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.

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.

The Good
The combat engine is excellent and the control scheme is fairly vigorous and powerful. The characters are nicely animated and the voices are very interesting with their different foreign accents. They are very realistic and gives the impression u are leading a real international army, made up of people coming from all around the world to fight the alien hostiles. Also the mood music is quite original and contributes to create a catching atmosphere.

The Bad
I would have liked some higher level of customization of bases and equipment.

The Bottom Line
Much fun to play!