Playing through Fallout 4 I would often spend hours at a time hunting animals for food or clearing out raider settlements so I could scrap their weapons for parts and resources.
It was a prologue to the resource gathering functionality of modern games like Fallout. Elerium 115 and Heavy Plasma guns were highly prized and you felt more obliged to push your soldiers to the limits not just to level them up, but also because the more missions you undertook the more loot you gained and sold. Loot was a massive part of the original game and usually made up an ever increasing percentage of your monthly income. Naturally there was your psyonics team and I even had a special income generating squad that was always situated within a short Skyraider ride from the nearest Alien base, so they could swoop down and prey upon alien supply craft that regularly serviced the alien invasion at regular intervals. Following them into combat on smaller missions was my ‘B’ team, usually with hand-me-down weapons and armour that had seen previous battle use with A-team. It was normal to have multiple assault teams specially suited for different situations: I always had an ‘A’ team, made up of officers and battle hardened veterans that had access to the latest weaponry. The original game allowed players to develop real world survival strategies.
UFO ALIEN INVASION VS. XCOM FREE
The player wasn’t really free to run XCOM as they saw fit, they just simply reacted to pre-planned events that were either won or lost. The game didn’t give you any options to choose your own missions or develop your own game plan and make up a terrible monthly performance by attacking an alien base or going on multiple missions at once.Īnd that was its core issue – it was the illusion of choice. Every month it was the same at least one alien incursion to deal with (sometimes zero as your satellite network increased), one council mission and maybe one terror mission. The “it’s this mission or nothing” approach to the mission roster was far from perfect too. It felt like it was there purely as an aesthetic Easter egg for older fans. What was the point of watching my aircraft fly around the map to undertake a mission when I can’t redirect them or change their orders at any point?
Without freely being able to move aircraft around the map or even have multiple bases the Geoscape became nothing more than a mission selector tool. However it wasn’t what was added to the original that made it lose points among real UFO fans, it was what was missing that hung around in the air like a bad smell.Īir combat felt pointless. Adding in a three dimensional cover system for your soldiers was a stroke of pure genius and I found myself eagerly chomping at the bit for a new alert to pop up so I could send my team into the hot zone and shoot some damn bugs. Let’s be clear, Firaxis Games’ 2012 XCOM: Enemy Unknown reboot was a pretty exceptional game that kickstarted my love once again for strategic turn based combat. Trips down memory lane aside, as a plethora of sequels, knock offs and reboots have marched past us in rapid fire succession over the years, why has it been so hard to replicate the complexity and sheer enormity of the first game? Two more sequels were developed: the near impossible to finish Terror from the Deep and the trippy multi-dimensional X-COM: Apocalypse. Pitting the player against an ever evolving alien invasion, UFO is a mixture of open world base building, inventory management and top down turn based strategy that is still as popular as ever today on steam as it was in its prime. The graphics are difficult to look at these days and the intro (that I thought at the time was mind-bendingly amazing) is a LOT cornier than I remember, but the core of the game still contains an open world strategic defence model that few games, if any, have been able to replicate in the 23 years since its release. Also known as XCOM: UFO Defense in North America, it revolutionised the concept of strategy gaming when it hit us like a freight train in 1994. It’s hard to find a more revered game in PC-gaming history than UFO: Enemy Unknown.
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