UFO: Aftermath (PC)

CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
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Gamespot editors' review

• Reviewed by: Brett Todd
• Reviewed on: 10/17/2003
• Released on: 10/15/2003

Few games before or since have gotten players as intimately involved as the 1993 classic, X-COM: UFO Defense, which dealt with defending Earth from an alien invasion. Managing men, organizing top secret bases, and prying funding away from tight-fisted governments let players feel like they were actually in charge of a desperate attempt to save humanity. Add to that a gripping turn-based tactical mode where soldiers attacked ET on his own turf and looted crashed flying saucers, and you had a game that few could put down. So it's surprising that UFO: Aftermath, a spiritual successor that began life as an unofficial sequel to X-COM--and designed by the original team--is so different. ALTAR Interactive has changed the focus completely, diminishing user involvement to the point that the game feels much emptier than its predecessors. The biggest problem is a stripped-down design that makes the player more of a generic commando than the commander of a paramilitary organization. Combat has also been stripped down to the bare essentials, with missions and maps that lack interactivity and challenging artificial intelligence. Despite some bright spots, this isn't a fitting sequel to X-COM, and, on its own merits, it just isn't a good tactical combat simulator.

On the surface, there are strong similarities between UFO and X-COM. You are still defending the Earth against alien invaders. You are still waging this war with small teams of soldiers who are sent to attack alien strongholds and sent to ransack crashed UFOs for their advanced technology. You are still researching terrestrial and extraterrestrial technologies for ways of chasing ET back to his own area code. Even the main map screen is a mirror image of that in the original X-COM, complete with a rotating globe, clock, and ticker, detailing available missions. If not for the post-doomsday storyline and a ticking-bomb subplot about an alien biomass that is slowly killing off planetary life, the games are nearly identical.

However, the design veers in new directions under the hood. Some of these new directions eliminate features that made X-COM and its sequel, Terror From the Deep, so popular. Aspects of play have been simplified, in part, due to the apocalyptic plot dealing with the aftermath of an alien invasion that's all but destroyed humanity. Most notably, virtually all of the management duties in the original X-COM have been removed. There is no budget to ponder, no bases to design, no scientists to hire, and no governments with which to deal, largely because these niceties no longer exist in the post-invasion world. You apparently run the Phoenix Company of commandos and answer to the "Council of Earth," but these organizations are nothing but names on the screen.

Basically, you make do with what you're given, which dovetails with the end-of-the-world setting but isn't satisfying from a gameplay perspective. Win enough missions in a particular territory and you discover a base that can be conquered and converted for your alien-fighting purposes. Then you pick a base type from the four available--military, engineering, research, and biomass repulsion--and your operation is up and running, a scant 24 hours later. That's it. Aside from the option of turning one base type into another (in the same 24-hour span), selecting tech trees to research, and aliens to autopsy, there is nothing else to oversee.

While this rids the game of micromanagement worries, it also does away with much of the role-playing that made X-COM so all-consuming. ALTAR needed to make some changes, as you end up controlling at least a couple of dozen bases around the globe in the average campaign. This would drown you in minutiae if they were governed in the old hands-on style. But forgoing all managerial responsibilities is too much of a sacrifice. It's hard to feel emotionally involved when so much of the struggle against the aliens is taken out of your hands. In many ways, the game is more similar to squad-based combat simulators, like Fallout: Tactics or Jagged Alliance 2, than X-COM. Where X-COM felt like a sprawling, open-ended campaign, UFO: Aftermath feels more strictly mission-oriented and is therefore more limited in scope. This isn't inherently a problem--but, unfortunately, the combat in UFO tends to not be satisfying.

The tactical combat, which takes place in randomly generated missions, seems barren. A seemingly interesting combination of turn-based and real-time mechanics that blends cautious decision-making with an exciting pace is wasted, largely due to the complete absence of artificial intelligence. You can't give your troops standing orders, so if you want them to fire back when attacked or to take cover, you have to manually tell them to do so. Being able to constantly pause the action makes it easy to stay in control of everyone, though this eliminates the real-time element. If an option to put troops on offensive or defensive postures had been provided, the real-time option would have been much more useful.

Lack of mission variety is another problem. You raid crashed UFOs, capture aliens to be interrogated, and assault and defend bases with a single team of up to seven soldiers--although it seems like you're just patrolling maps and killing everything in sight. Base missions turn into a tunnel crawl, where the narrow corridors are more of an annoyance than the aliens. After about six hours, you'll have experienced everything that the game has to offer in this respect. Far too many missions are about determining "the level of enemy resistance" in search-and-destroy expeditions. The only other point of interest is the ability to pass off noncritical missions to other teams, and even this is tempered by a lack of information about these associates and their results. All you're told is whether the mission succeeded or failed.

Even with fully 3D environments, the mission settings don't seem nearly interactive enough. Cover doesn't seem to work very well. Although there are typically a lot of cars, buildings, trees, and other items to hide behind on every map, these things seem to be more of a barrier to your weapons than they are to the aliens. All of the aliens with ranged weapons certainly seem to be crack shots, as they can take out soldiers who seem to be completely hidden under cover.

Expeditions play out on level terrain, so there's no point spreading out and looking for high ground. Not that it would matter even if it were possible. Your soldiers are usually crammed into close quarters, near aliens, when beginning a mission, in urban, wilderness, and/or indoor settings, so there isn't any point in trying fancy moves. Terrible pathfinding makes it even less of a good idea. Most attempts at a coordinated battle plan are wrecked by overly polite soldiers who bump into a comrade and insist on taking the long way around.

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