Goldhawk Interactive, the developer behind Xenonauts, must be big fans of the original X-Com: UFO Defense (which was released in 1993). Their title could almost be called X-Com: UFO Defense EE, because they’ve stayed true to the original template while mostly only improving the graphics and the interface. That begs the question: if a new game is just like a classic old game, then why bother with the new game at all, especially when the old game can be purchased for next to nothing? The answer for me is always the interface. Usually when people wax poetic about their favorite games of old, they forget just how unfriendly interfaces were even ten years ago let alone in the days of DOS. I’ll always take hotkeys and tooltips and unlimited save slots and amenities like that over interfaces without them, and so Xenonauts is a game that works for me. But will it work for you? Keep reading to find out.
If you managed not to play any of the various X-Com games (including 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown) or any of the related games (such as the trio of UFO games released in the 2000s), they all position you as the head of an organization set up to deal with an alien invasion. In Xenonauts, these events start in 1958 when an alien ship does so much damage that humanity eventually has to nuke it (and Iceland) to destroy it. Twenty years later, humanity is in much better shape, with soldiers and interceptors ready to go, and that’s when you take over — right in time for the aliens’ major assault.
Dealing with the alien invasion takes a lot of effort. You need to construct multiple bases in the world so you can detect when UFOs arrive and send interceptors to shoot them down. You need skilled soldiers so you can thwart alien ground attacks and scavenge the remains of downed UFOs. You need scientists to examine the alien technology so you can use it (or something similar) yourself. You need engineers to build state-of-the-art weapons, armor, and interceptors for you based on the alien technology. And you need to keep the countries of the world happy because their funding pays your bills, and if you lose too much of their support then you lose the game.
Each base you construct consists of a 6×6 grid. The 2×2 center of the grid is fixed as the base’s command center. This is the room you have to hold if aliens ever invade the base. Some of the facilities in the base (like radar arrays and hospitals) only take one square, while others (like hangars and living quarters) take two. The base you start with contains a little bit of everything, but any base you construct after that only contains the command center, and so you’ll be able to decide what role it should play. In my game, I found that my starting base could handle all the research and development I needed, and so my secondary bases were there mostly just to house radar arrays and hangars so I could detect more UFOs and shoot them down.
When a UFO (possibly with escorts) becomes visible on the world map, you can send up to three interceptors to shoot it down. In X-Com: UFO Defense your interceptors were faster than the UFOs, and so these battles were basically dogfights. But in Xenonauts, it’s just the opposite (until late in the game), and so the battles are more like jousts, where the two sides charge at each other before one side prevails. If you want, you can take control of your interceptors in these encounters, or you can let the game auto-resolve the outcome for you. I had pretty much no luck when I was in control, and auto-resolve always gave me better results, and so that’s what I went with. In sort of an odd (but friendly) twist, if one of your interceptors is shot down, it isn’t destroyed. It just gets towed back to its base, where it’s slowly put back together. Take that, Humpty Dumpty.
You start the game with ten soldiers, which is more than enough to fill a single troop transport. Soldiers are defined by six attributes: Time Units (or TUs), which measure how much they can do during their turn in a battle; Health, which is the same as the number of hit points they have; Strength, which measures how much equipment they can carry without a TU penalty; Accuracy, which measures how well they shoot guns and throw grenades; Reflexes, which measures how likely they are to interrupt an alien with reaction fire; and Bravery, which controls their morale and also acts as a defense against psionic attacks. You can also give a soldier a role (such as assault or sniper), but this is just for your benefit so you remember who is supposed to be doing what, and it doesn’t have much of an impact on the game.
After shooting down a UFO, you need to send your soldiers to the crash site so they can deal with any surviving aliens. These battles are turn-based, and they’re played out on a large square grid at a variety of locations (including farms, city streets, and train stations). On your turn, you can move your soldiers and have them attack as much as their TUs allow, and then when the aliens get their turn, they get to do the exact same thing. Since soldiers can move, attack, and then move again, that allows for some cheesy tactics — especially inside UFOs where you can open a door, fire at the aliens in the room beyond, and then close the door, leaving your soldiers in safety. Reaction fire is supposed to prevent this sort of thing to some extent, since it allows you to shoot during your opponent’s turn, but reaction fire always uses the least accurate firing option, and so it’s more useful for your soldiers (who become very accurate by the end of the game) than for aliens (who, as far as I can tell, don’t).
During combat, besides moving and shooting, soldiers can also crouch (to improve their aim and make themselves into smaller targets), they can use medipacks (to heal up to half the damage they’ve taken), they can throw grenades (including knock-out grenades, which makes capturing aliens easier), and they can hide behind cover. Just about everything can be used as cover, including trees, cars, and fences, and combined the cover objects make the battlefield a slightly safer place to be — well, at least for as long as they last.
Unfortunately, the combat engine is very simplistic, and it has lots of issues with line-of-sight (aliens can often shoot through walls), lighting (which becomes an issue during nighttime missions), multi-level terrain (which is a headache to deal with, especially at night), and even the cover. The problem with cover is that way too many things help out. By the end of the game your soldiers have the most powerful weapons ever imagined, and yet park benches, computer terminals, and two-foot hedges give protection (the hedges also inexplicably block sight).
Another issue with the missions is that there’s barely any variety to them. The maps are random-ish, and as you go along you gain better equipment and encounter tougher aliens, which makes things different, but 90% of the missions are for attacking downed UFOs. There are also rare missions for defending your base, attacking an alien base, or defeating a “terror” assault against a city, but the main difference between these missions and the downed UFO missions is the terrain, not your objective. For the terror missions in particular, if there’s any real benefit to saving civilians versus allowing them to become alien chow, I didn’t notice it. And so you kill aliens over and over again, in roughly the same way each mission, and it takes 75-100 of these missions (and 50+ hours) to beat the game. Luckily, you’re not forced to participate in every mission. If you want to, you can call down an airstrike on a crashed UFO, which earns you somewhere around half of the resources you would have gotten for sending in your troops. This helps a lot late in the game, when you’ve advanced your soldiers enough, and you’re just marking time until the final confrontation.
At the end of each battle, your soldiers can improve their attributes. Each attribute has a maximum value of 100, and soldiers can earn a point or two in each attribute if they do the right things. For example, if soldiers lug heavy equipment around, then they might improve their Strength, and if they fire enough reaction shots, then they might improve their Reflexes. Soldiers can also earn medals during the missions, and each medal improves their Bravery by a point. Medals are given out for things like killing enough aliens, participating in terror missions, or being the only survivor of a mission (or completing a mission solo, which is more likely).
When soldiers gain enough total points in their attributes, they also improve their rank, from private all the way up to (I think) major. This rank is basically how the game denotes a soldier’s level, and it’s there so you can easily tell at a glance how powerful your soldiers are. That is, unlike X-Com: UFO Defense, Xenonauts doesn’t try to mimic a realistic military hierarchy. At the end of the game, when I sent my 12 best soldiers on the final mission, ten of them were colonels and the other two were commanders.
Sort of surprisingly, one of the tougher parts of the game is maintaining your funding. The world is divided into ten regions, including North America, the Middle East, and Australasia, and each region only cares about itself. So if a UFO shows up over the Middle East and does some damage there, and you finally shoot it down when it’s over Europe, then Europe will increase its funding while the Middle East will decrease theirs. This makes the start of the game tough, as you can’t detect UFOs over most of the world, and your interceptors can’t fly very far. If the funding from a region drops to $0, then you lose the support of that region forever, and if you lose half of the regions, then you lose the game. In the first game of Xenonauts I played, I didn’t realize how the funding worked, and I was conservative about spending money — and by the time I started expanding it was too late. I had to start over.
Otherwise, the challenge is about what you should expect from a game of this sort. At the start, your rookie soldiers have low hit points, and their “armor” looks more like overalls, which means they die pretty easily and the early missions can be frustrating. But as you grind away the missions and build up your soldiers and tech, things even out a little, although one-shot kills are always a possibility (in particular, one alien melee creature always kills when it hits, no matter what armor your soldiers are wearing). I found the difficulty of the game to be reasonable throughout the campaign, even on the “normal” setting.
Where Xenonauts shows its budget-ness is in the graphics and sound. The game uses a fixed 2D isometric view. There isn’t any way to rotate the view, and the world looks very cartoony with its bright and distinct palette of colors. Your soldiers all look about the same except for the armor they’re wearing, which is sort of sad given all the genders and nationalities involved. Fire and smoke effects are also lacking. For the sound, there isn’t any voice acting at all, and the music and sound effects are basic.
The game’s interface is also lacking. I mentioned earlier that Xenonauts has a much friendlier interface than X-Com: UFO Defense, and that’s true, but it doesn’t have a good interface when compared to modern games. And so, while the interface has tooltips and hotkeys and a nice color-coded system for showing how far your soldiers can move, it also has some problems. As an example, during combat missions, your soldiers are assigned to the numbers 1-0 so they’re easy to select. That’s a nice enough idea. The problem is that they’re assigned randomly, and you can’t change the assignment, so if you’re looking for your assault soldiers, you never know where they’re going to be. It’d be nice if you could “sort” your soldiers so the assault guys come first and your snipers are last. The 1-0 assignment also has the issue that there can be 12 soldiers. For some reason the “-” and “=” keys aren’t used for the last two guys. Those guys don’t get hotkeys at all. Xenonuats also has strange problems with scrollbars (some screens don’t have scrollbars so you can’t see everything, and others have an invisible “bar” so they’re tough to scroll), and the interface uses the smallest text you’re ever going to see in a computer game. Xenonauts isn’t a good game to play if you have poor eyesight.
But overall, I think Xenonauts gets enough things right to be worthwhile. It isn’t as slick as the recent XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but it has some old school charm, and it’s about as close as you can come to playing X-Com: UFO Defense with a modern interface. Plus, no sooner had I finished playing than I saw that Goldhawk Interactive was close to releasing their final patch for the game, which looks as though it will fix many of the things I didn’t like about it (such as the wonky line-of-sight system). So if you like tactical strategy games in general and X-Com games in particular, then Xenonauts is a reasonable purchase at its $25 price tag.
