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Aaron Tubb
United States
Fuquay Varina
North Carolina
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X-COM: UFO Defense (or UFO: Enemy Unknown, depending on your version) is one of the best strategy games ever made. It was released way back in 1994, and it's still just as awesome and just as satisfying to play as it once was. Seriously, if you've never played it before, you should check it out.
What's the story?
The game puts the player in charge of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (or X-COM), an organization collaboratively created by the major powers of the world in 1998 as a desperate attempt to combat the aliens that have been attacking and abducting people with increasing frequency. Having absolved themselves of personal responsibility for the alien threat, the governments and people of Earth depend on you to deal with the aliens. X-COM's performance will be reviewed at the end of each month, and your funding will be adjusted accordingly. If a country's government becomes dissatisfied with X-COM (or is infiltrated by the aliens), they may pull all funding from the project. If you fail, or if all your funding is cut, the major powers of the world will attempt to negotiate with the aliens, and I'll tell you right now that it won't end well.
The Geoscape
Gameplay Basics
There's two different parts of the game, as far as gameplay goes. First, there's the "grand strategy" bit, where you manage your bases, research alien technology, buy, sell, and manufacture equipment, and manage your soldiers. You'll also be watching for and intercepting UFOs and alien bases on the "geoscape". The other part of the game is the turn-based tactical combat, which you will enter whenever your soldiers encounter the aliens. Usually, your objective during a combat mission is to kill and/or stun all aliens so you can capture the aliens' UFO and equipment, destroy their base, save your own base, or save the civilians, depending on the situation. Tactical combat maps are randomly generated, based on the terrain type, and there are a variety of UFOs you will encounter, all with different layouts, and a variety of aliens you will encounter, all with different characteristics and abilities. Your soldiers start out as rookies, but their skills will improve with use (if you keep them alive). Soldiers (and aliens) can end their turn with some action points remaining, which they can spend during the enemy's turn on "reaction fire" if an enemy moves into their line of sight.
On the battlefield
Why is this game so freakin' awesome?
Firstly, the gameplay is awesome. It is all very strategic and very satisfying, and nothing feels gimicky or pointless (except maybe some of the equipment. e.g. laser canon for aircraft). The combination of grand strategy and tactical combat works very well, and both aspects of the game are well thought out and have quite a bit to them. You will have to become well versed in both combat and the geoscape in order to do well in the game. Also, it doesn't feel like two different games, but rather like one game with "zoomed out" view and a "zoomed in" view, and the two views mesh together perfectly.
Second, the game evokes an atmosphere of tension and fear VERY well. Your soldiers are fragile, even later in the game with powered armor, and you never know if death is waiting just around the corner for Sgt. Coolguy (for example), who has been with you through countless missions. Imagine, you stack up a squad of three at the hatch to a crashed and smoking UFO with trepidation, hoping that you will be able to clear it out of aliens without losing any soldiers. One soldier opens the door and steps in, but can't see any aliens through all the smoke. You see a couple dead aliens near the controls, killed in the crash, and you feel relief and move the other two inside. Suddenly, a plasma shot comes from somewhere in the smoke and kills one of your soldiers instantly. You move another soldier towards the nearest wall for cover but he is killed by alien reaction fire before he can get there. The third soldier successfully makes it through a door into a small side room; now you have a lone soldier in a UFO that is filled with smoke and at least one alien, and the alien is better at seeing through smoke than you are. For another example I have experienced, imagine you have a handful of your most elite soldiers preparing to enter and assault the main control room of an alien base. You have successfully cleared out a large number of aliens defending the base, made your way to the control room elevator door, and have decided to rest for a turn to regain your soldiers' energy (your troops have been moving nearly non-stop and you don't want to rush into the elevator room and not have enough energy to make it all the way there). The alien commander takes this opportunity to launch a blaster bomb (remote controlled high explosive missile) down the elevator and into the door you are stacked up against, instantly vaporizing the door and your entire squad! (Once blaster bombs and psionic attacks start showing up, nowhere is safe!) The fact that there are a variety of terrain types, UFO layouts, and alien races makes you never sure what exactly is waiting for you in the next room or around that hedgerow.
Third, with such a variety in stuff you can encounter, randomly assembled maps, various difficulty levels, and countless ways you can approach different situations in the game, the game is highly repayable. I've played from start to finish multiple times, and it's still awesome. Once you get any good at the game, I highly recommend playing it "Ironman" style, which means you only save the game to stop playing, and not to undo something that happened in-game. It makes the entire game experience so much more tense, exciting, and oh-so-much-more satisfying.
Base management
What's not to like?
There's just a couple things that could be barriers to your enjoyment. First (and most obviously, especially when talking about older games), the graphics are 1994 retail video game graphics (in glorious 256 color-o-vision) and not 2010 retail video game graphics. I think they look pretty good myself, in a retro, pixelated kind of way that lets you fill in the detail with your imagination. It certainly doesn't look amateurish, and it was fortunately made before the age of 3D began (those early 3D games are UGLY). In any case, if you can get past the oldschool graphics, you can enjoy one of the greatest video games ever made.
The other thing not to like is that the game has a number of bugs, depending on which version of the game you have. The worst bug in the game made it so you could only play on "beginner" difficulty (it reverted your save game to beginner level if you ever saved and loaded it). No official patch fixed this bug, so unless you have played X-COM with a mod or XcomUtil, you have only ever experienced the game on "beginner". My preferred way to play is with v1.0 with XcomUtil, since XcomUtil fixes the worst bugs, and the official patches actually introduce as many new bugs as they supposedly fix.
For the sake of comparison, the more recent Gold Edition of the game has a bug that prevents alien blaster bombs from traveling vertically, which sometimes results in alien commanders killing themselves inside their base control room. Gold Edition also has worse quality sounds and music than the original v1.0. The original v1.0 had a bug that caused your ammo to disappear after completing missions sometimes, but it had the best sound and music quality and had alien blaster bombs that tended to kill X-COM soldiers instead of aliens.
You need this mod: XcomUtil (find it HERE)
XcomUtil is awesome. Nowadays, it's really the only way to play X-COM: UFO Defense. Seriously, once you play with XcomUtil, you'll never go back. Here's a list of just some of the cool things this program can do for you (you can pick and choose what features to use when you run it):
- Fixes the difficulty level bug
- Makes most of the useless equipment more useful (heavy lasers, laser canon, high explosive)
- The ability to use other mods and custom made maps and map sections
- Interceptors can carry a small number of soldiers and Skyrangers can equip a single weapon
- Randomize UFO layouts (all UFOs become a maze of halls and rooms)
- Alternate starting base layout
- Some alternate map tiles for farmland and desert (suburban home for farm and pyramid for desert)
- Make all battles at night (or day)
- Other minor bug fixes
- Much more! (As a side note, XcomUtil also works for Terror from the Deep, which is great because you can give Gauss weapons unlimited ammo)
To install XcomUtil, just download the zip file into your X-Com main folder, then run XcuSetup. Then, you must use XcomUtil's bat files to start the game (RunXcom.bat for DOS or RunXcomW.bat for windows).
To play this game, you may need DOSBox (unless you buy a version that is bundled with a DOS emulator). Get DOSBox HERE.
Using DOSBox is easy. If you have X-COM in the directory: C:\UFO (and the executable program is called ufo.exe) then type the following into the prompt when you open DOSBox:
mount x c:\ufo
cd x:
ufo
Conclusion: You need to play this game
If you like strategy games or games with turn-based tactical combat, you'll like this game. You may love this game. It's awesome, and by "awesome", I mean it is a masterpiece that still stands today as one of the best games in its genre, against which other tactical combat games are still compared all these years later. It's just that good.
Also, check out my Geeklist I did a while ago on this game:
X-COM: UFO Defense - Where to get it and how to play it
If you like X-COM: UFO Defense, you may also like:
UFOpaedia - Not a game, but a guide to the game. Very detailed and very useful.
X-COM: Terror from the Deep - The official sequel to X-COM: UFO Defense, and gameplay is largely the same as the original, only most of it is underwater and it is butt-hard. The atmosphere is even darker, creepier, and more oppressive than the original's also. The Martian aliens have been replaced with Lovecraftian horrors like Deep Ones and several tentacle-ish aliens and some underwater Mi-go "Lobster Men" (who's associated terror unit are enslaved human brains in jars, attached to flying weapons platforms). Instead of going to Cydonia and destroying the alien brain, you go to R'Lyeh "T'leth" and destroy "the Great Sleeper" (represented by an angry octopus-like symbol). If you loved UFO Defense, you'll probably like this one, too, as it's great for some variety and extra challenge. My main gripe about the game is that everything is entirely too yellow, and everything else is just blue.
UFO: Alien Invasion - The best fan-made X-COM clone I've seen. It's constantly updated and the latest stable release was just recently put out. I've been really impressed with this one so far.
UFO series - X-COM clones with pausable real-time combat. It feels too clunky and awkward to me, but some people like it.
UFO: The Two Sides - A fan-made remake of the original. Looks almost exactly like the original but with higher resolution graphics, and gives you the opportunity to play as the aliens! (single player campaign is still being worked on)
UFO: Extraterrestrials - The only retail turn based X-COM clone I've seen. It looks really cool, but some people don't like the fact that your soldiers never die and stuff.
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Anthony DuLac
United States
Minnesota
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A good review that is both concise yet thorough and which covers a classic and very good older game. Cool.
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Erik Merchant
United States
Saint Joseph
Michigan
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This game might be the best PC game of all time. Your review was excellent and fair, and I appreciated the info on the clones out there. Available on Steam (all the X-Com series in one package actually!), for those of you wanting to play on modern computers. Thanks!
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My favourite game of all times! Nice review: I think I will reinstall it and play it through again.
BTW there is a sort of port of this game on to a board game called Target Earth heavily insparied in this computer game.
Has anyone tried the version that came out for Play Station (1)?
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This is definitely up in my top ten of all times! I've been gaming since 1981 and this is a title that still get a play every now and then.
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Posted Fri Aug 20, 2010 3:24 am
