Xenonauts

> play Xcom 2 and win with ease > play long war of the chosen "hmm still too easy, and a bit disjointed. I want more!" > find this game "oh, looks like fun! time to wipe the floor with some ayyys" > gets a plasma shot in the face the moment I peek a corner and die instnantly "damn, ayyys got hands"

Xenonauts (CE) was highly addicting for me. But this does not make it a good game. I have had fun with it. At times I think I like it, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this game for anyone attempting an XCOM style ironman veteran difficulty run. The critical problem with the game is it appears the dev(s) recognised a few elements of XCOM (1994) that needed improvement. Namely air-combat and squad tactics. They focused on these to the detriment of essentially every other part of the game. At every turn the game seems designed to hamper your fun. You can't breach UFOs from any angle anymore, you must go through the prescribed means of doing so. This makes every mission feel very samey and requires you to play in an optimal way. Not a fun way, an optimal way. The game is effectively a tightrope walking simulator. You will play the exact way the game wants you to play or so help you God. Aliens can pretty much see through walls, know where you are, while you are left at the mercy of your own line of sight. Getting new recruits to replace the dead ones in the middle-late game is a massive pain, since the aliens are going to be fielding upgraded versions of theirs but you are relying on fresh faces. Other ventures into the genre helped solve this issue with some catch-up mechanics like getting new recruits who are already more advanced. But here if you face a few squad wipes it is basically game over. On top of that the game is still buggy to this day, you run the risk of what is essentially a save corrupting bug if you don't have the game installed to your C: drive. There are little 'choices' that are designed to drive you up the wall. If extracting from a mission, your weapons left inside the dropship will be deleted on returning to base. Oddly the game does not do the same for the armour on any dead soldiers you cart to the dropship. I have effectively lost the 80 hour campaign I was on because I extracted from a bad mission but forgot to keep the weapons in the inventory of the extracting soldiers. This is not fun, or fair. It appears to be a consequence of the dev(s) not wanting you to leave missions with alien loot left on the floor of your dropship. Do you see the problem here? A clear oversight/glaring problem has appeared in the game as a result of the dev(s) wanting to counter-act a tactic you could do in XCOM (1994). I can understand wanting to flip the table and try something else, but that thing you try needs to be fun and interesting in its own right instead of being a 'HA GOTCHA!' for fans of the original XCOM. Finally the worst part about Xenonauts is that it just lacks sauce, or soul. I don't like relying on such an arbitrary idea but it just feels grey and lifeless. The reliance on tension, fear and stress only go so far. People who have played the game understand. The enemy designs are flat, texture-less. The environments are boring and samey. There is no spice, no texture. If this was the only issue I would look past it, but it just begins to grate on you in concert with all the other problems of this game. As of writing this I have not totally abandoned this campaign. I will try to beat the game, even if this run fails. I ought to point out I have also lost a 100+ ironman campaign in the last mission because a soldier shot a rocket into a wall. I hope Xenonauts 2 is a better game and stands on its own instead of trying to be XCOM but more stressful and frustrating.

The game is broken, bad guys can fire through walls, you can't

A nice spiritual successor to the 1994 X-Com game. I enjoyed both the strategic layer and the tactical combat. Personally, I didn't care much for more detailed air combat but everyone else seems to like it a lot, and it's not like it is bad just an area I was less interested in. Any other issues I may have had were solved by the Community Edition, plus there is a lot of mods to let you tweak the experience. Don't forget to use the Community Edition: Right click -> Properties -> Betas -> Beta Participation -> Select community: Xenonauts Community Edition branch

It's basically XCOM. And I love XCOM. It's not XCOM. Nothing is XCOM except XCOM, but this is pretty good. It can get a little repetitive, but that's when you load your whole squad with rocket launchers and go have a blast. The game is stable on vanilla, I tried using the Community Edition with Lore+ and Armored Assault mods, but the game crashed like every 10 minutes with those. I reinstalled and haven't had a crash in days. If you never played XCOM before, this is a good place to start your alien defense simulator adventure. You manage everything and it's really like 3 games in 1 where you manage your development, do air battles with UFOs, then go to the crash sites to get tactical on dem AYYYS. It's kinda like Fallout 1&2 and Fallout Tactics. Turn-based, beer&pretzels, save anytime type of deal. Plus they did a really good job with the hardware, I love just looking at them planes and guns.

I want to love this game, but I can't. I started playing this genre with XCOM Enemy Unknown, and was drawn to Xenonauts as it did away with the artificial difficulty of the "group trigger" in XCOM EU, where spotting an enemy activates that group of enemies which immediately gives them free movement. This meant that if you triggered a group at the end of your turn, especially a group of Chryssalids, your whole strike team could easily get wiped out within 3 turns. Xenonauts doesn't have this "trigger" mechanic, which makes Xenonauts fundamentally better. However, this superior design is nullified by the Zombie-Reaper death mechanic. The Reaper is effectively the Chryssalid from XCOM EU, and both are the most dangerous enemies in both games. Their mechanics are basically the same, where they kill any human, be they under your command or not, typically in one hit, and then infect their corpse with eggs to make another Reaper/Chryssalid, which are carried initially by the zombified human host they were implanted into. In Xenonauts, when you kill the Zombie, even if you do so with explosives or otherwise an extremely powerful weapon, it instantly spawns the Reaper, which is free to act as normal once you end your turn. This means that to kill it, you need to kill both its Zombie host, and then the Reaper, in a single turn. This requires you to direct a enormous amount of firepower on to effectively a single enemy, and you must do so by using 2 separate attacks, first killing the Zombie, then the Reaper. Therefore, you can't deal with this problem with just 1 well placed rocket, or a high damage attack from for example a machine gunner. Often times you just won't have enough firepower nearby able to attack this enemy to deal with it, and sometimes even attacks from your whole strike team might not do the job, but even if it does, you've now used all your actions for this turn on this single enemy, so if there are other enemies nearby (usually the case), they will then be what kills you. This creates this frustrating damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario whenever you encounter a Zombie, where either you focus everything on killing it, meaning something else kills your guys, or you split your attention to also deal with other threats, meaning you now won't be able to kill the Zombie-Reaper combo. On the harder difficulties, the game is already hard enough. Playing on Veteran-Ironman, it's very common that my strike team takes casualties on missions, and it's not uncommon that I'll lose the whole strike team or almost all of it. When you encounter Reapers though, this dumb Zombie-Reaper death/spawn mechanic basically means unless you get lucky, all your guys are gonna die. Reapers are already the most dangerous enemy even without this dumb mechanic, and with it they are just straight overpowered and broken. If you only consider everything else bar this mechanic, this game is great, but because Reapers are so consequential as a threat, this dumb Zombie-Reaper death/spawn mechanic ruins it for me.

Sorry, but I won't recommend it. It's a game from 2014 and I had the impression that I was playing an x-com clone from ~2000. The game has a lot of bugs: I didn't use mods and I still lost progress a dozen times because there was a crash at the end of a land or air battle. Bugs allow you to go beyond the map. The final mission is weak, and the fights with subsequent UFOs are simply tiring. Bugs made noises to go loop like crazy :/ The worst thing is that the game is simply a poor imitation of X-com and has a worse atmosphere, worse QOL and generally, as I like to replay old X-com games, Xenonauts irritated and tired me. Why the game loads for even 20-30 seconds on hardware from 2023 is a mystery to me...