I'm planning to buy the trilogy for PS3 soon. These games look bloody good.
Do it. They are.
7.
X-Com: UFO Defense (PC: 1994)
X-Com is a turn-based, tactical strategy game that hails from the distant, sepia-toned and pixilated years of the early 90's. Come join me, dear reader, and let me regale you with tales of massacred soldiers, alien invasions, hidden movement, and psychic assaults.
Despite being twenty years old, X-Com is still, way ahead of its time. The basic gist of X-Com is that the Earth is under attack by aliens and you are given the go-ahead from the various nations of the Earth to start a force capable of defending against the aliens and, eventually, taking the fight to them. That's it. That's the story. There are no characters, no real plot twists, just this basic setup, and a series of randomized encounters that propel the action and keep the game moving.
X-Com combines two separate, but totally integrated games. The first is the world view, where you have a wide, encompassing view of the Earth. From here, you build up a base, manage your money, construct supplies, train troops, keep the various nations of the world happy so that they will continue to supply you with funds and manpower. There's a lot to do and, as with most ancient PC games, the UI is supremely unhelpful. There are a lot of buttons and no help on what any of them do. Getting into
X-Com is not an easy task for the uninitiated.
The second game within
X-Com are the various isometric, turn-based scenarios that you will undertake. Such scenarios involve alien craft that you shoot down and investigate, terror missions where aliens attack civilian areas, base assaults where you find and destroy hidden alien bases and also, when the aliens finally have enough of you fucking with their shit, they will assault your base. Yes, the aliens are bastards, but that is just the tip of the alien-bastardry iceberg.
The aliens that your soldiers will face are a varied lot, starting with the lowly greys (called sectoids) that you will encounter throughout the early stages of the game to the fucking ethereals that will make you hate anything and everything in the late stages of the game. Seriously, fuck you ethereals. Even the sectoids, the alien chumps of the
X-Com universe, are not without their tricks. Their commanders often possess psychic powers that they can use to drive your soldiers into states of panic and fear. Other aliens include the floating, biomechanical cyberdiscs, the flying floaters (redundant word is redundant?), the dumb and tough mutons who fill the role of the space brutes, snakemen, and the chrysalids. Ugh, the chrysalids. Your first encounter with chrysalids will be one you will remember. I have never seen a mission turn from good to omg-my-whole-squad-is-dead faster than when chrysalids are involved. For a chrysalid, think of a giant, bipedal insect that, when it bites its victim, the venom turns the creature into a mindless zombie. Bad enough right? Wrong! When you kill that zombie, another chrysalid pops out fully grown to continue the cycle of teabagging your ego into a bloody smear.
Make one wrong move, and your soldiers will die. And they will die a lot. Don't get attached or you might watch as your Master Sniper named Sven, who survived through those first, harrowing missions to become a true, exo-skeleton and plasma-rifle equipped badass, get iced by a lowly sectoid in a darkened warehouse. That's the beauty of
X-Com. It is so unrelenting and so punishingly evil in how it constantly pushes you to maximize your tactical options. Do you reload and try to find a way to save Sven or do you let him take one for the team so that you can, hopefully, mop up the remaining alien resistance with limited casualties?
One aspect that I did not touch upon that adds an entire dimension to the gameplay is that
X-Com features almost fully destructible environments. If you know that a lone chrysalid is hiding inside of a warehouse, you can bomb the place to the ground with a few well-placed rockets and grenades rather than send a platoon of men inside to their death. You can even blast holes through walls with your laser rifles. This adds a tremendous amount of tactical options to an already tactically rich experience and one that you will miss when you play similar games. The fact that
X-Com, a game made in 1994, had destructible terrain and most games nowadays do not is astounding.
So if you don't mind dealing with an obtuse UI and graphics only slightly clearer than mud, give
X-Com a try. It's not the fastest paced game and it may seem a bit boring at first, but that first terror mission or that first base assault should convince you that there is something very special about this game. It's a classic for a reason.
This game comes highly recommended for wannabe anti-martian field commanders, people who love to name military squads after their favorite bands and then watching them die horrifically, and folks who love to read the words 'hidden movement' over and over and over again.
Note, a sequel/remake to
X-Com: UFO Defense came out in 2012 named
X-Com: Enemy Unknown. It is a good game and it very handily updates and expands upon the formulas of the previous games. I don't know if it's nearly as good, but if you're jonesing for a game with a similar style and depth, but with modern graphics and a UI that doesn't look like an accounting spreadsheet, then
Enemy Unknown is an excellent game. Play it on classic difficulty and it will punish the fuck out of you.