UFO: Alien Invasion

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GreatEmerald
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UFO: Alien Invasion

Unread postby GreatEmerald » 18 Sep 2013, 17:10

Completely by accident I came across a very interesting game, UFO: Alien Invasion. It's a faithful remake of the original XCOM: UFO Defense (AKA UFO: Enemy Unknown).

Unlike the official remake, it has a fully functional (and gorgeous) Geoscape, you can build bases and aliens can attack them, your soldiers use Time Units, you take 8 people in the battlefield by default etc. Though it does have changes that add to the experience, like no more energy units (they were redundant with TUs anyway), radar towers and SAM sites can be built in Geoscape, a lot more more weapon types, you need to store, research and disassemble UFOs to get their flight computers etc. And like in the official remake, you no longer get profit out of production. Instead you use it to produce items you can't otherwise buy, like newly researched ones or those that require alien alloys. You get profit out of the aforementioned UFO disassembly.

The game is free software and is cross-platform, it works on Windows (including XP), Linux, OS X, and even FreeBSD. The game is still in active development. The official stable version right now is 2.4, but I recommend the nightly builds of 2.5, because it's pretty much in a release candidate stage already, and it has a lot of updates and balancing fixes. There are still bugs here and there, but they're usually minor and not related to gameplay mechanics (there was one bigger bug recently, but it got fixed yesterday).

Their main website is here:
http://ufoai.org/
Here are some screenshots:
http://ufoai.org/wiki/Category:Screensh ... AI_2.3-dev
You can download it here (scroll down to the Development section for 2.5):
http://ufoai.org/wiki/Download
If you find any bugs, report them here (or you can also ask about it on their IRC channel):
http://ufoai.org/bugs/

Personally I've spent quite a bit of time playing the game (it's as addictive as the original :D ), and am probably around the late mid-game or early end-game. I started on Very Easy, but it's not that easy even on that setting (the battlescape reportedly doesn't change, the difficulty only changes geoscape right now). I have 5 bases that cover most of the globe, and numerous radar installations for patching up any holes in the detection grid. That's pretty nice since I can rely less on interceptors and let more UFOs land, giving me more materials to work with (but even then I try to not overstep my monthly funding by the nations). So far it's been going fairly well, even had two nice alien base assault missions, and recently defended one of my weaker bases with a squad of 12 rookies (lost 4 of them).

So I highly recommend giving it a try if you liked the original XCOM, or the remake, or turn-based strategy in general.

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