can see you, they'll hit you. (Might have something to do with the fact all actual aliens have "heroic", the best level, in all their stats.) I'll stop here, though plenty more similar weaknesses could be pointed out here.

The Bottom Line
All the simplifications I listed above were done for a reason. However, many weren't actually finished to the point they were first planned, because developing time ran out. Others were finished, but don't reach the goal they had in mind. In the bottom line, the game just lost too much profile. Even if you can forgive or live with all the mentioned shortcomings, there's still another aspect: The Story. It's is a patchwork of different "wouldn't it be cool if we had" things that don't really belong into the same storyline, it's presented very badly (apart from the intro and extro, there's only a number of text-windows and the shortish descriptions of the research projects) and, if compared to the original X-COM, UFO:AM just isn't fun to play. That said, this isn't a bad game, not at all. It's quite nicely done and reaches an acceptable level on almost all levels, but it fails to set itself apart from the crowd. It's solid, yet far from good, let alone exceptional. IF I remember this game in a decade, like I fondly remember X-COM today, I'll only remember it because it tried to resurrect a classic that I remember, not because it was a classic itself.