Old Games I Still Love: UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka X-COM UFO Defense)

 

Oh boy, where do I even start with this game? If Fallout was the game that got me into PC gaming then UFO: Enemy Unknown is the game that pretty much confirmed it for me. Even now I'll still fire it up on occasion and play it over it's shinier, modern adaptations (which are still great games but that's a whole other blog post or three!) 

The idea of being given a single long-term goal in a game and then being thrown in to do it has always been compelling to me. In the case of UFO: Enemy Unknown you were tasked with defending the world from an alien invasion and trying to defeat it.

You take control of the so named X-COM forces, meager as they are at the start of the game. A single modestly equipped base, a dozen of the 'best' men and women the worlds armed forces have to offer and a couple of interceptors and the iconic Skyranger transport aircraft.

That's a lot of planet to defend with twelve people!

When you start the game you are asked where you would like to place this initial base on the so called 'Geoscape' screen, the placement is particularly important as your base radar stations only have a set detection range. Not to mention your early radar installations only have a small chance of even detecting the UFO's in the first place. Also your interceptors are also likewise limited in operating range and the countries you can cover will determine your monthly funding increases or decreases.

The Geoscape is pretty much the 'grand strategy' portion of the game where you manage your bases, hire new personnel, direct research and manufacture, send out air interceptions and direct your landing craft. The base layout itself as you build it is also highly important as if the aliens manage to find your base they can and will attack you and a badly designed base can be a disaster waiting to happen. 

Eventually as you acquired the funding you could build new bases which I often used for specialised roles, such as radar bases or manufacturing bases for weapons and equipment or even bases with fighter aircraft. Upon a successful interception of a UFO in the air the games second portion comes into effect. Though it's not the only way of engaging the aliens directly, there are other ways much later on.

Everything on the geoscape itself from how you equip your soldiers to where the UFO's crash-land has an important effect on the tactical battles. If you land at night you'll be hunting the aliens in the pitch black (and they can see a lot better than you!) The kind of terrain you landed on from deserts, snow and quaint farmlands.

Even the type of UFO you shot down would have an impact, more on that later though.

At the start of the game you have state-of-the-art human weaponry which against the aliens may as well be rocks. Honestly, for a turn based game the atmosphere and tension of slowly creeping forwards in the pitch black toward a farm house was palpable which was quite a feat to achieve for a turn based game (aided by the music somewhat!)

"Everything is on fire again, sarge!"

The tactical battles much like the geoscape had a lot of depth and nuance to them, all your soldiers not only had their own unique stats and names (which you could change) but they also improved over time should you keep them alive. The aliens far more advanced technology meant that for a lot of the early game your troops often died to even grazing hits making each mission as tense as possible. The landscape itself would even change especially during larger battles, walls would get demolished by gunfire and plasma bolts, fires could spread and rage out of control cutting off lines of sight with smoke. You could even use it to your advantage, blasting open walls or the sides of UFO's to avoid the almost always fatal door breaching. 

The maps themselves deserve a special mention too, they were randomly generated out of various blocks and buildings meaning that you rarely saw the same map twice. The only exception being the alien ships themselves, those however would have a layout and oft times a multi-floor plan depending on their role and type.

The battles were also helped by an impressive enemy variety, even the basic sectoids or 'greys' were a terrifying opponent with their psychic powers or the pure brute force of the muton's later on. All of them offered their own challenges and were mostly terrifying but the one enemy I will always fear alongside all other X-COM commanders, the Chrysalid.

A nightmare given form.

These enemies were typically most commonly encountered on one of the harder mission types, the terror mission. Every so often the aliens would directly attack a major city and you had to drop whatever you were doing and send troops there to put a stop to it lest the country in question would quite rightly stop paying you. They were tough, ridiculously fast and anyone unlucky enough to be bitten by one was turned into a drooling zombie, aggressive to their former comrades. Bad enough by anyone's standards but it got even worse, after several turns these zombies would crumple to the ground as a new chrysalid emerged. Meaning all those citizens running around in a crazed panic trying to escape would often become an army of black chitinous death if you didn't move fast enough. 

As the game progresses so to does the alien invasion, you go from fighting a handful of aliens in a small UFO wreck with rifles and miniguns in naught but a jump suit. To fighting your way up to the command deck of an alien battleship in powered armour with plasma rifles and blaster bomb launchers, turning their own weapons against them. The tension always remains though, making you feel as if you are always chasing the curve rather than getting ahead of it.

Once battles were done the successes and failures came around to affect the Geoscape portion of the game as well. Alien technology and corpses were stored away to be researched or used, equipment restocked, wounded soldiers removed from active service and fresh recruits hired to replace them. Successes pleasing the world council and increasing funding with failures reducing it or even seeing a member country leaving entirely.

All in all, I could write far more about UFO: Enemy Unknown, who knows, maybe I will when I start doing my after action reports and creative writing side of the blog more! This game even to this day is one of my favourite games of all time and I think I am not the only one who feels that way!