X-COM: UFO Defense

I finished game several times when I was a teenager in the early 90s. At the time, it was simply a milestone in the world of strategy games. I loved it so much for many years. The missions and the backstory are exciting. The game itself is dark, relentless, and unforgiving. The RNG factor is sometimes absurd. Compared to later versions of X-Com, the soldiers are more of a resource than characters you can form a connection with. They die quickly, and you order a new batch of soldiers just as quickly. It's still fun to play more than 30 years after its release and in my opinion it's by far the best game in the old X-Com series.

This game is very good and fun. The long-term strategy is simplistic, but satisfying when you see yourself really dominating the alien forces, and the tactical battles are as satisfying as any in the genre. Sure, it feels unfair and random a lot of the time, but that's when you realise that you can send in 28 soldiers to battle at one time, which is more than what the aliens are bringing. And also, you can kill aliens with one lucky shot just as well as they can kill you. Mind control is also extremely busted. The result is a hilarious inverse difficulty curve, where it starts hard and drops off a cliff, but it is nonetheless immensely satisfying to go through, and to arbitrarily extend your campaign to set up more bases and shoot down more UFOs just for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles. I don't really know if I have to speak on the gameplay in any detail here. You move soldiers based on stamina and time units, which are basically just action points. There are multiple types of shots units can take, but you pretty much always use snap shots or automatic fire, depending on the range. Explosives are very strong, especially a guided missile launcher you get at the endgame, which has the biggest explosions as well as remote-guided missiles, so you could probably finish many missions by having one psionic mind-controlling the enemies, and several soldiers with blaster launchers blowing up the whole map. The main weakness of the game is the repetitive nature of it. The loop of shooting down UFOs and recovering them does get old, and the biggest issue is that the large supply- and battle-ships have static layouts. This means that you will be crawling through the same corridors over and over again, and you can't even blow them up with explosives. When you reach that stage, it's definitely better to focus on bases, which have random layouts, and then just finish the game. I dragged things out to set up bases armed with two of the best interceptors in the game around the globe, but you don't have to do that. Truly, you make your own fun... I don't know if I should try the X-COM Files again. It feels like it just adds a ton of padding before you get to the fun part, which is just the normal campaign. At least it's cool that it exists, alongside many other mods that I would recommend checking out.

I remember when this game was first released back in 1994; my friend was the only one with a computer capable of running it, so me and several of our friends all went to his house and took turns playing it. Surprisingly enough, we didn't end up killing each other to get more time to play. This game was peak at the time. I only have 18 hours on Steam, but I likely have more hours in this game than any other game in my library currently. Even 30+ years later, the original still holds up. If you are a fan of the current XCOM games, I encourage you to give this one a try.