XCOM: Enemy Unknown & Xenonauts: Is a ‘Dumbed Down’ Game Any Less Fun?

New Statesman’s Phil Hartup has an interesting comparison article that puts XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Xenonauts (both obviously informed by Microprose’s X-COM: UFO Defense) side by side. I’m going to spoil the answer for you and say that he prefers Xenonauts:

The flexibility of Xenonauts allows for a variety of approaches. You can control much of the inventory of your soldiers and there are more options, from sniper rifles to breaching charges to armoured shields to knock out gas rockets and electric stun batons. Different size transports allow for more troops but even at the start you have a healthy eight. Despite this though there is still repetitiveness to the game. XCOM manages to mitigate this through its more directed narrative; Xenonauts, on the other hand, can feel like a bit of a slog at times.

Story progress with Xenonauts is less structured; there are no cut scenes to tell you where you are in the campaign and little sense that you are moving along a path. In some ways this helps to build the sense that your enemy is unknown, because you only learn about their patterns and plans from what you can observe yourself. Some of the threat of an unknown enemy is lost when a helpful scientist pops up every so often to tell you what they are up to. This lack of a defined story is liberating, you create your own story, but it can also be more demanding. The game does not hold your hand, not even for a moment. You need to deviseyour own strategy.

In terms of difficulty both games are challenging, yet in different ways. While XCOM can effectively kill you with one bad mission – particularly in an iron man game – Xenonauts offers all manner of ways for your campaign to go wrong but most of them are survivable. That first terror mission in XCOM is almost always something of a bastard, by contrast in Xenonauts the larger number of troops earlier in the game means that you typically won’t have any catastrophic failures.

For all the things you can do in Xenonauts is the game actually any better? Well, simply, yes. The acid test is a simple one, having played both games, which do I go back to? After Xenonauts the boundaries of XCOM loom large in every aspect of the game. It feels confining, and even lazy. Despite the reduced production values there is a sense of consistency and intelligence to Xenonauts that XCOM often loses, questions it doesn’t answer – like, why do all the interceptors have to fly one at a time? Why does the team have to consist of only four soldiers at the start? When XCOM feels most like a game, it loses the suspension of disbelief that, despite the dated visual style, Xenonauts clings to like a terrier.