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Pancake Batter
6 Jan 2009, 06:16pm
X-COM : Enemy Unknown

The year is 1998, UFO sightings in earth have increased along with abductions and terrorism caused by the unknown alien forces. The nations of the world could no longer sit around to the increasing alien threat, thus giving birth to the extraterrestrial combat unit known as X-COM. You are the commander of X-COM, your mission is to monitor the alien activities on earth, shooting down alien craft, saving any surviving civilians at alien terror sites, discovering alien bases and capturing aliens alive to learn what their goals are on earth.

Overview

This game is a turn-base style strategy game. You are presented with a map of the earth called the Geoscape, where you can view any of your bases that you build, be warned of any UFOs flying in your base's vicinity, be notified of any alien terror sites, or patrol around with your aircraft in search of any alien bases. Doing well in your missions (anything from recovering UFOs and going to terror sites) determines how well your monthly ratings will be, which in turn means more funding from supporting nations
http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/9651/ufo3wz5.png


This is your base, not much to explain here other than that you build shit, hire soldiers/scientists/engineers, buy/sell stuff, hold captive aliens, research, manufacture weapons, view soldier stats, equipping your aircrafts, etc.
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/5514/ufo4ot7.png

This is the combat side of the gameplay, you control your squad of soldiers to battle the alien menace in a turn-based type of gameplay.
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*Let's Play video by Kikoskia


*Didn't include any pics of air combat, you're just shown a small little window of two green objects shooting each other till one goes down*


Gameplay

The whole base building and such is pretty much the same as any RTS type games, but the best part is customizing your own little squads of soldiers, the possibilites are endless. Want to make a tactical squad consisting a leader, medic, scout, sniper, grenadier? Go right ahead. Want everybody equipped with grenade/rocket launchers? You could do that, though not advised. Want to make a single uber soldier that can take on anything? It'll probably take a ton of saving and loading. Not too emotionally attached to your soldiers? Hell, just use them all as cannon fodder, they are easily replaceable after all. In combat, any action your soldier preform uses up the soldier's time units which is recovered to full whenever it is your turn.

That aside, in the beginning of the game, you are simply out matched by the aliens. They got superior technology, soldiers, some of the alien races have access to psionic attacks (which could easily decimate your band of rookies) etc. It also doesn't help that the aliens will also get stronger as the months passes, so you should always be productive. Researcing better weapons and armor is a must as are keeping your soldiers alive through missions so they can gradually improve.


Sound

Not much you can say about the music in a DOS game, though the music fits perfectly with the game. It has this very eery and mysterious feel to it during the combat phases of the game.


Graphics

Nothing great for today's standard but for a DOS game, it good though all of your soldier sprites are always a white guy/girl (though you can see what race they are in the stat screen.)


Controls

Sort of annoying at first, the GUI on the combat screen is a bit confusing since they don't tell you what they do unless you click on them, wasting time units for your soldier (though some are easy to tell due to the little stickman such as crouching). It takes time getting used to the controls, I still get frustrated when I accidently move a soldier somewhere I don't want and since there's no way to cancel the movement, it wastes precious time units that I could use to shoot stuff.


Conclusion

Overall, this is a very good game even though the controls and difficulty might take some time getting used to. I decided to get this game when watching Kikoskia's amusing Let's Play videos on youtube and thought it would be a good game to try out, let's just say I'm not disappointed. This game is only $5 on Steam and only takes 20Mb of hdd space or you can buy all 5 games for $15, can't go wrong with either option.



Overall rating : 9/10