Customer Reviews

X-Com: Apocalypse

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'll get past the criticisms quickly: XCOM III (Apocalypse) has some slightly cartoonish graphics compared to the old games, and lacks fighting at night. As a result, a slight amount of the sheer terror of XCOM 1 and 2 has been lost.

But XCOM 3 is a game that - make no mistake - will make you care. Because every mission you fight, there will be innocent bystanders who can easily get killed in the crossfire. Name your special-forces agents after all your friends and family, and you'll soon realize how relevant the game feels to real life: you'll feel how painful it is to lose each and every agent. If you're very, very, VERY good, you might not lose too many.

The aliens will infest schools and shopping malls. You'll find your elite troops diving for cover behind store displays and school desks, slugging it out tooth-and-nail against ferocious aliens amidst terrified shoppers and schoolkids. There is a lot that's compelling about XCOM 3, but it's this urban combat that makes it so intense. You'll probably never be able to avoid killing at least one civilian in the crossfire. But you've got to try.

Not only can civilians get killed by your troops, but those aerial dogfights against UFOS can level entire city blocks, too. You're going to have to accept that saving the world isn't an antiseptic procedure. It's dirty, and the decisions are never easy. Sure, you can decide never to attack alien ships over the city, but if you don't, they'll drop insurgents. Who will spread from building to building. And take over corporations and organisations. Sooner or later, your troops are going to have to go in and clean them out. There's no getting around it.

Sometimes, you'll find the management a bit laborious. But every time you purchase a new shipment of weapons and equipment, or successfully research a new technology, you'll actually feel GOOD. Because you need those things. Aliens are getting into everything, and you need lots of guns, and LOTS of bullets. Grenades. Rockets. Landmines. Missiles. You'll need it all, and don't be afraid to USE IT.

Most computer games are just games, and they feel like games. But if you want to feel the true depth of the game, re-name your agents. Build and carefully arrange your bases and defences. Take a deep breath and take your agents into a UFO-recovery mission, or a mission against the Cult of Sirius (they worhip and assist the aliens), or into a shopping mall. Every outcome will matter to you. You'll feel the pain of a commander who loses friends. And you'll start to get angry - you'll really WANT to beat the aliens. You'll seek revenge for what the aliens have done to Earth. You'll soil your undies when the first mothership comes through the worm-hole at you. And if you're good, and maybe a bit lucky, you'll taste the bittersweet nectar of victory when you wipe out the last alien installation.

There's nothing better.

This game can get very addicting to those who like to micromanage. Though the aliens can be a little cheezy in comparison to the old Xcom games the weapons available from firearms to ships makes it interesting and entertaining for hours. I have played this game several times through (though i wish there could be alternate endings) it is still fun to play. Changing easy, normal and hard (superhuman too) all give different aspects of the game than monsters that take a few more hits to kill. The frequency of attacks, the amount of money, companies that are harder to please, even the landscape changes, all of this having a different affect on game play.
After playing both turn based and real time I have to say that real time makes xcom less frustrating. Having to think about moving points took away from the original two games for me but this real time strategy with the optional pause, fast forward, half speed controls help in setting up ambush sites, and makes retreat to second line positions possible if caught in a messy situation. There are some interesting extras in Apocalypse that are not seen in the first two. Pissed off countries just cut off fundings but in this game if the companies get mad at you or drop your funding you don't just have to take it, you can bribe them back or if they are too far gone go raid their place and destroy their buildings for a little more action and fun.
I myself liked going into the Cults temples (because they are going to be angry with you sooner or later) and raiding them for some extra money and weapons when there is a little time or just interested in increasing the bank account. If there was anything I didn't like about the game was that it is alien side of the game has an overall cheezy feel sometimes but beyond that this game is definetly one of my favorites even to this day. Trying to find more games that have the same type of play but hard to find one that matches this kind easy to use controls and playing style.

This game is excellent. It is in an above view, which gives you the opportunity of seeing everything. there are about 50 weapons, and that is not including stun bombs, grenades, and smoke shells.Put your agents in buildings, and raid out the buildings for any alien life forms.One drawback is that the graphincs really [stink].

Even though it started buggy, with a few fixes it worked perfectly on Windows XP. A really fun and addictive game! I honestly couldn't leave my screen for hours on end.

In my opinion, this is the pinnacle of the XCOM series. Yes, the pinnacle. As a long-time fan of the series, I recently went back and played them all again, and I have to say, this one takes the cake.

While Terror from the Deep and UFO defense are, in and of themselves, unbelievably outstanding games (the first is often considered the best computer game of all time), I think they are simply too outdated for today's player, whereas this game ports PERFECTLY since it doesn't require you to micromanage as much repetitive stuff. The real-time play mode is a necessary component to this, in my mind, because you're not tracking your troops around a map for 40 minutes waiting for an alien to come out. Many fans of the first two will scoff at this, citing that it doesn't take as much skill to run the missions in real time, but I think it really adds to the gameplay in ways that the first two cannot compete with.

Another element of the gameplay that works really well is that the aliens are more diverse and unusual in this game than they were in the previous two. They consistently outdo you in terms of technology and bring more tactics to the game than they seemed to have in years previous. Some will complain about the graphics and the fact that the aliens come at you in a rainbow of colors, but I think it works pretty well. You need different tactics to approach each kind of grouping. A popper alien is best handled by approaching it using long, narrow corridors that will let you shoot him down before he gets to you, while a group of Android and Skeletoids is best handled in a large open area later in the game when they bring out there devastator cannons.

While it can be a little repetitive over time, as the UFO missions will always repeat and the aliens have a tendency to break into the same buildings over and over, this is a great game that was extremely overlooked when it came out, and still is today. Buy it through Steam, where it will cost you $5, and it will work well on nearly any computer rather than getting the discs here. This is one of the very last DOS games to come out, and it doesn't work all that reliably in Windows.

Me and my friends played x-com 1 for years and then 2, we were addicted to it, we loved them without bounds, we even built our own replicas of the guns (well tried anyway, we were 11) and ran around making our own sound effects.
But then came this abomination, everything but the weapons looks designed by a bunch of kindergarteners using the brightest crayons they could find! What were they thinking?!
Don't get me started about the aliens.
However I must say the gameplay itself isn't too bad, I particularly liked the way "outo-shot" was done, so you can actually strafe a group of targets.
Honestly, if ALL the visuals were changed I think it would be a very decent game, I'm not crazy about the "City" idea but that's not so much an issue.
In short, if you can overlook...err...everything, you can have fun, I simply could not swallow the way EVERYTHING looks,x-com1 was the pinnacle of creation.

I have wondered excatly how this game got released. The graphics are a step back from the orignial X-Com (the higher the resolution the better it should look). Turn based is incredibly difficult, and real-time is, well, real-time. *dead face* This game is so bad it wasn't on my computer long enough to find out if it had the research & manufacturing of X-Coms 1&2. The game takes place in the city and you actually see your forces walking to the battlefield, I feel like my elite UN troops are hitch-hiking, while the world is in trouble.