I Play Old Games: X-COM UFO Defense
By ArbitraryWater 14 Comments
And that answer is "Hell yes". For those who are unenlightened, X-COM is a game with some management elements on top of tactical turn-based Strategy. Really, if you want a full on summary of what the game is, you can find more eloquent descriptions on the internets than I could possibly type out. All you need to know is that it was the first game I bought with my steam account, which along with plenty of other old games make excellent blog material. Oh, and I bought Civilization III for a dollar. Even though I don't particularly like Civ. Which makes me almost as bad as Giant Bomb's own Vinny Caravella, except I actually played it for 90 minutes before I decided "yep. It's Civ. I think I will stick to Galactic Civilizations 2 for my obsessive micromanagement needs"
So onto the gameplay. Thankfully, the learning curve for X-COM only took me a few (several) hours to not throw my dudes into the endless pit of misery and despair by having them die over and over again. Frankly, the beginning of UFO Defense is pretty rough. All of your weapons suck, your guys have trouble hitting the enemy, and everyone crumples in one hit, no exceptions. This "shoot first or die" mentality is what distinguishes it for me from say... Jagged Alliance, which is basically a game of inaccurate potshot tag which I despise so very much. No matter what though, losing 2 or 3 dudes per battle in the early game is commonplace until you research armor, when your guys crumple in one hit only 75% of the time! Then power armor lowers that to a mere 40%. I actually like it though. It's very... strategic, if also occasionally forcing me to reload a save. In any case, the gameplay works well and is generally awesome.
Once I overcame the learning curve and started researching better weapons (i.e. Laser Rifles), the difficulty became much more manageable (but still fairly tough) even though certain enemies are pretty much the worst thing ever. Basically, Enemy Mind Controllers are stupid cheap until you start researching psionics yourself, which I was lucky enough to obtain fairly early on in the game through the capture of an alien leader... but one thing that will never stop being cheap is the enemies that will turn your guys into zombies with only one hit, killing them instantly. That is pretty much the biggest gripe I have, since they also have a ton of movement.
The management end gives, at the very least, a good facade that you are in charge of a multinational alien stomping organization, although where I am now money has stopped being an issue, and therefore any need for me to try to balance my budget is less than necessary. If I have any gripe here, it's that there are occasional long stretches of nothing, but that's not very often.
Then what do I not like about X-COM, if anything? I think that the weapon balance is fairly off kilter, being that anything without an auto shot is inferior to anything with one, which is why you will never, ever, ever, ever use the heavy laser or the pistol (which leads to the problem of me only using auto shot because it's always the best choice). Frankly, everyone in my squad uses heavy plasma at this point, being that all the enemies use it anyways so ammo is plentiful, along with a stun bomb and the blaster launcher, which is one of the single best weapons ever in any strategy game.
In conclusion, X-COM is rad. No, seriously. I recommend it to anyone with a taste for strategy games. I should admit here that I haven't yet invaded the alien base on mars and beaten the game, but unless it's radically different in the endgame, I feel comfortable blogging about it. 23 hours seems enough, don't you think? I will probably also get Terror from the Deep when I'm done with this, even though it's more of an expansion than an actual new game. To those in the know, what about Apocalypse? I hear it's crap, but I'd rather hear it personally. As a reward for reading this block of text, have some videos recorded by yours truly of a terror mission, which are the hardest mission types in the game.