X-COM: UFO Defence AKA UFO: Enemy Unknown Games Room Review

This is a review I have wanted to do for a very long time, but it took me awhile to get round to it mostly because I wanted to record my own footage for the review and for some unknown reason every time I would try to record it something would go wrong making the footage unsuitable, but here it is complete and finished, for those who prefer to read reviews instead of watching them the written version is below the video.

X-COM: UFO Defence known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe is a science fiction strategy video game developed by Mythos Games and published by MicroProse in 1994. It came out on PC, the Amiga the CD32 console, and the PlayStation. My first experience of it was on the Playstation. I loved it from my very first go, it was quiet simply unlike anything I had ever played before and I found myself constantly returning to it just because it was so different to everything else in my collection, it was also one of those rare games which a lot of my friends also seemed to get into. Every so often there would be a game which my whole friend group would seem to buy and this was one of these games, we would all play it separately but kind of come together to talk about our in-game adventures and our tactics it kind of made the game exist beyond the confines of the screen.

Ok so to explain X-COM UFO Defence as a game to anyone who has not played it or heard of it before well it’s a game which basically mixes a real-time management simulation game with a turn-based tactics game. The player takes on the role of commander of X-COM – an organisation which is an international paramilitary organization which exists to defend the Earth from aliens.

So, when you play the strategic part of the game you are in charge of the research and development of new technology, you’re in charge of building and expanding your home base, with the choice of also building additional bases, you’re in charge of the organization's finances and personnel, and alongside growing your organisation your also in control of monitoring and adequately responding to UFO activity.

When you respond to UFO activity by sending your men to a crashed or landed UFO then you enter the tactical section of the game, as soon as your craft lands you are tasked with issuing orders to your individual X-COM troops, you tell them where to go and what to do. You can only see enemies on the map when they are in view of one of your units. At the start of the game your men will have conventional weapons, pistols, rifles and grenades and you will be fighting with Aliens who have Plasma based technology. This is where the two game types connect, if you want to have better equipment in the field then you need to research it and develop it, if you can either kill all of the enemies on a map or pick up a defeated enemy’s weapon and then retreat then you will be able to take their weapons and equipment back to your base and start the process of researching this otherworldly technology.  Obviously having a working team of researchers and other staff requires money, and how do you get money well you answer to a council made up of members from the various nations, if you help to keep their airspace clear and to eliminate aliens who land on there soil or conduct terror attacks on there cities then they will fund you, keep failing them though and they will withdraw their support which will lower your funding.

The game received strong reviews and was commercially successful, acquiring a cult following among strategy fans; several publications have listed X-COM: UFO Defence as one of the best video games ever made, including IGN ranking it as the best PC game of all time in 2007, the game has directly inspired several similar games, including UFO: Alien Invasion, and UFO: Extraterrestrials. The game had many sequels its first sequel was very similar to this game but was set under the sea, but after that for my taste at least the games strayed too far away from this formula the third game was overly complex and none of them captured the spirit or the fun level of the first two games.

IN 2012 there was a remake of the game called Xcom: Enemy Unknown created by Firaxis Games and published by 2K Games. While this remake is a fantastic game that I would heartily recommend I wanted to show the original game and review it as I don’t think the original should be replaced both of them are brilliant games which deserve to both stand tall.

By today’s standards X-COM: UFO Defence has incredibly basic graphics and sound but the core gameplay is still incredible, it’s a great example of a deep tactical game which can literally eat away days and days of your life, if you get into it the game all of the basic graphics just cease to be an issue. Sure, the remake is fantastic in its own right but I would argue that this version is possibly a deeper tactical game, there are things you can do in this game that you can’t do in the original, for example you can shoot walls to destroy them, you also take far more men out in to the field which I think gives the game a slightly bigger feel. I am not putting down the more modern remake both of these games are very rare cases of games which I would score with a solid 10 out of 10.