Xenonauts Preview
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On booting up Xenonauts Goldhawk have certainly achieved faithfulness in at least one area if you've not played X-Com before or read the manual you'll have absolutely no clue what you're doing. After choosing a difficulty mode (out of four, with Iron Man Mode optional on all except '˜Insane' difficulty) you pick a base location from the Geoscape Earth map and boom, you have a fully operational base. now what the [Sectoid] do I do? Play about with the interface mainly and try to get your feet.
While tutorials and the like will be available for any new players to the hardcore X-Com experience in the final game, the Early Access is only equipped with a somewhat barebones online manual that leaves out key details, such as how to heal soldiers with medkits (equip it on the inventory, move to the soldier you want to heal, and use it on them as if you were shooting them), how to pick up items on the ground (stand on the item or corpse and open your inventory), and how to get goddamned started. Seeing as I was put off the original X-Com games by the lack of any in-game explanation this was not a good start, fortunately however Goldhawk have made things far more easy to get to grips with than the baffling icon-heavy original and I was soon happily clicking away.
The mechanics and general gameplay of Xenonauts are directly like XCOM, with or without hyphen, although clearly closer to the less-flashy UFO Defense. Choosing a base location and name is the first point, but unlike Enemy Unknown you'll need to build more than one base over the course of the game since there aren't any Satellites to watch out for aliens here. Ever wondered why in Enemy Unknown you could station Interceptors in other countries but the game never explained where they were going? That's a holdover from the multiple-base-building exploits of the original, reinstated in Xenonauts. Not that this is possible right at the start though as you're probably better off pimping the base you have spending literally all your starting funds buying an unmanned empty building on a different continent isn't going to help. As I found out 10 seconds into my first play. Restart.
The base is arranged in a top-down map much like the original, except is all much easier to navigate once you know where everything is and what it does, and Xenonauts does provide pretty good tooltips to let you know just that. You have the base on one side, straightforward stats on the other (along with a big '˜Construct New Building' button), and a row of icons on the top representing the different base rooms. These are Research, Workshop, Hangar, Storeroom, Personnel, Vehicle Bay, and the Equipment page for your soldiers. You can mess around with your soldiers and maybe construct a new room, but at the beginning the automatically-started '˜Alien Invasion' research project is the only thing going and all that needs is time.
