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sinanju(Title shamelessly stolen from Futurama)
So I've continued playing around with UFO: Alien Invasion since my last post. For those of you who care (both of you...), more observations on the game.
It's very clearly a successor to X-COM: UFO Defense, as if that wasn't obvious already. But clearly.
1. There's a Mercator-projection style map of the earth (instead of a rotating globe) on which you place your first (and subsequent) bases. This is also the screen that shows you where alien incursions have been detected. You can zoom in on the map, but you can't change the POV so you can't actually see much but the equatorial latitudes in full zoom. If there's a way to change that, I haven't found it.
2. There's a UFOpedia giving you details on all the technical data (your weapons and equipment, aircraft, base facilities, aliens and alien tech you've captured and/or researched. (All written in the form of memos from your underlings, describing the technology available or proposed research projects.)
3. There's a screen which details your bases established, number of soldiers, workers, scientists and medics on staff, your total funding and expenses and how happy the various governments funding you are with your performance. Not a lot of change there.
4. Building or expanding your base is very similar to X-Com, though the graphics are more sophsticated. You add modules to the grid-like base screen, just like X-Com. The usual sorts of facilities are available: hangars (large and small), living quarters, workshops, laboratories, alien containment, radar, missile defense, and the main entrance module. In addition, UFO:AI includes a command center and power plant (required for some other systems), and a "team room" (for recreation/morale purposes), training simulator (to improve skills), and hospital for healing wounded soldiers.
5. You must hire soldiers, scientists, workers (engineers in X-Com) and medics. Assign the soldiers to a transport craft, then equip them. In an improvement on X-Com, the game remembers each soldier's loadout. Once you assign them a set of weapons, equipment and armor, you don't have to re-equip them for each mission. Even if you unassign them and send them to the hospital unit for healing (which automatically strips them of their gear), when you reassign them, they get their gear back--as long as you have the necessary items in your inventory.
6. Soldiers gain experience and rank as they complete missions and smoke aliens.
7. Each month you get a new infusion of cash. No doubt it will prove inadequate and I'll have to resort to manufacturing and selling something profitable to truly support my alien smiting, but I haven't figured out what or how yet.
8. Game play is very, very similar to X-Com. I work on research and manufacturing of equipment while time passes, then go into the tactical screen when I am notified of an alien incursion, sending my plane full of soldiers to deal with them in the tactical screen.
9. As I noted in the last post, the graphics are greatly improved over X-Com, but otherwise game play is very similar. It's a turn-based system. You can reserve movement points for your soldiers so they can use reaction-fire when the aliens are active, but it cuts down on their movement on their own turn. Unlike X-Com, when you move a soldier, the game tells you exactly how many of their remaining movement points it will take for them to get somewhere, so you seldom find a soldier left hanging out in the open because he ran out of points beore reaching cover.
10. Unlike X-Com, you cannot save the game during the tactical mission. You can abort and then retry the game if things go really badly, but you cannot save the game after each turn if it went well. Either you accept the outcome or you replay the entire game. This is by design, as "you should be scared" when your guys are facing the aliens.
I'm having fun with the game, but the interface is very different from X-Com, and some of the choices seem--to me, anyhow--somewhat counter-intuitive. It's taken some time to puzzle out how a number of features work. Buying and selling equipment is simple enough, but the display looks ass backward to me. Figuring out to tell how badly wounded soldiers were in the combat screen was more difficult than I expect, though maybe that's just me.
Overall, though, I'm having fun with the game. It's like playing X-Com again--only with better graphics.
So I've continued playing around with UFO: Alien Invasion since my last post. For those of you who care (both of you...), more observations on the game.
It's very clearly a successor to X-COM: UFO Defense, as if that wasn't obvious already. But clearly.
1. There's a Mercator-projection style map of the earth (instead of a rotating globe) on which you place your first (and subsequent) bases. This is also the screen that shows you where alien incursions have been detected. You can zoom in on the map, but you can't change the POV so you can't actually see much but the equatorial latitudes in full zoom. If there's a way to change that, I haven't found it.
2. There's a UFOpedia giving you details on all the technical data (your weapons and equipment, aircraft, base facilities, aliens and alien tech you've captured and/or researched. (All written in the form of memos from your underlings, describing the technology available or proposed research projects.)
3. There's a screen which details your bases established, number of soldiers, workers, scientists and medics on staff, your total funding and expenses and how happy the various governments funding you are with your performance. Not a lot of change there.
4. Building or expanding your base is very similar to X-Com, though the graphics are more sophsticated. You add modules to the grid-like base screen, just like X-Com. The usual sorts of facilities are available: hangars (large and small), living quarters, workshops, laboratories, alien containment, radar, missile defense, and the main entrance module. In addition, UFO:AI includes a command center and power plant (required for some other systems), and a "team room" (for recreation/morale purposes), training simulator (to improve skills), and hospital for healing wounded soldiers.
5. You must hire soldiers, scientists, workers (engineers in X-Com) and medics. Assign the soldiers to a transport craft, then equip them. In an improvement on X-Com, the game remembers each soldier's loadout. Once you assign them a set of weapons, equipment and armor, you don't have to re-equip them for each mission. Even if you unassign them and send them to the hospital unit for healing (which automatically strips them of their gear), when you reassign them, they get their gear back--as long as you have the necessary items in your inventory.
6. Soldiers gain experience and rank as they complete missions and smoke aliens.
7. Each month you get a new infusion of cash. No doubt it will prove inadequate and I'll have to resort to manufacturing and selling something profitable to truly support my alien smiting, but I haven't figured out what or how yet.
8. Game play is very, very similar to X-Com. I work on research and manufacturing of equipment while time passes, then go into the tactical screen when I am notified of an alien incursion, sending my plane full of soldiers to deal with them in the tactical screen.
9. As I noted in the last post, the graphics are greatly improved over X-Com, but otherwise game play is very similar. It's a turn-based system. You can reserve movement points for your soldiers so they can use reaction-fire when the aliens are active, but it cuts down on their movement on their own turn. Unlike X-Com, when you move a soldier, the game tells you exactly how many of their remaining movement points it will take for them to get somewhere, so you seldom find a soldier left hanging out in the open because he ran out of points beore reaching cover.
10. Unlike X-Com, you cannot save the game during the tactical mission. You can abort and then retry the game if things go really badly, but you cannot save the game after each turn if it went well. Either you accept the outcome or you replay the entire game. This is by design, as "you should be scared" when your guys are facing the aliens.
I'm having fun with the game, but the interface is very different from X-Com, and some of the choices seem--to me, anyhow--somewhat counter-intuitive. It's taken some time to puzzle out how a number of features work. Buying and selling equipment is simple enough, but the display looks ass backward to me. Figuring out to tell how badly wounded soldiers were in the combat screen was more difficult than I expect, though maybe that's just me.
Overall, though, I'm having fun with the game. It's like playing X-Com again--only with better graphics.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-14 03:36 pm (UTC)