Anyone know if the UFO series is any good?
UFO: Aftershock
UFO: Aftermath
UFO: Afterlight
UFO: Extraterrestrials Gold
What's the difference??
Also, how do they compare to that XCOM game I mentioned?
I quite liked the Aftershock series. They're real-time with copious pausing, and once you adjust the auto-pausing it's pretty smooth. The setting is darker than most XCOM remakes - something like 99% of humanity is wiped out in a bioweapon attack before the game even starts. All the games are pretty good, but Afterlight is probably the best to start with as it's somewhat easier, and has the most streamlined UI. Also it takes place on Mars.
Aftermath: Take back the planet with like a hundred slightly different real world weapons.
In Aftermath you retake the earth sector by sector. Missions aren't all "kill all enemies": Initial missions are usually "Spot 8 enemies and escape" or "Capture a specimen from this sector" to evaluate the biomorph threat. Easy missions can be safely delegated to other survivors, greatly reducing potential tedium. Reticulans are mysteriously passive: they harass, and guard certain government installations you need to raid, but don't actually attack much. The reason is eventually revealed, as a deadly new threat is deployed once you've recovered about 50% of the planet.
I played this one the most, good replayability.
Aftershock: Lots more features, factions. Slight story spoilers, but mainly just longwinded:
Humanity has allied with the reticulans and been mostly evacuated to satellites and Mars. You grew up on one of these satellites. Eventually the reticulans stop checking in, and pretty soon you and some other kids escape the vault the satellite (blowing it up in the process, you idiots). Returning to earth you find that the reticulans have somehow been reduced to mindless animals, and earth is populated by cybernetic and psionic mutant humans. You decide to carve out a place for your fellow satellite survivors - with the mutants' cooperation, or without it.
Lots more features here, almost overwhelming. You can help out the fractured mutant sectors and eventually they'll join you for continued protection. This gets you cyborg mutants or psionic ones, which have unique upgrade paths compared to your own space-borne people. My squads were mostly cyborgs with a space-borne leader, mostly for RP purposes. It's possible to get both psionic and cyborg allies, but each doesn't like it if you're friendly with the other.
The main threat is a strange cult which worships the biomass and seeks to grow it. It takes quite a while to finally clear them off the planet. At that point a new threat emerges again, but the game was finally getting tedious so I didn't finish.
Takes place at the same time as Aftershock, but is the story of the humans exiled to Mars. Squad members fight in space suits, which can be ruptured by enemy attacks (steady health drain until repaired). Your mission is to terraform the planet, a slow process which visibly changes the overmap and battlegrounds as it progresses. Watching an ocean on the overmap grow over an enemy facility was great.
Reticulans arrive but are willing to make peace. Different Reticulans arrive and "explain everything". Brutish servants of the biomass appear from space, summoned by its failures on earth. And as mars turns green, creatures deep underground are roused from their slumber of eons.
Edit: Oh right, you're very short staffed because most of the colonists are in cryosleep until you finish terraforming (limited water, air, food...) This means that instead of having dedicated soldiers, scientists, and engineers, most of your personnel will have two possible roles. Sending a techie to fix the aquaduct or repair a facility grants them a lot of bonus XP, plus they have special tech-only combat abilities. Mostly repairing suits/mechs, and laying explosives. Scientists can be frailer but their anatomy skills let them specialize in doing massive damage to certain alien types. And the main benefit is that these field-hardened techs and scientists will build and research much faster back at base.
So I'd definitely pick up Afterlight. But to answer your question, no, they aren't much like original XCOM or the new XCOM. I like the new XCOM's small squads and huge emphasis on cover mechanics and abilities, but they make it a lot different from any other XCOM-like game.
UFO: Extraterrestrials is what Xenonauts should have been. It's XCOM but with a minimap, weapon progression beyond bullets-lasers-heavy plasma, and they've included a fan-mod which allows a lot of gameplay tweaking. Don't let the new planet and lack of license fool you, it's the most faithful commercial remake of the original XCOM. It also takes an exceptionally long time to win due to the added padding of the tech tree. Definitely a game to play over weeks, not try to finish in a weekend.
Fun thing the fan-mod allows: increasing vision distance to include most of the map, eliminating the weird but classic XCOM tactic of having a rookie spot targets for a line of elite snipers. Really helps the pace of combat in my opinion.
Revenge mode: Set the alien vision range to 2 tiles less than the human range. (normally it's the other way around, because supposedly it's fun to get shot from offscreen, by invisible aliens "hiding" out in the open).
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