Xenonauts

Here to give this game a thumb up before the sequel drops. Bought it in 2015 because I didn't want to fight OldCOM's UI or learn how to make it work on a modern system. Learned a lot about OldCOM since then. Its feel and meta. An OldCOM vet's comparison of that to this, which I heard during my complete viewing of his letsplay of OldCOM, was that in OldCOM when you saw an alien you made it die. It was like hide and seek. In Xenonauts, you engage them in firefights. The latter is true, in my experience. A lot of players appear to struggle with this because they try to rush through ground missions and DIDN'T READ THE MANUAL. It's available in the launcher menu. If you buy the game, do yourself a favor and read it or keep it open while you're playing. It's that kind of game. I love it. It's the kind of game I come back to every 12-18 months. The rest of this will be pros and cons that stand out to me. +If you fail at something, it's usually your fault. 3 guys just died to one alien grenade? Your fault for bunching them up around a corner you hadn't cleared yet. Only exception I can think of is when an alien ship wave comes to a part of the world you haven't got interceptors stationed at yet. +C4. Oh baby. The brick of boom in this game has given me so much enjoyment. Is a whole factory presenting a major obstacle to you? Have your soldiers give 4-6 bricks to 2 fast guys, have those 2 prime them (1-9 turn fuse, your choice) and then just drop them out of their hand or backpack such that half the first floor walls experience a critical existence failure. The entire factory will collapse and paste any aliens inside. Truly an awesome sight to see buildings fall in this game and find a couple purple splat marks. +Bazookas. Flying boom cone. Tricky to use effectively, but let you deliver the above experience at range. +Competency payoffs. The first time you capture an alien corvette with no casualties without body armor you're going to want to light up a Cuban. +Fun progression. Going from dudes in WWI French uniforms shooting M16's to men in power armor wielding Gauss miniguns is a long journey and one which tells you indirectly that you played the game well. +The stategic UI is good. Biggest hassle is soldier loadouts but you have the default gear templates to help, and you can make as many as you want. +Strong workshop, and community content generally. I highly recommend the Community Edition over vanilla. It's so popular and good that it has an option for it in steam settings. +Managing aircraft distribution, selecting UFO targets, etc. is probably my favorite part, and I don't even use the air combat minigame. They just nailed it. In ground battles I find myself thinking "Gee I can't wait to get back to telling my MIGs to blow things out of the air." +You control the "timer" to defeat via your skill at strategy. The Veteran victory I got, UFO's couldn't really even stay in the air for long because my airforce had become so dangerous. +The final mission, which I won't spoil, is a real change of pace from every other tactical mission. It really is a test of everything the game teaches to that point. I had a great time killing a spread of all the enemy types without losing anybody. +Real sense of dread. The first few times you attack alien bases are going to be nail biters, especially if you try it without armor. -Imbalance in the progression. Your first body armor is so bad, the meta is to skip it. The worst offender IMO is the "top tier" interceptor which is an SR-71 Blackbird modified with alien tech. The problem with it, in vanilla, is that it only fires ALIEN BATTLESHIP ENGINES strapped to a rocket. You want it to do stuff? You gotta capture a battleship with its engine intact, which is a 90 minute time sink. And then that gives you only 1 shot. Hard pass. Just make the 'basic' top tier interceptor fighter which you can spam and fry vastly more targets. -Base placement meta is very stale. My first 3 bases follow a meta I read years ago: First cairo, then Cuba, then Papua or Manila. This because this setup gives you coverage over all regions in the order of how much money that coverage will yield. Your budgetting has to be tight so dropping that $500,000 initial base investment kinda necessitates this meta, or at most a shuffling of the order. I think the game would have benefited from adding "mini bases" with half the space. Enough for 1 radar, 4 hangars, and 3 missile batteries to fill coverage holes. Only after those first 3 can I afford to get "creative" with bases (*cough* Alaska, baby, protect those polar bears to make Uncle Sam and Papa Stalin send you even MORE cash). -Assault rifles SUCK. They tried to make them into some kind of jack of all trades weapon, but the end of result is trash of all trades. The just consume too many time units for all their attacks for their damage and accuracy. You're better off running teams of all specialists and getting proficient at positioning and anticipating where the enemy will engage you so that your long range and short range guys are in the right place. Experienced troops also get strong enough that you can absolutely give your snipers shotguns in their backpack or vice versa.

OG Xcom if playing it didn't make you wanna kill yourself

Я не рекомендую эту игру не под каким соусом, не даже под мод community, это отрыжка когда то легендарного х-кома, где был баланс, интерес к наземным операциям и желание поиграть еще и еще. Тут же баланс испаряется с количеством наигранного времени и вот уже при вероятности 95% ваши оперативники не просто промахиваются, а стреляют вообще в другую сторону, ладно бы с выстрелами так, тут как бы попал в -5% ну ок, пуля ушла мне не важно хоть в небо, но с гранатами как так? не рядом бросить, а вообще в другом направлении. А что пришельцы становятся не убиваемыми у них вдруг хп становится под +200едениц как только исследуешь новую технологию оружия, алло ее только исследовал, даже не произвел не одного пистолета, ну это ладно пол беды, помните х-ком там можно было взять 27 рыл в транспорт и с таким рандомом +\- как то тащить на равных с переменным успехом, тут приколитесь 10рыл максимум против 20-30, наземные операции становятся каким то кошмаром где либо после каждого хода приходится перезагружаться потому что, то очконавт гранату вместо того чтобы в открытую дверь кинуть он ее себе под ноги кидает, можно сказать кладет, то вместо того чтобы выстрелить с оставленных ему очков движения он просто смотрит как к нему потрошитель подбегает, хотя специально не стреляешь пока противник за укрытием, можно конечно стрельнуть перезагрузить еще раз стрельнуть пока не попадешь, ну бред конечно, либо пройти с потерями где выживет 1-3 солдата и то случайно, это на сложности сержант(стндартная), даже игра ufo aftermatch 2003 года будет получше наверное, с перехватами тоже шляпа самолеты могут догнать только маленькие тарелки, все остальное это игра в догонялки пока топливо не кончится, ну по всем фронтам лажа, а не геймплей, сидеть д р о ч и т ь с я в это нет никакого желания, наиграл 300 часов думая что можно что то исследовать и будет играбельно чисто на впечатлении от оригинального сегавского х-кома, но ничего там нет не надейтесь и не наступайте на мои грабли, те кто пишет положительный отзыв 100% сыграл пару начальных миссий где даже 15% шанс попадет и пошел дальше играть в другие игры.

This game has been out for a long time. The UI is clunky. The game frequent crashed for me. It has all sorts of minor bugs and a few major ones that I encountered (such as all my troops suddenly being unable to move anymore). Only under certain conditions can troops behind other troops manage to shoot without murdering the people in front of them, to make matters worse - auto shots on the enemy turn routinely end in the death of other squadmates. I have seen some truly laughable moments where a machine gun went horribly out of its way to hit a squad memeber that was like 15-20 degrees outside of my LOF. The missions, primarily alien recovery, always funnel into the same thing, coming in through the only door in the alien craft and through a any alien killbox, the only real option is to cheese it, especially on medium craft which have a funneling hallway right when you come into the craft. This game is an absolute savescum nightmare. With vehicles you routinely run into maps where basically half the map is cutoff because the vehicle doesn't have avenues wide enough to drive through. This game is a poor iteration on the x-com formula in many ways. And then some of the things that are definitely better like having roles for troops is inexplicably missing a delete role button, so if you aren't aware of this you'll find yourself with tons of unnecessary roles to scroll through. I did at least find the ship combat to be better all around and more interesting. Given how often this game has popped up on steam and how long it has been out - I was expecting a way better experience than what they delivered here.

I have never played a game with more infuriating logic. All of the nations on earth are facing an alien invasion and they decide to give you limited funds like defense budgets are always underfunded like the US military has a 900 billion dollar budget and you can't secure a million dollars a year to fight off aliens. I can't manage to kill an alien from 3 feet away with a damn shotgun, but then somehow an alien on the other side of the map manages to snipe my soldiers. And somehow the entire world has nearly 10 million active soldiers and I can't secure 10 skilled soldiers to fight off an invasion of los angeles. Somehow I manage o fight off an entire invasion of tehran, and the entire country of India decides i then deserve only 30k more per year for saving millions. Somehow I have a soldier standing 2 feet away from an alien who has two hp left and decides that then is a good time to panic and run away. Please note, that the community version still sucks. This game could've been so fun, it feels fun when the game logic works, but then that's only 5% of the time. Don't play unless you want a hole in your wall. P.S. , the game constantly has graphical and audio issues

Xenonauts is an extremely disappointing game full of wasted potential. The strategic layer is excellent, and Xenonauts is the first XCOM-like to have an air combat system that is actually fun and engaging to play. However all of this is spoiled by the terrible tactical layer. Combat is extremely simplistic, with very few options to choose from other than positioning and shooting. Cover is sparse and ineffective, your soldiers will routinely get killed while crouching behind full cover. The AI cheats and always knows your exact location, making tactical flanking maneuvers impossible. Even if you can "flank" an enemy, there is no reward for doing so, as there are no crits and you only get marginally better accuracy. The Time Unit action system is extremely fiddly, and the mechanic for reserving TUs to shoot is completely useless, as it does not allow you to reserve TUs to account for crouching or turning towards a target (yes, each of these requires TUs!). You will routinely find yourself making lethal mistakes because you miscalculated the number of TUs you needed by 1 point, and can no longer make the shot that you need. And of course there is no way to undo and retry such mistakes except by reloading a save game. Any actions other than moving and shooting are incredibly tedious to use. For example, to use a medkit you must first open a soldiers inventory, drag the medkit into their hand, then close the inventory, click the medkit, and right click to select how much HP to heal, and finally left click on the target to heal. Grenades are similarly tedious, and difficult to use effectively as well, requiring most of your turn to throw one with very short range, and will routinely land wildly off the mark, effectively wasting your entire turn. In short, do not expect to get far in this game without extensive save scumming. The camera cannot be rotated and walls and props will routinely obstruct your view, making it difficult to move your soldiers around. There is a button to toggle between showing wall, walls+ceilings, or none, but this only partly mitigates these issues. Finally, the game does not support basic features like borderless fullscreen, has trouble alt-tabbing, and has crashed repeatedly on me.

This is one of the most brutally challenging games I have ever played. I have seen things happen in this game that are so unfortunate it makes me question the nature of reality. Still one of the best alien defense games ever made, really makes you feel like you are fighting an unwinnable war.