#Xenonauts base layouts update#

You’re forced to speed up time, stop it, check to see if it’s done, and then do it again until it’s ready. Then it reloads, which is displayed as a percentage. How long does that take? It’s hard to say: first it repairs, with an estimated completion in hours. It also brings about the most frequent and annoying information display problem in Xenonauts: after you use an interceptor to shoot down a UFO, it has to return to base to repair, refuel, and rearm before it can attack another UFO. We probably don't need to play this one out. It doesn’t have nearly enough variety or staying power to keep my finger away from that auto-resolve button, however, and about 95 percent of the time an engagement is a foregone conclusion anyway. It’s a simple pausable real-time tactics challenge about maneuvering up to three planes on a 2D battlefield, so that your planes remain outside the enemy’s firing arcs while keeping their targets in their own sights.

I do like where Xenonauts was going with its entirely original UFO-interception minigame. When someone gets killed, it doesn’t tell you who it was until the end of the mission - it just hides their portrait and makes you use the process of elimination to figure it out. Oftentimes you’re shown that you have line-of-sight on an enemy, but can’t shoot them for unknown reasons - rounded objects (the landed UFOs) are especially hard to shoot around.

It’s awful at showing you where your annoyingly inaccurate grenade tosses actually land, so you should probably just run in case it landed at your feet.

It’s particularly difficult because Xenonauts does a terrible job of telling you important stuff, like whether you’re actually benefiting from cover (corners, for example, don’t do squat). I’ve been running Xenonauts at 1366x768 and blown it up to fit my 1920x1080 screen - it still doesn’t give these tiny sprites anywhere near the character of the big-headed sectoids of old, since they’re still undetailed and mostly bland, but it at least makes them big enough on screen that they feel important. There’s some cool concept art showing detailed lizard men and chryssalid stand-ins (called reapers) that you’ll see in the research and database screens, but the characters on the tactical battlefields are tiny and lacking in personality in both design and animation. For example: it’s drab-looking, and that criticism has nothing to do with it being a 2D, sprite-based game.

#Xenonauts base layouts update#

And yet for an update to a classic that aims to bring that gameplay to a new modern audience, Xenonauts is disappointingly unambitious and unpolished in a lot of ways. Should you spend a big chunk of money on a new base to protect more of your funding countries with radar and interceptors to protect your cash flow, or do you hire a large team of scientists and engineers to accelerate your technological development? Do you concentrate on developing weaponry for a strong offense, or tough armor for a strong defense? Xenonauts even gives a few new options for both, with gear like riot shields that make equipping stun batons (for taking enemies alive) less of a suicide mission, and actual shotguns, sniper rifles, and heavy machine guns make arming a soldier to complement his unique stats, like strength, time units (aka speed), and bravery something you have to consider. Survival requires intense attention to detail and resource management, and almost every decision feels weighty. (If someone dies in tactical combat, they’re dead on the strategic layer, too.) So does the way the flexible time unit system puts every step they take in your direct control. The fact that each of your renamable soldiers is an extremely fragile mortal that can be permanently struck down in an instant by a plasma bolt from the darkness or turned into a zombie with a single touch adds an incredible high-stakes tension. (An average campaign will take roughly 15 or 20 hours.) Building a base to research and manufacture advanced weaponry on the global strategic level, then using that weaponry to kill aliens in the squad-based tactical mode on randomized, destructible maps and bring back their technology for further development ties the two together in numerous interesting ways. Structurally, it nails almost all of what makes X-COM my favorite game of all time, and kept me largely happy for the roughly 80 hours I’ve played. In most respects - perhaps too many - Xenonauts is the X-COM follow-up we should’ve had in 1998.