The interface doesn’t really take advantage of more modern, mouse-driven control. And the aliens are a really uninteresting bunch – such as alien crabs and gelatinous goo. There’s less environmental damage modeling than there was in the original—you can blow up the occasional car or wall, but what about taking out the walls of a downed alien ship?—and cover for your troops seems more theoretical than usable (aliens often hide behind things, but it seems like their weapons work through any object). The missions are generic and repetitive, moving from being merely hard to nearly impossible once you head toward the second half of the game. The aliens have essentially destroyed the world, meaning the urban battles all take place in empty, nearly-destroyed cities that are very dull-looking and repetitive. The tactical combat is exciting, it’s almost ludicrously challenging, and the atmosphere sucks you in. Once patched, it’s easy to feel a certain amount of fondness for Aftermath.
Ufo aftermath review Patch#
Out of the box, Aftermath is incredibly buggy, but a patch addressed its most egregious problems. Certain events (optionally) trigger the game to pause—a member of your team reaches the end of his or her movement, or you run into a bad guy, to use two examples—but there’s less tension and dread because in real-time, because there’s just less time to think about those awful aliens. With the real-time system, you plot out your movement while paused, then hit “play†and wait for things to happen. The turn-based combat of X-COM was intense because your movement points had to be doled out so judiciously you had to leave some in order to be able to return fire if an alien moved into your field-of-view. Aftermath keeps it consistent throughout, which may sound like a disastrous decision but is, in reality, only a partial misstep.
The original ran in pausable real-time at the global level, but switched to pure turn-based mode in combat.
Ufo aftermath review full#
You have full control over individual troops in these tactical battles—they have no AI whatsoever, which proves problematic (how about just returning fire, or ducking?). You eventually send them all over the world to take on the alien menace, and actual combat takes place on small maps. From a globe-level view, you research your enemy and develop new technologies, manage bases, and outfit your troops. It shares the same basic structure as X-COM: The earth is under attack by aliens, and it’s up to you to head up an organization created to send the critters back to their home planet. That it comes up short isn’t too much of a shock if anything, the fact it holds up as well as it does is perhaps the bigger surprise. Considering that the first developer of Aftermath made the original X-COM, and that the UK name for X-COM was UFO: Enemy Unknown, this new game has a lot of legacy to live up to.
Ufo aftermath review series#
After a long, strange journey that saw it change publishers, developers, and names during the course of its development, UFO: Aftermath arrives as a spiritual, if not literal, successor to the legendary X-COM series of turn-based games.
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