games

I genuinely really love XCom: Apocalypse and think it's sad it is rarely talked about.

The vision they had for that game is incredible. A full scifi megacity with a functioning economy. Every single building in the city is owned, every company is its own faction, and the police, and the gangs, and xcom. Relationships between everything. With gang wars and company wars and raids against one another and everything. It was truly in the same intent as the original xcom, to make a simulation.

The thing that bothers me about the newer games compared to the original is that in the newer games the geoscape plays like a boardgame whereas in the old game it feels like the goal is to have it play like a simulation. Apocalypse continued the goal of a fullscale sandbox simulation of a city with capitalist monopoly megacorps capitalising on an alien invasion coming from an alternate dimension all while you're desperately trying to advance your technology and stop this thing. Alien technology proliferates through companies and gangs if you sell it on the market. And they acquire it from raiding each other over time too. Need money? Go steal drugs and VR tech from the gangs and sell it. You might piss off the MegaPolice doing this though but that's fine really they're weak. Don't forget the cult faction actively working to help the aliens too.

It was cool as shit. In some ways it slightly doesn't meet that full vision. And it has to be played on the higher difficulties to get all the features.

Oh and combat is realtime strategy with squads and shit.

Really liked it. I wish it was talked about more it really feels like they were onto something. Battles in the cityscape (equivalent of geoscape) were waaaaaay better than basically every other game including the modern games and xenonauts.

In a lot of ways it's quite different from the 2012. There's no scripted plot, for on. But for me the biggest thing was, in the new X-Coms, you can get 4 or 6 troops. In OG X-com you could shove up to 14 guys on the Skyranger, enough for multiple fireteams plus overwatch and specialists. I couldn't get over the limited number of troops and way that severely limited your tactical options in the new games.

Xenonauts 1 is good, especially with mods. Xenonauts 2 is mixed bag, still have it, but development is taking forever and campaign is not finished. Tactical combat is very similar to original, though the antifun brigade is pushing to make it harder than even TFtD and lately there was a lot of needless buffs for the aliens. Unfortunately air combat and especially air economy is completely FUBAR, made incredibly shit and unfun in the last 2 big patches.

Its true, all of it.

Xcom terror from the deep is what I'm most familiar with. Great game and series.

I almost came close to buying xcom 1 (2012). But I refrained cause combined with the dlc it was too costly.