Retro Review: X-COM: UFO Defense

X-COM: UFO Defense (or X-COM: Enemy Unknown for our European readers) is not a game, it is an interactive survival guide to prepare you for the inevitable: alien invasion. You’re put in charge of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, or X-COM for short, created by the nations of the world. Your mission is to kill the alien freaks at every opportunity and repel the invasion for the various countries that are funding your operation.

It’s all about space coverage,
and realizing China will defect no matter what.

If you should fail to defend a country, they will decrease funding or might even defect to the aliens. In order to protect them and effectively manage the incoming threat, you’ll have to build a number of bases strategically placed around the world. Build all your bases in America and the rest of the countries will likely yank precious monies as you’ll be unable to retaliate in a timely manner to the various flying saucers and terror ships that cross through their skies.

To protect the air and wipe out the alien invasion you’ll need to manage an intricate base system where you’ll construct such facilities as hangers, living quarters, radar systems, general stores, and more. There’s a lot of resource and personnel management going on at this level, and an inability to think ahead can result in time lost as you wait for essential materials to arrive. It’s infuriating to deploy your troops into a fight only to find them waving empty guns in front of some slithery aliens.

Reaction time is a factor, so pay attention.

Once you’ve got your soldiers geared up and ready to go, you’ll need a crash site. The aliens like flying around in their sexy, purple spacecrafts, and landing for only minutes to kidnap some innocent humans or scout out a country. Occasionally, you’ll catch a landed craft, but more often than not you’ll need to shoot that sucker out of the clouds. You can send your interceptors in guns blazing or make them approach with a little more trepidation, as you keep the enemy craft just barely inside firing range.

When you’ve brought one of the saucers down and have a pretty little crash site, it’s time to send in your squad of soldiers. As soon as you fly these brave boys and girls onto the field of battle, you’ll skillfully managing them in a careful game of turn-based combat. Each soldier has a number of individual statistics (firing accuracy, strength, time units, etc.), and you must exercise each soldier’s abilities in order to make an effective squad.

And this is where UFO Defense becomes an astoundingly complex game. Tactics in taking on these aliens are paramount. Say there’s an alien just inside a building, but the second you open the door, he fires a lethal burst into your troops. No problem. You see that feeble wooden wall, the kind of wall that defies the wills of many a video game character? Not you. That flimsy wooden wall has served its usefulness. It’s all that stands between you and the alien scum. So what do you do? Shoot through that pathetic excuse for a barrier to kill that sucker.

Who needs doors when you have the sky?

So you can shoot a wall, big deal. Actually it is. This is one of the few games where just about everything I thought I could do, I actually could do. I could have one of my men toss his gun to another that ran out of ammo, use high explosives to blast openings in alien ship hulls, or crouch one soldier so another soldier can shoot over him.  It’s one of the rare games where I make my own rules instead of following the rules set by the game, where I approach a situation in unconventional and exciting ways. In fact, just writing about this now makes me realize I could turn a soldier into a suicide bomber by having him set a timer for an explosive and sending him running into a room full of xenophobes. It’s that ability to improvise and create exciting, on-the-fly tactics that makes UFO Defense a deep game experience.

And you’ll need to develop smart tactics because this game is brutally hard. This makes sense; if the aliens were smart enough to get here, then they’re going to have superior technology. A lot of the game is a struggle for survival. The save feature will be invaluable, even for the most veteran of players, as you will need to reload over and over again. So how do you level the playing field?

These odds hardly seem fair.

Sun Tzu once said “know thy enemy,” and since the original title of the game is UFO: Enemy Unknown that’s relevant advice. After you survive an alien encounter, you’ll gut out the alien ship for everything valuable and haul it back to your base. You can hire a team of scientists to study these items so you can use the enemy’s weapons against them. And once you’ve figured out the tech, you can hire some engineers to manufacture a plethora of alien weaponry.

If you’ve lasted long enough to start gaining such tech and find the juicy surprise one research option gives you, the tables begin to turn. Combine the human spirit with crazy alien technology and you’re ready to become a mean green killing machine. Even then you’ll face some tough foes. I was still losing troops and gear even in the last moments of my play-through. It’s a tough, yet satisfying experience.

UFO Defense is an excellent blend of challenging gameplay, complex turn-based combat, and solid simulation. More importantly, it has enough depth and freedom so players can play how they want. It’s one of those exceptional games where your imagination truly is the limit. X-COM: UFO Defense hits a gaming sweet spot by both enabling the player to be creative and challenging the player with difficult foes.  For that reason alone, it’s a title every PC gamer up for a challenge should check out.