X-COM: UFO Defense

the indomitable human spirit, baby, bogos binted this 🛸💥

I finished game several times when I was a teenager in the early 90s. At the time, it was simply a milestone in the world of strategy games. I loved it so much for many years. The missions and the backstory are exciting. The game itself is dark, relentless, and unforgiving. The RNG factor is sometimes absurd. Compared to later versions of X-Com, the soldiers are more of a resource than characters you can form a connection with. They die quickly, and you order a new batch of soldiers just as quickly. It's still fun to play more than 30 years after its release.

I remember when this game was first released back in 1994; my friend was the only one with a computer capable of running it, so me and several of our friends all went to his house and took turns playing it. Surprisingly enough, we didn't end up killing each other to get more time to play. This game was peak at the time. I only have 18 hours on Steam, but I likely have more hours in this game than any other game in my library currently. Even 30+ years later, the original still holds up. If you are a fan of the current XCOM games, I encourage you to give this one a try.

This game is very good and fun. The long-term strategy is simplistic, but satisfying when you see yourself really dominating the alien forces, and the tactical battles are as satisfying as any in the genre. Sure, it feels unfair and random a lot of the time, but that's when you realise that you can send in 28 soldiers to battle at one time, which is more than what the aliens are bringing. And also, you can kill aliens with one lucky shot just as well as they can kill you. Mind control is also extremely busted. The result is a hilarious inverse difficulty curve, where it starts hard and drops off a cliff, but it is nonetheless immensely satisfying to go through, and to arbitrarily extend your campaign to set up more bases and shoot down more UFOs just for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles. I don't really know if I have to speak on the gameplay in any detail here. You move soldiers based on stamina and time units, which are basically just action points. There are multiple types of shots units can take, but you pretty much always use snap shots or automatic fire, depending on the range. Explosives are very strong, especially a guided missile launcher you get at the endgame, which has the biggest exp…

[hr][/hr] [h3] [strike] Awful [/strike] > [strike] Bad [/strike] > [strike] OK [/strike] > [strike] Good [/strike] > [b] Great [/b] > [strike] Awesome [/strike] [/h3] [hr][/hr] [i]Another one of my nostalgia trips. This game is really old. And when I mean old, I mean really, really old. You can see that and feel it everywhere in the game. These days, it really feels like some very interesting and unique indie project. But back in the day, this game was a gem. It was revolutionary in many of the things it did, and for that alone, it would deserve huge praise and a great review. However, I'm not rating it based on nostalgia, just as I'm not doing with the other games. So let's be fair here. The game has a lot of positives and negatives. The biggest negatives are the playability, which is not really great, and some mechanics that are hard to understand because we're used to something completely different today. The controls are also difficult to work with, but once you get used to them, they're fine. One thing that actually aged surprisingly well is the pixelated graphics and their stylization. They still look good even today. And this is a good example of how avoid…

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