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Review: Xenonauts |
It’s important to have radar coverage of as much of the globe as possible
Those of you who have played both the original XCOM of 1994 as well as Firaxis’ 2012 remake will surely have realised that while the newer incarnation didn’t lack in fancy effects and a Hollywood-esque action overtone, it did simplify and dumb down quite a few of its forefather’s mechanics to make it a much smoother experience and more welcoming to newcomers. Xenonauts does you no such favours. In fact, one could almost see Xenonauts as a re-skin of the original XCOM rather than a re-make because it copies almost every mechanical and game-play aspect down to the ability to control which way your soldiers point when the turn ends. And while this fine-tuned and highly granular management approach may not be for everyone, it can be quite satisfying when all your intricate plans come together magnificently. Basic game-play follows the classic XCOM formula of research, build, and shoot down UFO, ground combat with aliens.
“Baptism by fire”
Despite being recruited from “the best in the world”, your soldiers start off by getting exhausted after 10 yards and could not hit the broad side of a barn manufacturing facility with their sub-par weapons. Nevertheless, you must blast the UFOs out of the sky and then meet them on the ground to recover their corpses and whatever pieces of technology are left to research and eventually reverse engineer your own better weapons, armour, equipment and aircraft which will then make both the battles on the ground and in the sky easier. That’s how it works in theory anyway. But any XCOM veteran can tell you that as soon as you make any technological advance to make things just a little easier, the aliens will then in turn escalate their assault with new types of ships, enemies and tactics so it rarely gets to a point where you are comfortably in charge of the situation. And if it does, enjoy it because it will not last for long.
As you progress, you can build better weapons, armour and equipment
This constant arms race creates an on-going tension throughout the entire game that has you in constant fear of falling behind the alien advance. You have to keep pushing and taking on the bigger nastier enemies so you can take home their goodies and keep advancing your research. As mentioned before, the highly granular control of the original game is present again here. In the 2012 XCOM, each soldier could only equip 1 of each type of gear and could not drop or swap out equipment mid-mission. Xenonauts allows you to completely customise what the soldier takes in their backpack allowing more specialisation for things like dedicated medics, demolitions, grenadiers and so forth.
“Micro-micro-management”
You can also drop your weapons and pry the alien’s from the cold dead corpses to use mid-mission should you choose. But why you can do this mid-mission and can’t just collect them all to equip back at base was always a mystery to me. You must research and build your own new weapons to do that…. The multi base approach also makes a return where, funds allowing, you can have as many bases around the world as you wish to increase radar and interceptor coverage. One of the new additions Xenonauts makes to the classic formula is allowing you to take direct control of dogfights where you take on the UFOs issuing orders to your fighters in real time. Although I did not usually partake of this and preferred to let it auto-resolve.
Likewise, as you progress, so do the aliens. Stepping up their game every time you do.
In Summary
Through and through, Xenonauts maintains the air of authenticity to the old-school XCOM formula and any fans of those games would do well to give this one a go as well. And those that thoughts the new game was too easy? Xenonauts fixed that too. This game is hard. Rock. Hard. But still comes well recommended to fans of turn based tactical combat and anything XCOM.
I enjoyed the 2012 XCOM and I felt that the difficulty curve was decently managed, if no-one dies that is.
Would you recommend this for players who have only dipped into XCOM with the 2012 installment or is the ramp up in micro-management so large that such players should cut their teeth elsewhere before coming near this one?
Compared to the 2012 XCOM, this is a sizeable difficulty ramp up and the vastly increased number of elements to manage can be a lot to keep track of. But there is no real intermediary between this and 2012’s XCOM other than playing it again on a harder difficulty to prepare you for harder combat or to play this game on an easier difficulty first. It’s still worth your time though if you enjoyed the new XCOM. Just be prepared to die or reload. A lot.