X-COM: Interceptor

I was just about 23 years old when this was released and it was terrible back then. Now i am around 51 years old. Its still bad. Avoid it like the plague. And to think that, this was released at the same time freespace was released. Apart from the main XCom games (XCom, XCom 2, XCom 3 and the reboots) stay away from the franchise.

Funny sometimes to go back to these games and see why they got so much hate. If anything, this game deserves worse than what it got. As a massive flight sim and X-COM fan I have no idea who they were trying to please here.

The most underrated of the X-COM games and the best of them as well. I bought a copy in 1998, literally got emotional when I flew my first dogfight ... here was the first really top notch hybrid game, with an X-Wing style flight sim married to a Civilization-style strategy game. I played it right up until last year. You may want to open the gamesettings.ini file and tinker around with weapon/shield/hull settings , buffing the latter to make battles last 10 minutes instead of 1. On windows 11 you can't really come and go from the game as you please; if you open a word processor or something while the game is running... you'll have to save and restart the game to come back and continue playing. There will be a crash roughly every half hour...its been that way for almost 30 years. Save frequently.

It has an interesting learning curve that takes some time to master, but it is not a bad game and runs well on modern hardware now.

This one BIG NO.

The game looks intriguing, even more so that it is part of the original XCOM universe. But the biggest turn off is the hundred button controls it expects you to remember. Its very cack handed, even after adjusting and remapping the controls I still can't get it how I like it as it uses majority of your keyboard. I couldn't get close to 30mins of playtime before thinking "Nah.....I'm done" Glad I got it for £1. Most of it feels it shouldn't be needed and instead be automated. It's not intuitive at all for my liking. Now each time I look at the icon on my PC desktop and think about playing it, I sigh like I know it will be a chore. So for the controls alone is why I wouldn't recommend this game. If you have more patience and better muscle memory than me, then you may enjoy it. Otherwise you may be put off like I was.