Xenonauts Review
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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.
