I can’t help but begin this review by vocalizing why I am bothering to visit a game that was made 17 years ago. Indeed, when X-COM: UFO Defense released, I was only 7 years old. I didn’t even own a computer at that age (my first PC and dial-up modem would come 12 months later). In other words, the game is frickin’ old, so why bother? I have my reasons:

1) I’ve never played it before. This is reason enough!

2) X-COM: UFO Defense and the other X-COM games were re-released in late 2008 on Steam, my primary PC gaming platform, and the game cost me less than one dollar.

3) 2K Games has officially announced, and teased with a few details and screenshots, a new first-person shooter in the X-COM setting. There will be strategic elements, also. The funny part about this reason is that X-COM: UFO Defense is a classic. It’s considered a masterpiece. So, when big game publishers promise first-person shooter adaptations of classic titles, fans around the world begin flipping tables. And now that we’re into E3 season, we’ve seen some juicy gameplay videos. The new X-COM is looking like a Bioshock-clone with the X-COM spin. Will it actually have the strategic elements that, as I hope to convey, make X-COM fun? Who knows, but I bet they’ll be mighty watered down for the drooling, gibbering masses known as console users.

4) Seriously, this game is fucking old. Was the guy who invented Solid State Drives even born yet?

And now that I have four good reasons to be reviewing a game from 17 years ago, I will proceed.

Holy fuck, just looking at the box art creates a musty smell response.

I think the strongest test for a game, and for almost any media, is that of time. Shakespeare is still kicking around because, whether you liked it or not in grade school, his works are fantastic. The same could be said of Homer, or a plethora of other long dead artists. And that’s not even getting into music or film. I could go on all day, but I’ll leave it there so a film studies major can cover it better somewhere else. Truly, if video games are an art form, there must be some titles that stand out among the crowd, immortalized by their greatness. I don’t think X-COM is one of those greats, but for a game made in 1993, pretty much all of its core aspects have held up well.

X-COM UFO Defense, also called X-COM Enemy Unknown, is a freakishly hard game. I can say with confidence right away that the one thing that will turn off 90% of anyone that reads this review and tries out the game is the learning curve. To put it into perspective, I’ve played over 25 hours and just now I’ve got one game running where I didn’t game over within the first three game months. Oh, this is on the easiest of five difficulty settings. It just doesn’t stop getting better either: the sequel, Terror From The Deep, actually has a bug where its lowest difficulty is even harder than the hardest difficulty in UFO Defense. Knowing this, I don’t know if we will be expecting a Terror From The Deep review.

Truly, the stunning vistas in X-COM are something to be admired. Was anti-aliasing invented when this game came out? Wow, I think I actually need a legend here. Teal square: My base. Pink square: Alien base. Yellow diamond: One of my aircraft returning to base. White X: A recently crashed UFO.

X-COM UFO Defense is actually two parts merged to make one game. The first is a surprisingly deep base management system. The United Nations, or uh, something like the United Nations has formed X-COM, a secret project with the distinct purpose of repelling alien attacks against Earth. In any given new game, you start on the Geoscape, which is simply a view of Earth from orbit. You can zoom and such, and many prominent Earth cities are labelled, but you spend most of your time pretty zoomed out, because you need to keep an eye on UFOs that show up.

Your first task on the Geoscape is selecting your first secret base. Your first base also gets some of the essential fixings: living quarters for the people under your command, hangars to store, arm, and fuel your aircraft, and general stores to…uh…store stuff. Once your base is placed, you can tweak how quickly time goes by with the time intervals on the right hand side of the screen, and it plays kind of like the Sims, but with more explosions. You get starting aircraft, the Skyranger, and an Interceptor. The Skyranger is like a jet version of a Chinook helicopter, and it’s for transporting your soldiers to UFO terror and crash sites to clean them up. The Interceptor is essentially a corny, early 90s looking F-22, and it’s about that effective. I’m not insulting the F-22 or anything (except for the ones that can’t fly in rain), but we are talking about fighting hostile interstellar alien species here. You’ve got some basic facilities. You have scientists to begin researching advanced technology, such as laser weaponry. You have engineers, the only people capable of manufacturing any advanced technology you manage to research. And you’ve got funding. At the beginning of the game, your funding relies rather heavily on the UN, and they do provide a decent amount. But they only provide good funding if you do good. If you do poorly, and that means allow UFOs to exist at all, your funding will fall like an F-22 in the rain.

Enter, the learning curve. First of all, you need radar facilities to detect UFOs in range of your bases. There’s no free rides in X-COM. That’s all well and good, but the biggest radar system might allow you to see UFOs in, say, North America, if your base is roughly where it is on the above screenshot (see legend). This means to make all of the countries part of your funding happy, you need to stop all the UFOs, anywhere on Earth. One base isn`t going to cut it. In my most successful game, I have three bases, though the game can accommodate around ten. The problem, of course, is that setting up new bases is both time-consuming and costly. Secondary and tertiary bases receive none of the basics of your start-up base, you get a blank slate and have to provide everything: hangars, soldiers, quarters, scientists, aircraft, weapons, ammunition, everything. It all costs a lot of money, and everything also comes with a monthly maintenance cost that further saps your funding.

This is the load out screen for a Skyranger. You can manage exactly which crew are transported, and with exactly what equipment, down to the last pistol clip.

But wait, at the same time, you have to be researching and manufacturing advanced weaponry fast. I have to give X-COM more and more credit because, frustratingly hard as the game is, it`s almost realistic. It shouldn’t be an easy fight taking down all of these advanced alien species and their crazy UFOs and lasers. It should be damn near impossible, and it is. This doesn`t make the game very accessible, and at times it makes it bullshit, but it`s gratifying on the occasions you do well. Earth weapons suck and Microprose wants you to know that. So you have to balance, rather perfectly, managing one or more bases while also micromanaging Interceptors to take out UFOs that you can spot, and Skyrangers to head to crash sites and recover technology and corpses. You have to balance it fast, too, because the UN has you on a three strikes program. On your third month where they rate you as below neutral progress, it`s complete and utter game over.

If you’ve managed to wrangle the base management side of the game, and trust me you won`t, you are now faced with the micro-management side. Aircraft combat is nothing more than a simple mini-game, wherein you decide how quickly or slowly your aircraft engages the UFO in question. If you charge in headlong, UFOs tend to counterattack more. If you keep your aircraft just within range, you tend to come out the victor in even fights. I stress the notion of even fights, but I should also tell you there are few of those. UFOs come in a myriad of sizes, starting at Very Small and as far as I have seen, ending at Very Large. Interceptors can easily take down Very Small UFOs and usually take down Small UFOs as well, but it stops there. That means once Medium or larger UFOs show up, there isn’t even a point in sending Interceptors, and you pretty much have to let the UFOs do whatever they want. If you actually manage to shoot down some UFOs, and that’s not difficult, a crash on land will make a crash site. From there, you can send a Skyranger full of soldiers to try and kill any aliens that survived, and recover what you can. This takes you from the Geoscape to the Battlescape, or the turn-based strategy combat. This isn’t a part of the game you can ignore for long, because the UN bases a lot of your project rating on successful crash and terror site missions. Base management is the bread, but the turn-based combat is the butter, and both are necessary for successful game toast.

If I’m going to save the world, my first base will be in my home town. Aliens always attack bigger cities first anyway, right? They’ll never expect it.

Enter the next problem with X-COM, soldiers are so inept at holding a gun, and so similar looking in their textures, I am convinced they are Stormtroopers. Even my soldiers that, through total luck, survived a dozen missions and levelled up half as many times could still die in one hit, and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if they were inside the barn. Is this some kind of early 90s typo, where the game actually says I loaded soldiers into the Skyranger but really I loaded up my engineers? I wish this were the case, for it would make more sense. There are a few key early game choices you can make in terms of strategy, but as far as I could tell, spanning across several games that only lasted a few months, a few that lasted almost a year, and one that hasn’t ended after two years, early game success is pretty much random. There are strategies you can use and there is certainly a learning curve and a lot of commands available to increase your odds in those first missions where you lack weapons on par with the aliens. However, sometimes, you`ll just walk soldiers out of that Skyranger and they’ll all get sniped immediately by aliens with auto-shot activated. Auto-shot is a lovely feature that you can have your soldiers make use of, where they save up their actions, organized into Time Units, and shoot at enemies that move in their line of sight even when it is not your turn. Of course, the aliens figure this trick out before you do, and oh boy will you ever lose a lot of soldiers, and sometimes all of them. I should point out that the UN will hate you for failing a mission, even more than if you didn’t show up at all.

Everything in combat costs Time Units. Each soldier gets about 50 per turn, augmented by their rank, X-COM`s version of levels. Still, it doesn’t change much, and you won`t see Time Units much above 60. I do mean everything costs Time Units. Walking, ducking, standing, shooting, reloading, managing inventory, even looking around. The game must play roughly on the Dungeons and Dragons time scale of 6 seconds per round, because there is not much you can do in every turn, and this means everything you do matters a lot. One click in the wrong space can mean a dead soldier over a dead alien. Each and every soldier has unique characteristics for accuracy, health, and a half dozen other stats, but it rarely seems to matter. If a soldier gets hit by a plasma weapon, they die immediately. If some miracle occurs and they don’t die that turn, they’ll die in the next turn. The only protection against the alien weapons that I’ve reached are the flying power armor suits, but even then, it’s often a one-hit kill game. Some aliens take upwards of three heavy plasma rounds to drop. Basically, the game isn’t very fair. Even at my best, I lose soldiers all the time. An alien may be in that one darkened corner you didn’t or couldn’t see and hey, now it’ll open fire on the three soldiers you sent into the building. Things eased up a little bit once I could afford plasma hovertanks, but even then, only in the open ground sections.

Ultimately, the combat section is a pretty slow beast, and it can get a little dry after a mission or two in a row. This is turn-based strategy, not real-time. You would have had to line up for another year to grab Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in 1994 for that! In crash sites, you need to kill the few randomly placed aliens that could be anywhere on the map, and then kill the few aliens inside the downed UFO. Now is a good time to mention that entering UFOs is bullshit. They are, near as I can tell, the one tile set in the game that can’t be penetrated by enough plasma blasts or grenades. You have to physically hurl soldiers into their narrow doors, and often times aliens are waiting there with auto-shot on. I’ve had missions going so well that I felt like a CIA Black Ops commander, watching as my seasoned veterans slip across the silent fields of wheat, sniping half a dozen aliens as they hunt for cattle to mutilate and crops to circle. And then I reach the UFO door, and I am without words, without orders. Things can be going amazing up until that point and then bam, I could lose half of my crew just because I need to get them through the door. A legitimate strategy at times is kamikaze, quite literally priming a grenade on one soldier and running headlong into the UFO and hoping you take out at least one alien.

As time goes on and you struggle through the X-COM program, you will see different alien species pop up. The easiest by far are the quintessential little gray men, and maybe a few other recognizable types, though it would take someone more versed in UFO mythology to give a damn. Some aliens are bigger assholes than others, effortlessly mind controlling your soldiers and forcing them to kill your other soldiers, or creepy bug-like aliens that lay eggs in soldiers or civilians they slay and spawn new bug-like aliens. Just as you think you might be getting the hang of the management and the combat, X-COM gladly makes things harder, and I must admit it does so in a reasonable pace, insane learning curve notwithstanding. By the time I finally researched some of the alien aircraft and had bitchin’ plasma cannons on them, the aliens started sending the dreaded Very Large UFOs, capable of taking down even my best aircraft with ease.

Oh, right, there’s not much of a story in X-COM. In a rather bold move for its time, Microprose looked ahead to the future, saw StarCraft, and decided no story is better than that. The opening cinematic shows a bunch of big mean aliens stomping up some civilians, with the X-COM showing up and stomping up the big mean aliens. I will say that you get a nice little visual and text description of what happens to Earth after you game over, up to and including total alien enslavement of the planet. It was a nice touch. The actual “story” comes in a series of research options that slowly lead X-COM towards a solution to the alien problem. The actual objectives for this are totally realistic, but horrendously boring. After playing the game for a while, I will admit killing the aliens dead is not as hard as it once was. However, to capture live aliens and gain critical intel, I have to equip my team with stun bombs. It’s the equivalent of being stranded in a forest full of dangerous wolves and bears eager to eat you. You’re forced to build weaponry from scratch. It’s long, arduous, painful, but ultimately rewarding. But as you’re about to take on the aforementioned bear with a sweet bamboo spear, a referee blows his whistle and demands your weapon be a soggy patch of moss. Yep, that’s a pretty good analogy for stun bomb UFO raids versus plasma weaponry.

Knock knock! Who’s there? Plasma technology!

X-COM UFO Defense does feel like it hits a bit of a wall here, and it’s a shame because it was truly a thing of beauty before the wall. The level of detail in the base management is fantastic. There could be more detail or control in the training of soldiers, but other than that combat is bearable. X-COM starts to feel anemic, though, and it’s not for lack of trying either. All of the elements needed for a rich strategic game are here, and yet, I feel like during my entire play, I have been treading a single path. I’ve been treading the one path that seems to let me, well, survive for more than six months. I have played dozens of games, mixed up how I built bases, or where, or what I focused my research on. Ultimately, relying on UN funding seemed impossible, and some technologies are simply better than others. I had to become a black market arms dealer to keep my funding out of the red, or I wasn’t able to play the game at all. And we’re still talking about the lowest difficulty here. X-COM UFO Defense became X-COM Laser Rifle Manufacturing, with a UFO Defense mini-game.

Combat is similarly lacking. As mentioned before, there are certainly strategies that help you win battles. However, would I ever use a pistol? No, never. There’s no point. I save a handful of Time Units because of reduced weight, but it does less damage than a rifle or heavy launcher. Accuracy means absolutely nothing in X-COM. You’re using Auto Shot, which fires 3 successive shots, or you’re losing. The only time you’d ever use something like Snap Shot, which only fires 1 shot, is if you were desperate and too low on Time Units to use Auto Shot. All of these smaller points about limited strategies to lead to a bigger picture: X-COM is a surprisingly limited game. Sure, I could make use of different strategies, if I like getting game over a lot. If I actually want to repel the alien attacks, I pick plasma rifles and triangulate three bases and I flood a hell of a lot of plasma weaponry and heavy weapons platforms into whatever proxy wars are happening in this alternate reality Earth.

X-COM UFO Defense has a pretty strong following from gamers my age or older that enjoyed it in the younger years of PC gaming. It probably was one of the best games to play way back in 1993 too, but there are a lot of aspects that don’t meet up to today’s standards. As for whether the game was worth the price tag of a fraction of a dollar, I would say yes, of course. However, the game is just flawed enough that it escapes that pedestal of true gaming mastery.

It’s okay X-COM, you did good. Now come on, it’s time to come over here behind the chemical shed.

The new X-COM game will probably just be another period first-person shooter, but after playing X-COM extensively, I’ve decided that’s no longer a bad thing. If the new game ends up being a decent Bioshock clone, then that’s not the end of the world. If they manage to infuse some of the truly admirable qualities from X-COM UFO Defense, with a 21st century flair, then we might be talking about a serious award winner. A truly awe-inspiring strategy giant lays in its infancy here. It can be spawned out of the ashes of X-COM UFO Defense, but it’ll be the job of a ballsy developer to get that done, and get it done right. No developer out there has the balls to do it either, so I hope you all enjoy shooters like I do!

In the modern day context, X-COM UFO Defense gets three of its own generic-looking soldier textures out of five. If you correct for Game Deflation Index, that’s like four-hundred and ninety out of five in 1993, I think.