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