A remake of the original game, designed to take advantage of the capabilities of modern machines. In some ways it succeeds.

Ten years ago, a game called X-COM: UFO Defense (or UFO: Enemy Unknown depending on where you lived) was issued by the now-defunct publisher Microprose. Despite the low horsepower of PCs back then, this game had everything except the sort of graphics we’re now used to.

You played the leader of an international agency dedicated to defending the Earth from an ever-increasing wave of alien attacks. On the strategy screens you assigned funding, carefully equipped and positioned interceptor aircraft, designed and built bases, and recruited scientists to research alien technologies.

When you took your elite squad on a mission, the game moved into a powerful and fun turn-based squad combat mode. The game was a smash success and spawned a long-running franchise (which mostly went downhill from the original).

Cenega Games’ new title, UFO: Aftermath is essentially a remake of the original game, designed to take advantage of the capabilities of modern machines. In some ways it succeeds.

The overall structure of the game is much the same, but a change in setting to a post-apocalyptic world (nicely captured in the good opening sequence) means that you don’t need to worry about keeping national governments on your side as in the original.

In fact, you have very little to worry about. Rather than handling the management of a large organisation including logistics, you have unlimited supplies of material, and your decision on acquiring a new base is limited to declaring it military, scientific or engineering in its focus.

Strangely you also have an unlimited supply not only of ammunition but of jet fighters, which magically appear at any military base that you wish. In fact, your strategic choice boils down purely to which missions to accept (and which to delegate to computer-controlled forces).

Your troops (who gain experience and skills as the game progresses) fight their missions in pausable real time on a 3D map. This all looks very nice, but a rather strange control system stop the game whenever any soldier completes his or her orders.

This makes large firefights difficult to handle: pausable real time only works for much more freely-flowing combat systems. Essentially this engine is turn-based under the hood: and everything would have been much less frustrating had it remained so on the surface, too.

It is especially frustrating that soldiers will not open fire unless specifically ordered to do so. And then, if you tell them to fire three shots at an enemy, they will do precisely that and then stop.

The range of orders is rather limited: despite the 3D nature of the map, the engine is actually a step back from the ten-year-old X-COM original, which included multi-floored buildings and a wide range of reaction-fire options.

It is also an exercise in annoyance to get your elite troopers to change their weapons, something which is inexcusable given how often you’ll end up doing it. The tactical part of the game gets hard very quickly. Save early, save often. It’s a pity that there’s such a mismatch between the difficulties of the two parts of the gameplay.

So, what’s good? Graphics are generally good in the tactical sections, and beautiful for the strategic screen: a lovely rotatable, zoomable, globe with day and night moving around it. The music is generally understated, but is atmospheric and entirely appropriate.

Sound, though, is patchy: the order-acknowledgements from your soldiers are uniformly awful (every elite commando is retarded, or a racial stereotype, or both). But on the whole the look-and-feel are just right for the genre.

It’s a shame that the gameplay falls so flat. It might have been better if Altar (the developer) had simply updated the graphics and sound, but otherwise left a classic game alone.

As it is, they seem to have removed much of the delicate strategic balancing which made the original so much more than a squad-based tactical game, and many of the tactical elements which made it stand head and shoulders above resource-management games.


Review by Marc Read.