Call me when they have deformable terrain and a usable interface.
What’s wrong with the interface? It’s got tooltip support and is basically similar to the one in X-Com.
Personally, their inventory seemed broken. My counts for items on the buy/sell screen differed from what I could equip or had in the ship. Furthermore, when messing around equipping multiple ships, it seemed like some equipment was just stowed on one ship or another and no way to transfer between the two (except maybe equipping a person on one ship, dropping him and moving him to the other).
Granted, I didn’t play the latest update. Overall, would be nice if that whole inventory system was overhauled, allow certain equipment profiles to be saved/edited and filled in as much as possible. I got real tired of spending half the game plunking the same 10 items on inventory slots…
I don’t think they are trying to reinvent much so far. It’s a beta and I think they are still focusing on adding core gameplay elements. That said, I believe I saw an option to choose an alternate UI when I installed this version.
As for inventory management, again it’s pretty much XCom. At least it remembers the load out so you aren’t re-equipping the troops every time, like a lot of these games.
For a free game, it pretty much accomplishes the “graphically updated XCom” vibe people claim to want.
Yeah…what the hell were they thinking when they stuck the mechs in their WW2 game?
Except for the changeable terrain, which is really a fairly big part of XCom.
It does do some neat stuff aside from that - I really like the starting weapons, for exmaple. I’ve barely played it since for some reason the game maps run at 4fps on my machine, but it held together fairly nicely. I think I can forgive destructible stuff a bit in leiu of the random environments and other stuff.
And it’s free!
That said, the interface is, indeed, somewhat horrid. My friend who played a bit more than me couldn’t get past it - is there even a way to scroll the screen which isn’t on the mouse?
KG
I think there are keyboard shortcuts. I haven’t played in a long time, but the previous release had a new tactical interface that seemed closer to the old one. I actually preferred the new one…
I haven’t played the original, but I like the decent variety of ground-based missions.
I suspect destructible terrain might not happen at all. It’s a Quake 2 engine game, so unless the team finish the content very quickly and have the skill to implement it (assuming it’s even possible to implement) people may have to live without it.
This saddens me. One of the best experiences in X-Com is gradually building up your destructive power. You started with lobbing grenades that didn’t as much as scorch the side of Farmer Bob’s barn, to where you could make breach entries on the control center of a battleship-class UFO with a pin-point blaster bomb.
They were thinking that Ma. k SF3d was awesome.
Which is true, but didnt help the game.
It’s not just the enjoyment aspect. There were real tactics involved in blowing things open to get shots at creatures, or blowing things up to deny access.
I just installed Xcom gold from Hotd, and I can’t get it to play right. When it loads up the screen is really distorted to the point I can’t tell what is what, I tried telling windows to run in 640x480 but it’s not working. What else do I need to do to be able to see what’s going on.
edit: Sound seems to work, and I turned off visual themes and put on display 256 colors only.
The windows version shipped with some kind of graphics bug. I remember that you used to be able to play it by turning off all video acceleration in Win98SE. There was a guy who wrote a fix for it-- in fact, I think the later versions of the indispensable XComUtil program included that fix, so look for that.
Deformable terrain is a HUGE part of X-COM. Not only does it allow you to cut through obstacles and destroy cover, but it makes you feel like you’re playing in a “real” world and your actions have consequences. There is nothing that breaks immersion faster than firing a game’s most powerful weapons at a wooden door and seeing it still standing, unscathed, when the smoke clears.
Vaporizing the bananas with the first shot, shaving the eyebrows of a civilian-explosively hitting a gas pump with the second, and hitting the Chrysalis in the face with the third shot was truly a moment of epiphany.
Not having played X-Com in any iteration before, I can live with the lack of deformable terrain. Would be nice, but it’s not essential.
What I really wish it wouldn’t do is fan my guys out around the dropship when the mission starts. Oh, how nice! You put all the guys with sniper rifles and rocket launchers on one side, and the assault and shotgun guys on the other!
Update: there was a Xcom fix with the download and running that the game is working now. I’ve ran a few missions already and of course got a few guys killed.
The game seems to stutter abit but other then that it’s working fine. I had one CTD before a mission but I’m saving now before starting any mission to keep that from causing any trouble.
One last thing does anyone have some suggestions for a complete noob at X-Com?
Research Heavy Plasma weapons as soon as you find some.
No no. You want medikits and lasers first. Once you research laser rifles move on to plasma tech and alien grenades. ALSO! Don’t bother with regular grenades, buy high explosives instead.
Buy tanks.
Spam scientists (50 is a good start).
Manufacture laser cannons for a tidy profit - once you’ve geared up, you can say goodbye to money woes.
Most importantly, don’t get too attached to anyone. :)