UFO: Alien Invasion 3D 2

Disclaimer: I've decided to take a look at UFO Alien Invasion on a very cloudy day of December. I'm also listening to a Cryo Chamber ambient mix while writing this.

When UFO: Terror from the Deep, the unforgiving tactical challenge from developer Microprose, came out during the nineties, I was unfortunately put off by its complexity. But I was always enamored with the concept of managing a para-military organization and having to face an alien threat that's bent on destroying humanity. It was when Firaxis released their re-imagined X-COM game, that I took a stab at defending planet Earth from pesky little flying saucers and their crew.

Of course, as with any updated franchise, the gameplay was smoothed out, controls were polished, and boundaries were redrawn. You could no longer bring an army of cannon fodder to an encounter, and you only had to manage a single base, which was also immune to attacks. The gameplay was different, but not in a wrong way. Elegance replaced fiddliness and quality replaced quantity. I later found out that the re-imagined game design was made to work as a tabletop game before being translated into code. The result was me enjoying dozens of hours of X-COM.

But the player base can never be satisfied completely. There were always those rugged UFO veterans who wanted more of the same, and while the modern X-COM: Enemy Unknown covered for the shameful "Bureau" game, it wasn't enough apparently. But would-be X-COM killers have always been on the market. From ALTAR Interactive's UFO trilogy (Aftermath, Aftershock, and Afterlight) to Xenonauts and the recently announced Phoenix Point, the genre isn't going away anytime soon.

UFO: Alien Invasion is not another spinoff at the theme, but a collaborative effort to re-create the original X-COM but with a graphics face-lift. To that, I can confidently say that it failed. Although the first stable version was released only in 2014, the visual style looks stuck in the early era of 3D gaming, when everybody thought that 3D was a good thing no matter what. Well, today we know that you can't add a dimension and increase resolution without compromising the style and charm of a beloved title. That's precisely what UFO Alien Invasion did, and as a consequence, it is not only as cumbersome to play as the nineties X-COM, but also ten times as ugly. Just look at those atrocious character portraits! The camera movement and the interface aren't spiffy either. I know it's free an all, but if you really can't skip buying a few beers to purchase a more polished game, you should at least take a look at OpenXcom.

I know this was more of a rant than anything else, but there's enough info on X-COM out there, and if you don't have a clue about the gameplay, then I warmly recommend you take a look at Firaxis' XCOM: Enemy Unknown or its sequel.

Final Thoughts (or TLDR)

UFO: Alien Invasion is to be avoided unless you're broke and at the same time, highly nostalgic for the year 2000.