UFO: Alien Invasion Game 2.2 Review review

Just like the X-COM games of days gone by, UFO: Alien Invasion (UFO:AI) tasks the player with defending Earth from aliens intent on murdering everyone they come across. Typical evil space-faring race stuff, really. To do so the nations of the world band together to form Phalanx, a multi-national task force, whose job it is is to put a halt to said alien scoundrel's plans.

The game is split into two sections: the first is the geoscape, a world map from which you can build bases, do research, and launch interception and transport craft. The second section of the game is a turn-based tactical battle map, or battlescape, from which you command the forces of Phalanx in its brave effort to defend Earth. After you send a troop transport craft to a mission site this is where you end up. It's an unforgiving place. This is especially true of the first mission that appears on the geoscape. For some reason the game throws one of the more difficult maps in the game at you for your first taste of tactical combat. Combine this with the inability to save the game mid-mission and you have a rather frustrating first experience of combat. While it's not impossible, it certainly would be nice to start off with one of the smaller, more focused maps with less buildings cluttering them. It does do a good job of showing you what the tactical combat experience in the game is like, though. It's hard and unforgiving, especially to newbies, even those that played the X-Com series.

While it may appear random on first play, there are a lot of scripted events that happen every game. Terror missions seem to appear in the same order and around the same time for each game. This leads to a flaw that is probably one of the biggest with the current iteration of the game: terror missions never go away. They sit on the map and cause 6 civilian casualties every couple of days. Considering the game only allows around 40 before you lose, this is tantamount to forcing the player into playing these missions. X-COM was all about choice up until very near the end. You decided what to do. If you wanted to you could completely ignore terror sites. Sure, that tactic might not have been the smartest, but then at least you got to play the game without the drudge of knowing that on its way is a mission that will make you quit and play something else instead.

What it also does is dictate where you will put your first base. Unless you want to lose rather quickly, you will turn on the 2D version of the geoscape on the options menu and place your base as central as you possibly can. That way you stand the most chance of being able to get to each mission site without being told your transport jet can't reach that far and waiting to slowly run out of available civilian casualties. With civilians flocking to the terror site it's a nuisance you can't really afford to leave while you build another base closer to it. I'm not really sure why the civilians keep going there. My guess is the scheming aliens are running one of those "Win a free car/boat/time-share villa" promotions and are just relying on human stupidity.

The map design and inability to save on the battlescape lead to a rather stifled tactical combat portion of the game. Where X-COM had a great system for handling reaction fire that could really save your butt at times, the one in UFO:AI seems to be overly relied upon. Time units (what you use to move your soldiers around and attack etc.) can be reserved and dedicated using a special reaction-fire button. While this may seem like a cool innovation to begin with, it soon becomes obvious that it has not been thought through properly. Each attack costs the same amount of Time Units to reserve no matter how many bullets are fired during the attack. If you set your reaction-fire shot to full-auto it costs the same amount as if you set it to just one bullet. Even without this flaw it seems like too far of a leap away from the games roots. The winning tactic in the game soon emerges: standing around doorways with reaction fire set on all but a couple of your team. Two attack, the others guard. If you don't use this tactic (or one similarly as cowardly) you'll often find yourself with two or three Phalanx casualties per mission early on in the game. With a game that has troop advancement, the idea is you're supposed to improve on the troops you have. They're far more disposable in UFO:AI than they ever were in X-COM, even if the troop pool is limited. This squad-based tactical slowness may be realistic, but it's not all that fun. Unless you want to play with a squad of fresh recruits on every mission, you will play the game like a cowardly-custard and not like the alien fighting special forces you're supposed to be.

Before tactical missions begin you're often required to intercept an alien craft (UFO). This element to the game was only added recently and it's quite evident. One type of UFO will completely obliterate your starting interception craft, while the others seem to have about even odds. While it might be realistic, again it is not all that fun. Trying to find the magical equipment setup for your ships should not be what this is about. Sometimes the game even decides to make all UFOs flee from your ships. I'm still not sure of the reason for this, but it makes it even more annoying that having to play savey-load-load just to be able to shoot them down.

There was always a difficulty curve in X-COM where the alien ships gradually grew in power, so that when you came up against a bigger ship you understood why it won the fight - it was gigantic. In UFO:AI there's no sense of what UFOs are bigger than the others and should be avoided, there's also no clue as to why the first UFO you encounter will probably destroy your interceptor and feast on its remains. There should be a learning curve, not a constant attack of tedious defeat and reloading. While they are vehemently opposed to saving and loading on the battlefield, the developers attitude on the geoscape seems to be completely different. Even when the game tells you that you destroyed the UFO you're not safe. Missiles continue to travel at your interceptor as it casually turns and attempts to return to base. It's like tic-tac-toe or it's more popular name "Oh, another draw". Again, it's (kind of) realistic, but not at all fun.

When you do manage to shoot down alien UFOs the game offers you a treat. The alien crash site maps are the best in the game. They're simple, to the point, and offer straight-up action. Where other maps have huge portions of just trying to find aliens, the crash sites let you get straight into the thick of it. The alien wreckages
are ablaze and the aliens inside are not all that impressed with you shooting them out of the sky. That UFOs seem so hard to shoot down with any sort of consistency can make these maps quite rare, although hopefully the developers will tweak interceptions and focus more on these maps than the terror ones now that they are in the game. Terror maps were never all that much fun in X-COM. Spending hours walking through houses or cargo ships looking for a single alien to blow away.

The combat in UFO:AI is okay. It's nothing spectacular and needs to be balanced and tweaked a lot, as well as adding the ability to save on the battlescape. The misguided notion that the game should be difficult through the disabling of the save feature is perplexing. Sure, it should be disabled in the super-mega-difficult mode, or have its use limited somewhat, but this is an X-COM clone. It's slow stuff. It's not Gears of War like, where you feel a rush after getting through a particularly hard checkpoint. If people want to get their kicks from not saving the game, then sure, that's possible for them really simply: they don't use save. For people who feel it's a complete chore to play the same mission over and over because the developer decided that the save feature was "against the spirit of the game" it is quite the game-killer. While the maps are short, they are complex enough to warrant a save feature for the people who want it. Choice is what is important and a lot of design decisions through the game seem to be aimed at limiting players. You will get used to not saving after a while, but it makes each tactical mission carry a certain sense of "here we go again" with it.

This being an open source project there are a lot of people contributing from around the world and yet it maintains a very focused feel to it. It doesn't feel like someone is hammering parts onto another person's game. The majority of the game's basic functionality seems to be in and working to some degree, as well as much better writing than should be expected from a spare-time project. The development, unlike a lot of mods and free games, is ongoing and moving along rather quickly. Bug reports are dealt with quickly and that is a very positive sign. Although certain aspects of the game are not very enjoyable right now, there is the hope that - as the team seem so passionate - the game will continue to evolve at the rapid pace that it seems to be going at the moment. If they can improve on the basic game-play and get more of the X-COM feel into it this game then there may be greatness ahead. The game has bags of potential and with the developers it has right now it should certainly reach if not surpass that.

This is definitely a game to keep an eye on as it matures, but is not really a 'must play' right now. Still, you may enjoy it, and the more people to test it the faster bugs can be ironed out and you may even find the developers have a need for your talent, whatever that may be (probably not fire-eating, though).

Good Stuff:

+ Potential
+ Motivated developers
+ Key features largely present
+ Possibly the most complete X-COM mod / free game available

Bad Stuff:

- No saving on the battlescape
- Generally unbalanced game-play / learning curve
- Control scheme requires 3rd arm
- Reaction-fire over-useful compared with X-COM, game will make you rely on it
- Too many terror site missions with overly complex maps