Visually, it evokes X-COM without blantantly just being X-COM - the camera angle is the same and the original's key tropes - the globe, the radar-based air chases, the grid-based, top-down base, the troop carrier craft with a drop-down door and a phalanx of somehow nervous-looking soldiers waiting to be unloaded into an ominously silent battleground. It looks thoroughly modern and has, I think, made a lot of smart decisions about how to re-present the slew of stats and facts that a game like this requires without interfering with that familiarly vintage flow or feel. The higher resolution isn't tokenistic, either - as well as meaning a sleeker interface in the turn-based battles, the global view screen now holds a ton of at-a-glance information, which in X-COM you'd be delving into sub-menus for, placed neatly into the space around the side. It's unusual, and that's for the good - again, this is trying to be its own game despite the comforting blanket that is a genuine X-COMiness. There's a crisp two-dimensionality to Xenonauts, most everything in it looking as though it's been clipped neatly out of cardboard. These guys are in a terrible situation, and it is only right that this dread knowledge would be written all over their scowling faces. It’s drawn some complaints, but I am entirely behind this - send me into the middle of a desperate battle against an enemy unknown and you're not going to find me smiling or spending time gelling my hair into a Rob Liefeildesque upright spray of preposterous posing. Much was made at the Expo of how dour your soldiers looked on their inventory screens - surly, tired, not handsome, clearly having a bad time. For a start, the setting has moved from overtly 90s-styled near-future sci-fi to an alien invasion in the midst of the Cold War, and with that comes a more subdued palette and a more military-realistic look. It isn't simply a slavish remake, however. Show me one of those Euro-made UFO games that came out a few years ago, and I could gripe at you for hours about what they did wrong and why they didn't feel right and eIt is clearly made to be X-COM remade for modern resolutions and with a clutch of the interface and control improvements strategy games have seen over the last two decades. And I'm struggling to know what to say about Xenonauts as a result.Īgain, this is a compliment. I can't think of a greater compliment for any game. They didn't say what worked or what didn't or what they'd change or anything like that - they just said "it's like X-COM." It is not in my nature to believe that dreams can come true.Ī playable build of Xenonauts was on show in the RPS-sponsored Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer expo last week, and pretty much everyone I spoke to about it said the same thing: "well, it's X-COM," they offered with a wide grin. Partly this was due to the many tales of infamy concerning amateur game devs who started working together remotely without ever actually meeting - online tensions can run so high - and partly because I've been waiting a long time for an X-COM remake that actually feels anything like X-COM. I've been very interested in Xenonauts for some time, if faintly horrified that lead designer Chris England claims he made the final decision to pour his life savings into funding an X-COM remake based on an offhand oh-if-only comment I made on RPS, but I confess wasn't entirely convinced it would see the light of day. OK, I admit it: I am as cynical as you when it comes to half-suspecting that enormously ambitious, fanbase-courting independent projects announced before work on them has even begun carry the dread stench of vapourware.
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