Since nobody else has mentioned it, it looks like I’ll be the first to offer some impressions of UFO: Aftermath. Got it on Thursday, been playing it all weekend and I’m ready to offer an opinion now: Get this game. It’s at least 80% of the “XCOM 1 with updated graphics” people have been screaming for. I’ll keep it as spoiler free as possible. There’s also a fair bit to cover, so apologies if I don’t mention your favourite features, but feel free to ask and I’ll try to answer.
The premise is very similar to XCOM - aliens have invaded, and you need to lead an elite group of soldiers on a bunch of tactical ground missions to kick them off your planet, whilst co-ordinating a greater strategic effort over the globe. So, how does it all work? Well, the first thing you’ll notice is that the Strategic game has changed, despite looking almost identical to the original (the Geoscape). No more base micromanagement - each base can be Military, Research or Engineering. Mil bases increase your control over an area and can be used to launch interceptor jets and the trusty troop transports, in this case a chopper. Additional Research and Engineering bases will reduce the time needed to perform those tasks. Also, you can’t build bases: they must be captured in a two part tactical mission. The tech tree is much larger than in any of the XCOM games, and most of the story in UFO is told through research reports (the rest being told via hardcoded missions, more on those later).
The game automatically generates most missions available to you with some special internal voodoo. According to the designers, it will create “flashpoints” where human forces are coming into contact with the aliens and generate a mission there. Missions can be of various types: recon an area, see one alien of each type, capture a live alien, eliminate all aliens, capture a base, raid an alien base, destroy an alien installation, etc. The exceptions to this are the missions you generate by shooting down a UFO and sending a team to clean up the area. These are also two- part missions (1 - reach the entrance to the UFO, 2 - kill or capture all occupants). Other exceptions are the aforementioned story missions that will pop up when you’ve met certain hidden criteria, the first of which takes you to Area 51 to grab some documents. An important point to note here is that you cannot and should not attempt every mission that appears on the strategic map. You only control the elite soldiers of Earth’s forces, while there are actually many more human units all over the globe. So, you can delegate a mission to these AI forces if you don’t feel like dealing with it yourself. This adds a great deal of strategy to the Geoscape game, having to choose which missions you’ll do yourself and which to leave to the vanilla soldiers.
The tactical game is the meat of UFO as it was in XCOM. The graphics look dark and post apocalyptic, very reminiscent of Fallout Tactics, and the terrains are randomised, as expected, with a healthy variety of location types. The pausable/realtime Simultaneous Action System (SAS) implemented here is very slick. You can queue up a bunch of actions for each of your soldiers, un-pause and watch what happens or pause to tweak your plans at any time. Soldiers can use cover and fire round corners. Some of the static objects can be destroyed while buildings can’t and also can’t be entered, and while I don’t really miss this too much, I realise that some will be disappointed. There’s a shockingly large number of real world weapons (no melee), before you even get to use any alien tech. All loot is auto collected at the end of a mission, but you can take the weapons off alien corpses if you need to use them straight away. A basic RPG style experience/levelup system is implemented, making your troops valuable rather than cannon fodder. Soldiers have main attributes and derived skills. When you level up, you get to apply a point to an attribute which in turn increases several skills. There are many different types of aliens, apparently about 25 in total, and they range from utterly harmless to completely fucking deadly. Make no mistake - the tactical game is hard as all hell. You need to really use squad level tactics well to survive here.
So what’s the verdict? I like it a lot. It’s unquestionably reminiscent of XCOM, thematically and in game design. The graphics aren’t the best I’ve ever seen, but they’re not horrible either. Music is fair to good but the sound is sparse and soldier voices are horrible. The most important thing I need to make clear is that this game equals XCOM in addictiveness. It truly has the “one more tactical mission before bed” qualities of it’s predecessor and has kept me awake at night thinking about how I’m going to resolve a FUBAR’d UFO recovery where I’ve been surrounded by Reticulans with plasma launchers. Just as in XCOM, the strategic layer combined with the story/research provide a strong motivation to plough into the next tactical mission. Who knows, you may find a new alien to kill or gun to use.
The floor is open for questions.