You are in control of X-COM: an organization formed by the world's governments to fight the ever-increasing alien menace. Shooting down UFOs is just the beginning: you must then lead a squad of heavily-armed soldiers across different terrains as they investigate the UFO crash site. Tackle the aliens with automatic rifles, rocket launchers, and even tanks in the struggle to retrieve useful technology, weapons or life forms. Successful ground assault missions will allow X-COM scientists to analyze alien items. Each new breakthrough brings you a little closer to understanding the technology and culture of the alien races. Once you have sufficient research data on the UFO's superior weapons and crafts, you'll be able to manufacture weapons of equal capability. You must make every crucial decision as you combat the powerful alien forces. But you'll also need to watch the world political situation: governments may be forced into secret pacts with the aliens and then begin to reduce X-COM funding.
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THE definitive XCOM game. THE tactical strategy game of all time.
This is what peak tactical gameplay looks like.
You will watch countless of your pixel-faced soldiers die, your veterans will be killed in the shadows and you will quit the game. 10/10
You will watch countless of your pixel-faced soldiers die, your veterans will be killed in the shadows and you will quit the game. 10/10
Finally finished a save I had started like 10 months ago which now allows me to put it right here in the ol' Backloggd.
I'm 36 at the time of writing this, and I went to tell y'all younger folks about something called Shareware. Back in the day, we kinda sorta had two different types of Not-The-Full-Game experiences: demos and shareware. A demo back in the day was what a demo is now; a limited, small chunk of the game. And then there was shareware, which was ostensibly the entire game, but you only got to play a portion of it until you paid. Think of it like a sort of Freemium thing that we've got nowadays.
Anywho, to a kid like me--and I would imagine lots of PC gaming kids back in the day--shareware made up the bulk of what we experienced: the first levels of Commander Keen, the first chapter of Doom, the bits of Escape Velocity before you get blown up by a Parrot. You'd get these games from various discs (floppy discs, mind, but sometimes CDs) and just play whatever came your way.
It was the shareware of X-Com that more or less completely changed the way my brain worked.
There's a concept in TTRPGs, particularly in LARP, called "bleed." Bleed more or less refers to the degree to which you like, feel like your character(s), or the degree to which you're fully emotionally invested in them. There are low-bleed players and high-bleed players, and while I don't necessarily think that high or low bleed necessarily equates to something like immersion, I think there is a way that high-bleed folks can feel more attuned to their characters and games.
I've always been an incredibly high-bleed player, not just of TTRPGs, but of video games too. I need to feel a degree of emotional connection in order to even remotely care. This took the form of me talking out loud to myself as a kid "in character" as, say, an X-Wing pilot while playing X-Wing/TIE Fighter, or as Beatrice the Knight hero in HoMM3 or as the squadron commander of a group of hapless alien-fighting morons in X-Com.
Because of my high degree of bleed, I prefer games that are crunchy; I love when a game gives me levers and buttons and knobs to push and press and pull and manage. I love a base building system, I love an economy, I love to customize things and manage things and name things. X-Com gives you control over everything. The first thing you see when you start a new game is the globe--THE WHOLE PLANET! You can put your first base anywhere you want! Then you've got a whole base to build, you've got things to research, individual soldiers with their own stats and inventories to manage, fighter planes to deploy--it's everything. X-Com hands you an entire world that you get to mess with and says, "good luck!" And then it lets you do it all however you want.
It's simply a masterpiece of a game, and is still more or less unparalleled. The remakes--both 1 and 2--scratch the same itch, but as the saying goes, "you can't go home again."
Nothing will ever be like the OG X-Com.
I'm 36 at the time of writing this, and I went to tell y'all younger folks about something called Shareware. Back in the day, we kinda sorta had two different types of Not-The-Full-Game experiences: demos and shareware. A demo back in the day was what a demo is now; a limited, small chunk of the game. And then there was shareware, which was ostensibly the entire game, but you only got to play a portion of it until you paid. Think of it like a sort of Freemium thing that we've got nowadays.
Anywho, to a kid like me--and I would imagine lots of PC gaming kids back in the day--shareware made up the bulk of what we experienced: the first levels of Commander Keen, the first chapter of Doom, the bits of Escape Velocity before you get blown up by a Parrot. You'd get these games from various discs (floppy discs, mind, but sometimes CDs) and just play whatever came your way.
It was the shareware of X-Com that more or less completely changed the way my brain worked.
There's a concept in TTRPGs, particularly in LARP, called "bleed." Bleed more or less refers to the degree to which you like, feel like your character(s), or the degree to which you're fully emotionally invested in them. There are low-bleed players and high-bleed players, and while I don't necessarily think that high or low bleed necessarily equates to something like immersion, I think there is a way that high-bleed folks can feel more attuned to their characters and games.
I've always been an incredibly high-bleed player, not just of TTRPGs, but of video games too. I need to feel a degree of emotional connection in order to even remotely care. This took the form of me talking out loud to myself as a kid "in character" as, say, an X-Wing pilot while playing X-Wing/TIE Fighter, or as Beatrice the Knight hero in HoMM3 or as the squadron commander of a group of hapless alien-fighting morons in X-Com.
Because of my high degree of bleed, I prefer games that are crunchy; I love when a game gives me levers and buttons and knobs to push and press and pull and manage. I love a base building system, I love an economy, I love to customize things and manage things and name things. X-Com gives you control over everything. The first thing you see when you start a new game is the globe--THE WHOLE PLANET! You can put your first base anywhere you want! Then you've got a whole base to build, you've got things to research, individual soldiers with their own stats and inventories to manage, fighter planes to deploy--it's everything. X-Com hands you an entire world that you get to mess with and says, "good luck!" And then it lets you do it all however you want.
It's simply a masterpiece of a game, and is still more or less unparalleled. The remakes--both 1 and 2--scratch the same itch, but as the saying goes, "you can't go home again."
Nothing will ever be like the OG X-Com.
Highly recommended to play it on OpenXcom if you wanna get into it, it's a masterpiece of a game, something that is still on a league of its own, even when compared to certain modern games of the same genre.
Very fun, though takes a while to complete, at least for me. I love this game so far, it's really awesome :)
Edit: Since the initial review I had works really hard to finishing the game, which was made difficult with an old bug that was shipped with the game where it interpreted more moderate difficulties to wanting the highest and hardest of all! So to actually complete it, I had to play at a lower difficulty, but I feel no shame in that as I still had a lot of fun and I feel some of the mechanics of this game hadn't aged too well as I covered when revising my review of the sequel.
At times I feel like when it says a soldier or alien can see someone, the person it still hidden in darkness and I often can't see them, having to rely on the cursor changing colour when targeting a square the enemy is in and sometimes it's not the main one I wish to aim at, but to take out the far more dangerous one equipped with a psionic amp.
The story, as I hope everyone should know, is that the Earth is being invaded by aliens and a taskforce is formed with funding from all the different nations around the world. However, if they do not see a change or you lack behind in saving people and taking down UFOs, they may choose to reduce or even end their funding entirely and that'll be the end of them and you will never be able to regain any funding again from them in the future, limiting the amount of funding you can have and causing a handicap.
One of the things this game did above the newer, successful, version by 2K is that you get the full gore with the autopsy which seems to be easier to get away with because it's pixelated, where as the others are essentially the same animation, but with a different alien.
I loved learning and reading up the alien's biology and getting a good idea as to why they would benefit from taking over this world and some of the disturbing parts of the aliens themselves, like how the "Snakemen" are filled with eggs that are reproduced asexually and if left to their own devises, could easily out-populate the planet in a short time-span. Or how the Etherials' bodies are severally underdeveloped in every part of their body, apart from their brain having great psionic abilities and is essentially the only real functioning organ in their bodies.
The lore for this game is really something and you may even miss some bits of it, depending on how good you actually are at catching the aliens and in vanilla form, the game itself doesn't require you to catch every single alien or all of the aliens of multiple different ranks to unlock everything necessary to strike back at the aliens and end the game in the one final attack.
I was also excited to learn years later of a opensource modding program, allowing you to modify this and the following game into a whole new experience! For those interested in wanting to play more classic X-COM without having to replay the same game over and over again, I highly recommend you check out this forum and website for all the mods and how to install them!
My favourite of the Megamods is X-Piratez, but I'm sure all of your could have fun looking up these mods for yourself and having your own fun. Maybe even getting involved in the modding community too!
Openxcom Forums
Mod.io/openxcom
Edit: Since the initial review I had works really hard to finishing the game, which was made difficult with an old bug that was shipped with the game where it interpreted more moderate difficulties to wanting the highest and hardest of all! So to actually complete it, I had to play at a lower difficulty, but I feel no shame in that as I still had a lot of fun and I feel some of the mechanics of this game hadn't aged too well as I covered when revising my review of the sequel.
At times I feel like when it says a soldier or alien can see someone, the person it still hidden in darkness and I often can't see them, having to rely on the cursor changing colour when targeting a square the enemy is in and sometimes it's not the main one I wish to aim at, but to take out the far more dangerous one equipped with a psionic amp.
The story, as I hope everyone should know, is that the Earth is being invaded by aliens and a taskforce is formed with funding from all the different nations around the world. However, if they do not see a change or you lack behind in saving people and taking down UFOs, they may choose to reduce or even end their funding entirely and that'll be the end of them and you will never be able to regain any funding again from them in the future, limiting the amount of funding you can have and causing a handicap.
One of the things this game did above the newer, successful, version by 2K is that you get the full gore with the autopsy which seems to be easier to get away with because it's pixelated, where as the others are essentially the same animation, but with a different alien.
I loved learning and reading up the alien's biology and getting a good idea as to why they would benefit from taking over this world and some of the disturbing parts of the aliens themselves, like how the "Snakemen" are filled with eggs that are reproduced asexually and if left to their own devises, could easily out-populate the planet in a short time-span. Or how the Etherials' bodies are severally underdeveloped in every part of their body, apart from their brain having great psionic abilities and is essentially the only real functioning organ in their bodies.
The lore for this game is really something and you may even miss some bits of it, depending on how good you actually are at catching the aliens and in vanilla form, the game itself doesn't require you to catch every single alien or all of the aliens of multiple different ranks to unlock everything necessary to strike back at the aliens and end the game in the one final attack.
I was also excited to learn years later of a opensource modding program, allowing you to modify this and the following game into a whole new experience! For those interested in wanting to play more classic X-COM without having to replay the same game over and over again, I highly recommend you check out this forum and website for all the mods and how to install them!
My favourite of the Megamods is X-Piratez, but I'm sure all of your could have fun looking up these mods for yourself and having your own fun. Maybe even getting involved in the modding community too!
Openxcom Forums
Mod.io/openxcom
I think this is the pinnacle of turn base strategy games. Everything after this felt lackluster in some way or another.
This game is unique in almost every single way. It allows you to equip your soldiers in any way you want, take up to 40 soldiers to missions (or only 1), you can destroy all the buildings you find, set grenades to detonate far in the future.
This is balanced for the early-mid game. If you take too many soldiers you will spend a lot of money equipping them, the more you have the easier is for one to lose moral, drop everything (even primed grenades) and flee, maybe killing other, more important, soldiers.
Late game is a different story, both you and the aliens are overpowered. They can mind control your soldiers if they have a low psy ability. You can fire missiles that moves in a pattern defined by you, if those hit an enemy you will kill it and probably every enemy around it.
Overall, the best strategy experience I had in any game.
This game is unique in almost every single way. It allows you to equip your soldiers in any way you want, take up to 40 soldiers to missions (or only 1), you can destroy all the buildings you find, set grenades to detonate far in the future.
This is balanced for the early-mid game. If you take too many soldiers you will spend a lot of money equipping them, the more you have the easier is for one to lose moral, drop everything (even primed grenades) and flee, maybe killing other, more important, soldiers.
Late game is a different story, both you and the aliens are overpowered. They can mind control your soldiers if they have a low psy ability. You can fire missiles that moves in a pattern defined by you, if those hit an enemy you will kill it and probably every enemy around it.
Overall, the best strategy experience I had in any game.