Well played, some day you’re going to have to teach me your ways. OpenXcom does indeed look great, going to have to keep that in mind for the next time I feel like an xcom binge.
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@Fraggles I think it was just my unreasonably high OpenXcom expectations that ruined Xenonauts for me. I don’t like the artstyle very much, but that’s tolerable. What ruined the game for me in the end was many of the more arbitrary decisions-- that ended up hurting the gameplay more than it helped.
For example, WAY more maps have civilians than before. The way the AI works, they love to take shots at civilians at any given moment. Not only does this force you to cope with overaggressive penalties or rush into combat blindly, but it ruins the effect. When you saw a Terror Mission in the original game, you just looked down at the geoscape in sheer panic. That pink square on the map means that civilians are the target, you’ll be facing an alien force MEANT for combat, and you’re probably going to lose your heavy weapons specialist General Rex Colt in a horrible grenade mishap. Here, civilian targets are the rule rather than the exception, so it means absolutely nothing. Xenonauts is a game that not only should have looked at UFO Defense and figured out what to do, but also taken a few pages from Terror from the Deep on what not to do.
That’s just one example of the many frustrations I ended up having. It’s not an abomination or franchise insult-- that name is reserved for X-COM Enforcer. I just personally didn’t enjoy it at all, and it was a pretty big letdown with all the praise I’d heard for the game. Hopefully you’ll have a better time than I did.
To be clear, I’m not some old-guard hardcore strategy nerd. My first XCOM was Enemy Unknown (the reboot), and I still love it to this day. I don’t think X-COM classic has particularly aged well, but OpenXcom smooths things out to the point where somebody new to the series can actually enjoy it for what it is-- a unique turn based strategy and base-management hybrid where you’ve already sealed your demise two quarterly reports ago, and your designated rocket trooper getting mind controlled and firing away at your medic just confirms that you really should have had a backup team.
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Paging Fraggles. Just saw this and wondered if it was on your radar?
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Have not heard about it before, I will check it out later. Thank you.
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