Review: UFO: Aftermath
REVIEW SUMMARY: An excellent squad-based single-player game that is a great XCOM remake.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The game plot starts after the fall of Earth to aliens. They showed up, rebuffed any communications, then rained death and destruction. You’re part of the newly rebuilt planetary defense focused on figuring out a way to stop them. There are two main elements of the game – a strategic part that takes place at the world level where you control the various bases you own, and the tactical level where you control your squads as they go on combat missions agains the alien menace. The strategic level isn’t very deep, but the combat really makes up for it. If you liked XCOM, you’ll like UFO:AM. If you liked Jagged Alliance or Commandos, you’ll like UFO:AM. This newest game has a cool pausable real-time feature rather than the turns in XCOM, but it plays better in my opinion. I really enjoyed the game. I got about 25 hours of gameplay out of it and got to enjoy 2 alternate endings. The only downside was that near the end the game does get a bit tedious – you know where it is going and you’re ready to get there but have to get through a few more missions instead. I played on Normal setting and found it challenging, but not frustrating.
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Is there a link for this?
I’m sure you’re familiar with google, but it is at http://www.ufo-aftermath.com
What is this ‘google’ of which you speak? Can I search for that?
The official site is: http://www.ufo-aftermath.com (as Scott said)
And there is the fan-site: http://www.ufoaftermath.co.uk
New review this week over here.
Looks like Scott’s review was picked up.
That scifi.com review was interesting. The guy didn’t like the switch to real time and for him, that made the game poor. I can appreciate a turn-based game, but I guess I’ve played lots of games now (such as Baldru’s Gate 2 and Knights of the Old Republic) that made the move to real-time and had it work. For me, the auto-pause features in UFO:A worked well – it paused when I wanted it to, and otherwise the action just flows.
In retrospect, one valid criticism of UFO:A I’ve read elsewhere is that you need to have your entire squad (7 people) with you at all times to take on even 1 alien because the alien can dish out so much damage quickly – and you have to be able to respond in kind. To me, this is unfortunate and likely a result of a poor game balancing pass. 7 on 1 should be a cake walk, there wasn’t any need to balance it otherwise.