Xenonauts may be set in 1979 rather than UFO’s future-nineties, but everything is recognisable, from the strategic Geoscape, top-down base design and isometric turn-based combat. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, this snuffing out of life in an instant, this sundering of plans and protocols. I’m in control.Īnd then, during the sinister veil of ‘alien movement’, the shattering of glass, and a sound somewhere between a raygun and a breaking bone. They kneel in the dirt of a rural dustbowl or the icing of an Arctic drift. I see the UFO, I order my soldiers to preserve time units for a quick shot, I look for cover that provides a good view of the ship’s door, I move everybody into the correct position. The situation described in that earlier paragraph – the squad forming a perfect perimeter around a downed UFO – is second nature to me. Naturally, it’s the similarities that filled Toshio with such dread. I can’t comment on the end-game - potentially the most difficult part to make pleasing for a designer – but Xenonauts has a character of its own and what changes have been made are either improvements or attempts to express that new character. All I wanted from Xenonauts was a game that could stand on its own feet rather than using UFO as a crutch. Everyone who has played UFO has their own memories, their own creations within the game and their own false memories about its flaws or lack of. It’s a spiritual successor to one of the games that caused me to love games but I don’t have any particular expectations as to what it should update, alter or retain. I’m not in awe of UFO and that’s at least partly because it gave me toy soldiers to name and play with when I was a teenager, which inevitably led to the aforementioned melodrama and bad romance.Īll of this feeds into my approach to Xenonauts. The reason I dredge up my own idiosyncratic way of playing is to establish that while Julian Gollop’s masterpiece is an incredibly significant game in my life, the relationship I formed with it isn’t entirely serious. Hopefully that hasn’t entirely ruined your memories of UFO. I was too young and naïve to realise I’d inadvertently made it look like they were noshing each other off. To do so, they had to spend eight action points, which meant making them kneel in front of one another, and then stand up again. (Tangent within a tangent - during quiet moments, usually when hunting down the last alien on a map, couples would occasionally smooch. Dogs lying down with cats, and then making out with the cats one last time as they bled out covered in plasma burns. Grizzled veteran Trent Reznor cuddling a gerbil. When every other barrel o’ names had been scraped to its very bottom, I gave new soldiers the names of my pets. The whole thing became even more creepy when I ran out of celebrity names and started using friends. That one guy called with the Guile haircut (Trent Reznor) was totally in love with the new recruit (Billy Corgan), and the mission became personal when Corgan died in the middle of an orchard without a single kill or time unit to his name. I used to write what was essentially fan fiction about the lives and deaths of my soldiers, filling in the background of their lives before the invasion and (oh god yes it’s true) lingering on the romances that sprang up between missions. Melodrama! Turns out Xenonauts brings out the giddy diarist in me just as the UFO: Enemy Unknown did way back when. He’s only killed abstract shapes framed in a scope and with their own crosshair to bear, but he’s seen death up close, ragged and steaming. He’s a sharpshooter, a sniper, a death-dealing veteran of two campaigns against brutal insurgents. The squad have taken up position, ready to blow seven shades of reconstituted genetic material out of whatever freak opens the door, but Toshio has been told to hang back. It’s his first time in the field since recruitment and everything is going smoothly but a sense of déjà vu washed over him just now as the downed UFO came into sight. And some anecdotes about intra-squad romance. Several days of playing later, I have the answer. With its loyal approach to the original design, Xenonauts doesn’t step on XCOM’s toes, but I wondered if it could succesfully muscle in on the original game's territory. Following a successful Kickstarter and a period in Early Access, the game has been available for almost a month now. Xenonauts is a spiritual successor to UFO: Enemy Unknown, which means that it’s also a spiritual successor to many of the most tense and glorious hours of my teenage years.
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