X-COM: Terror from the Deep

The Good
Well. Saying that it's the "exact same game" is not quite right in my opinion. XCOM: TFTD takes a bit different approach, and is much better at it, in many ways.

The game is deeper, darker, more terrifying. And the aliens! While Gill Men and Deep ones feel a bit silly, Tentaculats and other nice creatures of this sequel leave UFO: Enemy Unknown far, far behind.

Everything is more serious and suspense, depths of the ocean are darker, screams of dying Aquatoids run chills down your back and teeth of Tasoth are sharper... After playing TFTD, blasting sectoids on cabbage fields feels a bit silly, and you will come back to TFTD to find that claustrophobic, haunting experience that prequel lacked. In other words, you're not chasing little green men anymore, now it's your aquanauts being chased, in the depths of the oceans...

While most of weapons feel the same, technology feels a bit more realistic and your aquanauts in top notch armor don't look more like what they were supposed to be and not like lost funny astronauts as was in the prequel.

Loads of new (and better!) graphics, darker colors and less repetitive terrains add alot too.

The Bad
As almost all reviews say, missions are way too long and difficult. Especially second level of the alien colony - whoever designed this map - totally overdid it. Maps are quite crazy too, and it feels almost like designer intentionally designed the map so chasing down that last alien would be so difficult. This becomes quite frustrating.

Also, while music is good, and definitely adds more to the atmosphere, all that deep and dark burden wears player off quickly. I personally preferred cyberpunk and somewhat thrilling feel of the original to this... endless terror and agony that TFTD sounds like. Still, sounds are heavily improved and overall feel fits better to the theme.

Spending few hours (missions) underwater makes you miss the daylight. Sadly, there's almost none in this game. This gives somewhat worn out and repetitive feel, especially since game is much longer and harder.

The Bottom Line
If you liked UFO: Enemy Unknown and seriously need more, pick up this game. But remember that techno-thriller'ish joyride of the first game is now replaced with fear-inducing, dark battle for survival.

And your chances for survival are low, much lower than before. Quite literally, if you're not a patient, experienced hardcore player, you WILL die alone in darkest depths and no one will ever know what happened to you. No merry civilians wandering around this time.

The Good
Well, it's pretty much the same as UFO: Enemy Unknown, its prequel. This game is based underwater though, so the graphics and sound effects are a little different. Not better or worse, just different. Particularly appealing are the rivetted brass look of the alien ships, just like the Nautilus in "20,000 Leagues under the Sea". I also loved the footstep sounds, especially over the metal decking of the ships. And some of the underwater scenary is very cool.

The Bad
This game is much bigger than the first game. But that's not really a good thing. The orignal's leaness gave it a certain appeal, whereas this just gets repetetive and dull real quick. The ship attack missions are real fun the first time, but you soon get really hacked off having to search every single cabin for that last alien - this alone can take over an hour.

During the game you have to destroy 8 large alien bases. Each one of these is a nightmare situation - four floors of alien landscapes, and you never have enough men to cover the ground properly.

The Bottom Line
I don't know how this game ends, since I got bored and frustrated long before I got that far. However, I do have a ZIP file with all my last saves in, so maybe one day I'll go back to it. Maybe...

If you loved the first game, you'll probably like this as well. Whether you'll have the perseverance to see it through is another matter.

The Good
TFTD is more like a ritual than a game to me. I think it is the perfect strategy game because it's so deep and complex. I think it easily beats UFO probably because it has more variety in missions and also better music. What really intrigues me about the game is that you can goto an alien base (or dreadnought), wipe out every alien, and get enough supplies and money to keep you going for a few months. I once took out so many alien craft during a game (about 800-1000), that I ended up having about 2000 sonic cannons and a bunch of other equipment, over 100000 units of Zrbite and aqua plastics. Once you get to this point money is obviously not a problem anymore. The trick for me to survive during the beginning was to get a coelacanth until I reserach aqua plastics, and then later to use the MC disruptor for mind control.

The Bad
The only thing that annoys me is that at the end of each month, you need to go on a terror mission, and if you dont, you will get a terrible monthly rating. 2 terrible monthly ratings will result in cut of funding from the sponsors and game over. This is BS since the funding doesnt give you a lot of money each month, and I had just too much money for them to put me out of business. Also the tentaculant could be an annoying experience for newbies, but the trick is to memorize their starting positions on the maps you go on, so you could simple lob a sonic pulser in the direction before you get zombified. Also, if youre going on an artefact mission and dont have a disruptor yet, bring along a HWP because there are 8 tentaculants hiding in the elevator room at elevated positions, plus 2 more in the elevator itself.

The Bottom Line
If you play this game before UFO (as I did), you will probably get used to it and not like UFO as much. Contrary to what most think, this game just takes patience, practice, and some memorization to beat. If you do that, you will be almost invunerable later on in the game because your MC skilled aquanauts with 80+ TUs could put under mind control any alien, even tentaculants who have the highest MC resistance in the game. Also, if you notice, this game really has no end to it because you can choose whenever you want to go to T'leth, and even with all bases wiped out, you can always chase down subs and go on monthly terror/artefact/ship missions.

The Good
Everything to like about "X-Com" is to like about "Terror from the Deep." They're more or less the same game.

The Bad
X-Com was unfairly hard; Terror from the Deep is ludicrously hard. Even at the easiest difficulty level, with lots of experience and employing solid tactics, your men always have a better-than-even chance of getting run over like circus midgets at a steamroller convention. Without gave saves, getting a soldier through half a dozen missions is impossible.

The under-the-water motif never really made sense to me, but to each his own. The game does seem to be a giant continuity error, though; if it's set 40 years after the original X-Com, why has human technology gone backwards?

The Bottom Line
Basically just a facelift to X-Com, but too hard to play. Get X-Com, not the sequel.

The Good
If you are planning on playing this game- do not unless you have played the original first (X:Com: UFO Defence/Enemy Unknown). This game has a healthy dose of strategy, adrenaline pumping suspence, and plot. The missions are involved, your decisions in the campaign screen affect the success of the project, and research/financal politics are your life source. The atmosphere of the underwater missions are heavy and lonely.

The Bad
There were not a lot of things I didn't like about this game. My biggest beef was that some of the missions were very long. In fact some of the new types of missions (such as the attacked ship terror sites and the alien artifact sites) were as long as the final mission in the first game. These missions tend to take a long time to finish as well. The maps are much more complex- so when you get down to the final alien it can take you as long just to track the thing down as it did to kill all of its buddies.

The Bottom Line
This game is a worthy sequel to the original and a joy to play for people who like turn-based strategy.

The Good
The most obvious positive is that it's virtually the same game (Which can be a good or bad thing with games - in this case it's, for the most part, good). If you have any prior experience with "X-Com : UFO Defense", then there will be a very low learning curve in regards to this game's interface. Missions that involve underwater combat may initially present some interesting challenges to those used to fighting on land, however, namely due the rather bumpy and litter covered terrain. Speaking of terrain, it may only be because it's more detailed, but it does seem at times that randomly generated maps (particularly underwater ones) are somewhat larger than they were in UFO Defense (though I could be wrong).

As far as true improvements to the game engine itself, the sound department is quite a bit more impressive this time around, with ambient environmental sounds in the background, generally more impressive sound effects, and sound distortion while underwater (I believe this was the first game to do this, in fact). Another plus is the in-game music, which is a vast improvement over the comparatively dull music in UFO Defense. It has sort of a low-budget early 1980's synth sound to it, which complements the invading sea creatures theme rather well indeed.

As far as graphics, there are also several improvements here as well. Besides a more colorful palette to work from during land battles, there appears to be a palette shift while operating underwater to allow for more blueish-toned colors than those seen on land (either that or it's a semi-transparent blue overlay), which, especially during night missions, lends a certain atmosphere to underseas missions. Also, while there was animated terrain in UFO Defense, there wasn't very much of it. Not so in TFTD. A particular favorite of mine is the underwater volcano terrain, which feature bubbling lava vents and "streams" of molten material illuminating the nearby landscape. Great stuff.

The Bad
Microprose did a fairly good job regarding the design of the features that came with this game, but they failed miserably with monster creation. The aliens are either too easy or (more often than not) too hard to defeat. The worst offender is the Lobstermen, who are walking crustaceans with tank-like body armor and enough health to soak up the damage of a small thermonuclear device. The only way to kill them in an expedient manner is to use various melee weapons that you later research to drill rather large holes in them, and many times that is rather difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, forcing you to expend several magazines of ammunition to kill just one (!) of them. The only way to fix these problems is to use an editing program to increase or (again, more often than not) decrease the statistics of the various types of aliens, even though that's commonly regarded as cheating.

Another problem is the sameness this game shares with UFO Defense. While I did list this as a positive earlier, there are some things I would have liked a little different, in particular the available inventory. It's rather disappointing to find that most of the weapons and utilities available for use are exact carbon copies of items from the previous game, with some new sound effects and a change in graphics and text. Also there are three weapons that only operate underwater, but besides that they are also carbon copies of land based weaponry from the previous game. The only new additions are the Vibro-Blade/Lancer weapons (which are quite useful against Lobstermen), and that's really about it.

The Bottom Line
Terror from the Deep is a fun, atmospheric game that's neigh impossible to beat. It will take you several long weeks/months/whenever to beat.

The Good
It's XCOM, more weapons, more missions, tougher enemies...

The Bad
EXTREMELY repetitive, some missions just too long and deteriorate into hunt-that-last-bug, much harder than the original, EXTREMELY tedious final mission, research tree "holes" almost impossible to recover from

The Bottom Line
After writing the XCOM FAQ, I received a preview copy of TFTD before the actual release. My initial impression after install is... This is XCOM with a new tileset.

After a bit of play, I realized that the difficulty level had been VASTLY increased. Instead of nice clean rooms with clear fields of fire, you now have lots of alcoves and deadends and corridors that makes for excellent ambush traps in all terrains (esp. those USOs, unidentified submerged objects). Lack of heavy weapons initially in the game makes terror missions EXTREMELY difficult (as most of your heavy weapons don't work on land). The two-part mission are pure murder on your troops with just too many places to search, and enemies often hold high ground before you can even deploy.

The addition of hand-to-hand weapons like thermic lance are interesting, but ultimately doesn't add that much to the tactical considerations.

This is essentially an expansion pack sold as a new game.

The Good
This game continues the storyline of the original X-COM. The underwater theme definitely brings something new to the game. The new graphics are decent, if a little worse than the original.

The Bad
Put simply, this is the same exact game as the original. They did bump up the difficulty, though they might have gone a little too far. In the original, if you made a few mistakes early on, you could eventually come back. In this X-COM, one mistake can mean an early demise.

Have you ever tried throwing something underwater? Watch the next granade you throw.

The Bottom Line
This is basically a rehash of the original X-COM, because it did so well. If you are a big X-COM fan, get it to add to your collection. Otherwise, stick with the original. It is more fun, and a little more forgiving.

The Good
TFTD Requires a heck of a lot more patience, you have to remember that some weapons dont work on land, only in water. Capturing Aliens is now a requirement to get the good techs, like armour and new ships.

The Bad
Seems a bit sam-ee until you get severel months into the game

The Bottom Line
TFTD is another excelent XCOM Game.

40 years later, Humans are in a LOT of trouble. The Erelium115 supply from the last war has gone dry, and, humans kinda grew a little too depenent on it, thus meaning tech-wise your essentaly back in the 90s. Humans have become Complacent (as we most certainly do), and X-COMs funding has been cut.

Enter the Shipliner Hyperion. Unknown forces have attacked this superliner, the last reminants of XCOM (Now owned by a private company that salvages Submeged Crashed UFOs) respond, but the only message that is returned by the responding team is "I think they're back".

The UN has a crisis meeting, and a motion is passed, XCOM is back in action. Old hands are called back as technical advisors, and the newbies are trained up with what little they can be given, except this time, the aliens arent extra-terrestrial, but they sure do come from an alien world.

XCOM2 expands on XCOM a lot. Destroying an alien base is now a 2 or 3 step process. You can whipe out (or just get to the exit bit) on the "Exterior Base" map, then go in for the kill (going for the control station, or whiping out all the aliens), then, if you didnt kill em all on the exterior, its a run to the sub.

There are also "Alien Activity" sites,. where the aliens seek to re-activate long dissused devices that were built not long after they crashed into the earth, which incedently, was also the time the dinosaurs died.

Plus, Terror sites now not only occur in cities (or, ISlands, and Ports), but on ships! Saving a cruseliner is easy, but a cargo ship, which has 2 maps is a lot harder.

The alien list is for the most part revised. Sectoids make a new appearence, as the cloned "Aquatoid" race, but all others are new. Bio-Drones replace the Cyberdisk, but are much smaller, but still go boom! Large Things that look like Meteroids (from the NES and SNES Games) threaten to take control of minds, there are also "Gill-Men" and "Lobster-Men", and a swarm of others.

this is much longer than the first.

The Good
Well, the AI has been improved (to the point of madness), the game engine is a little faster and the UFOpedia has been given a boost.

The Bad
Game is simply TOO DAMN DIFFICULT, the graphics are less appealing than the first and the game has a much less claustrophobic, stretching atmosphere.

The Bottom Line
A lot less fun than the first, but still makes a good game.

The Good
X-COM, the first part.

The Bad
It's obvious that XCOM was outstanding, one of the games that deserve to be called classics; a game hardly to be beaten, by sequel or not. But TFTD is simply absurd: it's the same game, exactly the same game. Even worse, the plot is also absurd. What has done mankind with all those plasma cannons taken from the aliens in the first episode? Why must I walk the path again from... harpoons? TFTD is the result of following a success and taking it to the worst extreme: to make an exact copy of the previous.

The Bottom Line
If you have seen XCOM, you have seen TFTD. If you don't, skip the latter completely and try the first.