X-COM: UFO Defense

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.

The Good
X-Com is one of those rare games that gets just about everything right. I've always thought this was one of the best games I ever played for the PC, but recently began wondering if nostalgia was simply making it out to be more than it was. I've been playing it recently for a week straight, and have quickly come to the conclusion that this IS my all-time favorite PC game. I will tell you why:

The game combines both a strategic and tactical game in one. Both are equally complex and important, and FUN in their own right. As a strategy gamer, running the operations of my X-Com bases is pure delight. One portion of the game is ran from the Geoscape. This is a real-time view of Earth from outer space. It shows locations of your X-com bases, major cities, detected UFO's, crashed/landed UFO's, alien bases and cities being terrorized. Some things, such as Alien bases, you need to find before they appear. Once a UFO is detected, you send out your interceptors to shoot it down. Once it's shot down, you then send out your Skyranger filled with X-Com operatives to secure the landing site. This is where the game turns into the tactical portion of the game.

At the start of the battle, all your X-Com operatives are inside the Skyranger which has just landed at the crash site. As you exit, you may or may not run into aliens in the vicinity. Eventually, you will, and this is where your soldiers take the fight to the aliens. Most of the game you will be behind the aliens in technology, so will need to use a lot of tactics and heavy firepower (grenades, rockets, etc) and some luck to fight the alien menace. As you win fights and secure alien crash sites, ALL their technology is captured and taken back to your X-Com base. From there, you can assign scientists to research ANYTHING. Alien corpses, live aliens, alien rifles, grenades, UFO power sources, UFO navigations, etc. Everything researched has value, whether it's tangible or just information. Do you research alien plasma rifles so your troops have better weapons, or UFO craft equipment so your fighters can shoot down bigger UFO's? You'll constantly be making these decisions throughout most of the game. The research and discovery aspect of this game, especially the first time playing it, makes X-Com one of those games where you catch yourself saying, "I'll go to bed once I researched...".

Then once a new weapon is researched, for example, you get to actually use it in the tactical combat. In X-Com you are always progressing, and seeing the benefit of this progression in actual gameplay is a real joy. Throwing your first alien grenade and seeing it do much more damage than your own grenades, or seeing a soldier survive multiple hits because of some new armor he donned due to the research you've done is great!

The tactical portion of the game is almost like an RPG. You hire new soldiers from your base screen, in the strategic portion of the game. Each soldier has about 8 statistics that can increase the more missions he/she goes on, and how many aliens they kill. They not only gain skills (Like accuracy and strength), but also rank. What happens to soldiers in a tactical fight is how their skills raise. So if you load a soldier up with a ton of equipment each mission, their strength increases, allowing them to do more with more weight. If they fire a lot, and kill aliens, their accuracy increases. The detail is amazing! Each soldier has a first and last name, so soldiers who survive a lot of missions you'll begin to get attached to. You'll see someone like Alan Davies, and remember some of the heroic missions he went on where he barely escaped death and killed the last three aliens with a well placed grenade. Then, unfortunately, some day he'll die and you won't be losing a generic soldier. You'll be losing a veteran who you grew accustomed to and counted on to be the leader on every excursion. Now you have to get a replacement who may panic the minute a friend dies next to him.

The tactical combat, even though the graphics are dated, are still very atmospheric and creepy even to this day!! Especially if you haven't played the game before, the first time one of your soldiers turns a corner or enters a new room and sees an alien for the first time your heart will jump. "What the hell is THAT thing??" you'll ask, and notice the soldier that just saw the alien doesn't have enough turn points left to fire at him. The detail in the tactical combat is amazing. Objects can block weapon fire, smoke and objects can block line of sight, smoke can knock aliens/humans unconcious, explosions can rip holes into the sides of buildings, etc. Each weapon/item has a lot of uses as well. Equip a motion detector, and you can see movement 'blips' around that soldier. Use a medikit on a soldier, and you can use three different things: Painkiller, Stimulate or Heal. Different body parts can be injured to, so you choose the body part and heal it. I can go on and on about the level of detail of this game, but these are just some examples!

The game is highly addictive, and is rightly seated in gamers' minds as one of (if not THE) best PC game of all time. Play it for yourself and find out. Even for being so old, the gameplay is still golden!

The Bad
While X-Com has gameplay second to none, anyone worth their salt can tell you it has its problems as well. Graphics are old, but they don't affect gameplay. There are plenty of crashes in X-Com, even the Collectors Edition, and especially so now on WinXP. You have to save quite often, but the game is SO good, this will become second nature, and getting back into a game takes a matter of seconds. the only time you'll get pissed about this is if you had forgotten to save in a long time, or after a very long and important battle that you had won. An auto-save feature would be nice!!

Equipping your soldiers before each battle is also a big hassle. It would have been terribly useful if you could assign equipment loads that were automatically saved, so your soldiers would be equipped properly before each battle. For example, some soldiers I designate as (Hvy), which I typically give the heavier loadouts too (Rocket launcher + rockets, medikit, extra grenades, etc). It'd have been very useful if they started with that loadout at the start of each mission. Instead, you have to manually load each soldier every time. A nagging issue that you never truly get used to.

Lots of general bugs, such as loading a saved game that was in tactical combat and had proximity mines down. They are now gone and useless once you loaded the game.

Some weapons/research aren't very useful, such as most HWP's as they die in a few shots and are very expensive, and pistols.

The difficulty can sometimes be very frustrating, especially to casual players. Aliens are generally very accurate, and in the early to mid game you will experience a lot of casualties, even if you win a fight. Especially terror missions! Another thing that is frustrating, especially on terror missions, is that you can sometimes barely get off your Skyranger before half or most of your squad is killed. You get half your guys off, four aliens are waiting right outside, and either blast them all before they can get a shot off or just throw a grenade there and annihilate your entire team. Would have probably been smart for the X-Com team to land a 'wee' bit away from the terror site and then work their way to it.

There's other problems, and annoyances with X-Com that I can't fully document here. They are experienced after heavily playing the game (which most people will!), but ultimately NONE of these problems will deter you from playing it. X-Com proves to the current industry you don't need high production values to make a classic game. Even with the dated graphics, sound, music(which is actually still kinda creepy!) and bugs this game is a shining achievement in gameplay!

The Bottom Line
X-Com is a strategic and tactical game where you defend earth from an alien invasion. You control everything about X-Com, from purchasing weapons and equipment, building new base facilities, intercepting UFO's, researching alien technology, manufacturing new equipment, investigating crash sites and ultimately finding a way to eliminate the alien invasion once and for all!

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.