![]() ![]() ![]() Think outside the box make breach holes with C4, but risk damaging vital UFO parts you’ll need for future research or chunks of cold, hard cash. ![]() Get used to stacking troops by crashed UFO doors, ready for a breach, and they’ll start casually dropping grenades in your midst. Develop laser weaponry, they bust out mech armour that’s resistant to them. They remain better equipped, more evolved. As such, the most you can ever achieve is a level playing field. The idea is to eke out underdog victories, steal alien tech from cold, dead hands, then use it against them. Slender humanoid snipers mix with brutish lizard men while hovering disks scout the area and plough troops with rapid fire laser pulses. Your jumpsuit-clad cold-war tech soldiers shoulder their assault rifles and get effortlessly mowed down with plasma bursts while watching the weakest strain of invaders take several bullets to down. It’s not that easy keep yourself rolling, either initial sorties only stack the deck against you with hardier troops deployed with far superior technology. ![]() One of the many things that have been lovingly restored is the rarely seen option to sink hours and hours into the game and still come up on the losing side should you fail to keep atop the alien threat. Here, you lose a couple and the diminished funds really cut you deep. Losing a few world powers to the aliens in any of the X-Coms has always been a blow, but was never a big deal with all the different revenue building options available to you. Xenonauts forces you to care about appeasing government overlords you used to casually ignore and despise. Who cared if China was reducing their funding when you can make several times the amount lost by manufacturing some obsolete junk, and selling it off for a huge profit? Who wants to be sorting through mouldy harpoon bolts and junking huge piles of corpses to try and make room in cluttered warehouses so you can take order of new smoke grenades? Xenonauts stomps that into the ground, and with it takes away the ability to undercut X-Com’s funding bonuses from world governments. But! The further into Xenonauts I played, the more I realised that I did not miss these things at all. How dare they water down my complete dictatorship: if I wanted a streamlined, more simplistic X-Com, I’d be playing (a few hundred hours more of) the excellent Firaxis reboot. I’m not going to lie: the elitist in me raged at these changes. Some avenues of research automatically upgrade equipment on the fly rather than force you to scrap perfectly functioning builds with one obsolete mechanism. Crashed fighter jets were discarded in X-Com, forcing you to build or buy anew upon losing a dogfight here, they’re recovered and repaired without prompt. Xenonauts does away with all the fiddly stuff essentials like bullets are in infinite stock and take up no room in your warehouses. Just used up your last med kit? Can’t buy them got to manufacture more from scratch. Running low on assault rifle clips? Better order some up. Back in them olden times, X-Com tasked you with keeping track of every missile your fighter jets fired into alien UFOs and every bullet ploughed into pasty grey extra-terrestrial skin. I’m aware of how I’m kidding myself into believing my own ethereal sense of professionalism what if the next UFO encounter shows me something I’ve not seen and blows my opinion wide open? What if my R&D team discover something that will change everything? What if aliens storm Dubai again in new numbers, or raze my main HQ once more? These things could all happen, I guess, but I’m aware that all I really want is just one more turn.įor the unaware, X-Com is universally agreed to be the greatest game ever created a very in-depth alien apocalypse simulator rife with micro-management, tactical combat, base-building, research trees, government juggling and a tidal wave of stats that make early edition Dungeons & Dragons look casual. It’s of no exaggeration to suggest that these paragraphs are crafted between snatched handfuls of missions. However, now some weeks after release, my biggest fear has somewhat shifted: I’m now very concerned that I can’t drag myself away from the game long enough to finish this review. Originally, my biggest fear for Xenonauts was that it was shaping up to be inspired so heavily by the original X-Com that it was going to be a carbon copy with slightly shinier graphics and a few little adjustments here and there. "I could write myself a catchy header, but I’ve got Xenonauts shrunk down on my toolbar, and it’s been a few minutes since I took my last turn. ![]()
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