Xenonauts

I invite everyone who played and loved the original UFO and X-COM games to take this review with a grain of salt. As someone who, in X-COM’s heyday, was still elbow-deep in Dynamix’s masterful combat flight simulator Aces of the Pacific, I missed the boat on a wealth of popular, and some might say essential, classics. I write this review because Xenonauts was released in the year 2014. While I think there are more members of the old guard playing games today than gamers are generally aware (maybe they just don’t want to argue with you on Xbox Live…I don’t) there are many like me who missed out on some of gamings venerable ancestors for one reason or another. I blame my dad. He had his pilot’s license and he built computers for one reason, to fly.

I cut my gaming teeth on Jet, a 1985 diamond in the rough where modern fighters were rendered in glorious black and white. Granted, having been born in 1987, Jet was older than me, but that’s how much my dad loved flight simulators, and that’s how I was raised.

After graduating to X-Wing and Microsoft’s Combat Flight Simulator series, my PC was used for no other games. We had a Sega and an SNES sure, but this golden era UFO defense game flew completely under my radar, the closest (and admittedly, very lacking) comparison I can make from my repertoire is the punishing Commando’s series I played fairly religiously (and with no small amount of frustration. However, in 1999, my gaming habits shifted with the release of Age of Wonders, and again with the release of Morrowind in 2003. I say all this to describe the change in my gaming life’s trajectory setting me firmly on the path towards strategy and RPG, but alas, it was too late for me, in the days of dial-up and physical, boxed copies of games sold at Incredible Universe, to reach out and take hold of X-COM’s elderly alien hand.

Later, as I played through the release of Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions for the PSP, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, and then more recently the excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Fire Emblem: Awakening, turn-based tactics quickly became by jam. These games are, somehow, the games I now by systems for. I would not have, for instance, a 3DS if there was no Fire Emblem or Advance Wars. There would be no Vita on my shelf if it were not for those seminal remakes of FFT and TO: LUCT. The original Age of Wonders became a gateway drug to a new kind of game, and the love affair only grew with each passing year.

All this is to say, maybe there is a place for someone who missed the nostalgia of the original Gollop X-COM games to write a review about what is, essentially, an homage. There are no rose-tinted glasses or brand faithfulness here. With that out of the way, let’s dive into the terrible, dramatic, and head-spinning world of Xenonauts, circa 1981-ish. Let’s get to it.

The opening credits of Xenonauts is the beginning of a new, beautiful, and somewhat abusive relationship. I remember the cold shame of losing “Loki”, my aptly named Norwegian sniper I forced to stay behind and double tap chryssalids while the rest of his squad rodeo-ran to the extraction point in modern XCOM’s terrifying cargo ship level. In Xenonauts, that cold feeling becomes a chilling deluge, an ice-cold and infinitely deep bucket of “Look what you’ve done!” with every landing of the insertion chopper. I have lost far too many soldiers. Oddly enough, every male soldier in my line-up of powder blue clad grunts has bought the farm, either through my frustrating quest to figure out how to use the damn med-packs, or from a point-blank blast of plasma to the face. I am not complaining, necessarily. My force of warrior Amazons have been forged in a fiery xeno meat-grinder. They disembark from the chopper ripping throats out with their teeth and spraying hot enfilades of machine gun rounds into the denizens of many an unidentified flying object.

During a recent mission, my squad of warrior women spread out into an industrial park. They fight their way through an office building to find the mission’s crashed UFO, shot down by my brand-spanking-new MIG 31. Xenonauts employs one fantastic convenience that XCOM and a fair few other games would be wise to implement. I know that if I can take and hold the ship that brought these aliens to my world for five turns, I can walk away with a win, regardless of remaining number of aliens wandering marooned around the crash site. There is little to no cover at this particular location, so my most veteran soldier, a machine gun toting heavy named Sarah, crouches several lengths away from the UFO’s heavy front doors. I have two other soldiers standing at the very edge of the door, shotguns trained, while the others spread out over the field with assault rifles. I wait another turn for everyone to get settled, saving up time units (the Xenonauts equivalent of action points) for a full flurry of hot lead.

One of my assault troops (she goes by Linda), triggers the door, which grinds open to reveal three humanoid, red-shirt-wearing aliens that form the most basic xeno infantry. “Not too shabby”, I think,”Another ship to add to my collection.” Sarah opens up with her machine gun, which peppers the first alien with a couple of wounding hits, trashes some cover that no one is hiding behind anyway, and completely fails to do anything else, except perhaps ruining some precious alien artifacts. A burst of rifle fire from one of my outlying soldiers finishes the wounded redshirt, and one of myshotgun-toting troopers confidently marches into the ship, conserving as many time units as possible for an easy close-quarters kill. She misses. The next alien does not, and to my horror, as she bleeds out on the gleaming deck of the UFO, she reveals three more of the humanoid terrors.

Grappling with the loss of one of my veterans to a stupid mistake, I am unprepared as an outlying rifle-woman is peppered with plasma that mostly misses. Another alien has emerged from the tangled office park directly behind us. This xeno is reptilian, aggressive and has the hit points to back up its towering frame. On my next turn I send the wounded soldier through a door to flank the scaly degenerate as he aims his plasma weapon out an open window. She fires, but just manages to pull off a miss, and my second flanking rifle-woman pries open a nearby garage door and enters without the time units to fire.

Meanwhile, Sarah is sending salvo after salvo of withering machine gun fire into the ship. With my second shotgunner lying dead in the doorway, and the first pulled back to safety, I can’t see all that much of the enemy’s movements inside. I am probably scrapping priceless xeno technology, but I’m getting riled. The hulking lizard alien fires at my wounded riflewoman, and scores a non-lethal hit that will soon become very un-non-lethal if the situation isn’t resolved with a dead alien and a med-kit soon. The bleeding soldier fires back, putting a couple holes in the large alien, but doesn’t have enough time units to retreat into cover due to the high-accuracy shot I chose. A second burst from the flanker by the garage door dishes out some real hurt, but fails to finish the fight. At the ship, my shot-gunner is popping back and forth, taking low yield pot shots at the red-shirts crouching inside, while they take slow but persistent damage from the machine gun fire Sarah provides. But she’ll have to reload soon, and then there will be trouble.

In a miracle of perhaps lacking AI, the large reptilian form wheels around and fires at the flanking offender. He scores a light hit that doesn’t cause any bleeding, and answering fire from my wounded soldier who is now behind the ugly hulk rips a satisfyingly large hole in his back, whereupon he dies. On the alien’s next turn my wounded rifle-woman finally takes a knee, and then face-plants, spreading pool of blood and all. A well-deserved rest? I can’t say.

Sarah’s machine gun is empty, so a grenade is lobbed from close range, shattering the insides of the ship, killing most of the aliens inside, and causing the remaining shotgunner to take some worrying hits. Sarah resumes fire with a full magazine, and she is thankfully still unhurt. The mission ends in a flurry of blind fire into the dark maw of the UFO. In my mind’s eye, beyond the crumpled form of the my casualty and the wounded body of my last remaining assault troop, there is a tangle of destruction and alien remains blasted through by fifty caliber rounds and a single fragmentation grenade. I can hear XCOM’s Dr. Vahlen in my head, chastising my waste of tech and organic materials. War is hell, and I need to recruit some new troops.

This takes us to Xenonaut’s overworld map. Just like XCOM, you will be asked to choose where to establish your base at the very beginning. However, unlike Firaxis’ excellent game, this will not be your only base. It cannot be. Any alien activity occurring outside your bases’ collective sensor net will rampage unanswered. This is a fantastically nerve-racking feature. In one campaign I’ve already brought myself to economic ruin, trying to build base after base quickly, and fill them with MIG interceptors and troops to handle the grunt work. Other times I have adopted a more conservative “turtle” strategy, which, as it stands now, is actually a viable tactic for a game that wants to spread you as thin as a single packet of mayonnaise across a six-foot sub. Base placement and its concomitant politics are where things begin to fall apart a bit. I say a bit because, while in many ways Xenonauts is a gritty, satisfying mix of turn-based tactics, role-playing, and base management your tenuous relationship with the nations of the planet earth can fall apart seemingly at random. Some continents in which I planted bases and regularly responded to suspicious alien activity have withdrawn their support, showing day by day an unwillingness to participate in Earth’s defense and extreme ingratitude. This, while other nations completely in the dark and undergoing regular incursions and heavy loss of life (you receive regular reports and death-toll statistics regardless of your presence like a swift kick in the groin) will continue to pledge their support, expressing a rabid and entirely unwarranted faith in my ability to protect them.

There are some great additions to the XCOM formula here. The UFO interception minigame, where your Falcons and MIG fighters tangle with varying alien aircraft, is surprisingly entertaining and deceptively simple. Also greatly appreciated is the ability to shift your powder-blues into any job you require. Need a sniper? Give them the appropriate weapon and they will get to work. Additionally, one of the highlights of the necessity of multiple bases is the ability to have different labs go to work on separate research projects, and consequently not always restricting your research towards a single breakthrough, looking at you Outsider Shard.

The sometimes rigid adherence to the old ways of playing games can be mildly off-putting, but as someone who loves party-based RPGs and still can’t manage to play more than a few hours of Baldur’s Gate, the introduction of refreshing changes and a superior, simple user interface makes Xenonauts a sure long-term resident on my hard drive. Xenonauts was released on June 16, 2014, and can be purchased for $24.99 on both Steam and GOG. Patches are still being released regularly, and the developers continue to faithfully improve and iterate on the game. If you, like me, are well through your third play-through of XCOM, or are simply wondering what all the excitement over the old X-COM games was about, this game is a welcome and hearty lesson in how the things that used to be can still be great.