Customer Reviews

X-Com: UFO Defense (Jewel Case)

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This is an old game --- a real old game (as far as computer games go), but it is still played by many. This inof itself speaks volumes. This is one game that got it all right.

At the time of its release, it was a sleeper -- little advertisement preceeded it. I bought it off the shelf with one other game (because of the pictures on the box) when I bought my first computer. Once I played it, I was hooked. The game took the computer world by storm and made a name for MicroProse

The basic premise is that the earth has been invaded. You are to set up and operate x-com, a world-wide defense operation to locate and destroy the enemy craft and aliens.

You begin with a few sorry, slow interceptors and earth type weapons -- and generally get your butt kicked by the aliens. Not only that, but after a short time, your funding begins to fall off.

But never fear. As you capture your first aliens or bring em back dead, your scientists begin to learn what makes them tick. Same with their weapons and craft. Soon you can start producing their technology and put up a decent fight. You also learn that your organization can be made to be self-supporting (to hell with the world governments) by selling items made using alien technology (and you wondered where all those microwave toasters came from).

Basic play is on two maps. The first is a map of the world in which your detectors spot an alien craft making its way to earth. Once your interceptors have shot it down and marked the location, the fun part begins. You send out your military/scientific team to see what's left and if there are any aliens about. Although stiff by today's standards, the graphic are still not bad. The game play is good even tho the game is turn based (actually, this is not a bad thing). Combat with the aliens takes anywhere from a few minutes for a scout ship, to well over an hour for a discovered installation or large cruiser. Sometimes the aliens will raid your cities ... and occassionally, they will hit your bases if you don't guard them properly.

This game is truly a gem and is as playable today as it was in the mid 90's when it first came out. They only problems you'll likely encounter is that the game was set up to run under DOS and may have a problem with todays Window's environment. But if you can run a DOS window, you should be able to run the game.

It had a follow-on game as well -- taking place under water (X-Com: Terror From the Deep). That, too, is an excellent game. Both will provide endless hours of enjoyment as you try to beat back the alien hordes. Look past the dated graphics and you'll find the gameplay is what made this one great.

Highly recommended.

~P~

This game is one of the all time greats, but there's really no need to pay $[...] for it:

[...]

This site, as well as others I'm sure, will set you up with the same game but titled UFO: Enemy Unknown as it was released in Europe/Australia. The only difference is the name and price (it's free).

This is considered to be the best computer game ever made by many experts. Still to be recreated it is in desperate need of a revamp. The dept and the difficulty and the addictiveness can't be matched.

You see an alien move across a hallway up ahead and move your soldier forward to kill it. Afterward you turn him around and see a second alien staring from the shadows a few feet away...and your soldier's turn is over. Welcome to X-Com.

I first bought this game about 15 years ago on 3.5" floppy disks and absolutely loved it; I bought it again about a year ago on Steam (the whole series) and am still addicted to it to this day. Why? Because Microprose took everything that could make a game perfect and then went and made a perfect game out of it.

The premise is this: you are the leader of X-Com, an elite group of soldiers, scientists, and engineers funded by countries around the world to protect the earth from the threat of alien invasion. You start off with just one base, wherever you'd like it to be on the planet (on land), and begin building facilities from there. You build hangars, living quarters, laboratories, workshops, storage rooms, alien containment rooms, missile defenses, radar systems, and other facilities. You purchase or recruit as many items and personnel as you want, as long as you have the room and the money for it. You will receive funding every month which will adjust based on your performance in dealing with the aliens. Kill loads of aliens and you'll get funding increases. Ignore lots of ships or attacks and countries will refuse to fund you or will sign secret pacts with aliens.

When an alien ship is detected, you launch an Interceptor to shoot it down, and then send in the troops. Sometimes aliens will attack cities around the world or even your own bases, and you'll then too have to send in your soldiers. At first your soldiers are stuck with lame weapons like pistols and rifles, but the beauty of X-Com is that as you complete missions, you collect the aliens (dead and alive) and all their artifacts (weapons, ship materials, etc.). Then when your ship returns to base, you can tell your scientists to start researching the new stuff and, once they've researched it, you can start using it. Not only that, but you can tell your engineers to start manufacturing more of it. As you can imagine, over time you'll probably gather a lot of bodies and weapons, some of which you may not want. No matter, you can sell or fire whatever/whomever you want and make more money. That's right, you aren't just dependent on world nations for your funding...go do some missions and then sell whatever loot you don't want!

The gameplay is simple. Everything is fairly self-explanatory from the world view map and the base map. Missions are turn-based, and you'll swap between moving your own soldiers and, if you're lucky, watching the aliens move. You see, if an alien comes into view of a soldier, you'll see it moving; otherwise all you see is "hidden movement," sometimes with footsteps or a door opening, sometimes with shots fired and then the sound of a human scream (if an alien kills a civilian during a city attack). So it is important to branch out your soldiers and get good fields of view. However, they have limited "time units," which are an easy way of saying how many moves they can make in a turn. Different actions, from walking to crouching to turning to shooting to picking up items to priming and throwing grenades, use different amounts of time units. There are three different types of shots: aimed (very accurate, single shot, uses LOTS of time units), snap (pretty accurate, single shot, uses least amount of time units), and auto (least accurate, three shots, generally a few more time units than snap). As you go through the game however, if your soldiers survive and go on more missions and kill more aliens, their stats will improve and they will get much better than when you first recruited them. Similarly, alien difficulty will generally get harder as the game goes on, from the easy and generic Sectoid to the infuriating and semi-hard Chryssalids which turn humans into more Chryssalids (REALLY annoying on city attack missions) to the really infuriating Ethereals, which are easy to kill with higher powered weapons but will use psychic powers to either cause your soldiers to panic (that's right, your soldiers have bravery and morale levels which change in-mission), go berserk, or come under alien control. It is up to you to be a good leader with good soldiers and good technology to outwit and outfight the alien horde. Eventually you will take the fight to the aliens, attacking their bases and ultimately their home planet.

As old as the game is, it does show its age. The graphics are not terrible, but by today's standards they are not good, either. They are more than adequate for the game, though. The music is MIDI and while simplistic is appropriate and reasonably scary. It fits the mood of the gameplay.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough. It is the first in the series and was followed by four sequels, the second (Terror from the Deep, basically the same game but underwater) being the only other one truly worth playing in my opinion. X-Com: UFO Defense, however, is up there in the pantheon of amazing, perfect games which I could easily list as one of my favorite games, second only to The Complete Ultima VII. If you use Steam or another client where this is available, please buy this game. For the amount of sheer brilliant gameplay you get out of it, it is one of the best bargains you'll ever get.

Don't be fooled by the blocky, outdated graphics. This is the best game ever made, stunning in its detail, tactical gameplay, and strategic depth. You are in charge of XCOM, a shadow paramilitary force that is responsible for the defense of earth from alien invasion.

At the start of the game, you are woefully unprepared, sending inexperienced rookies armed with primitive rifles to their deaths against aliens with superior weaponry. UFOs will zoom past your interceptors as if they were standing still. Your lone base has meager radar coverage, most alien activity goes undetected. They will terrorize cities, and governments will mysteriously defect as aliens infiltrate their ranks. But over time, you will seize alien technology, interrogate alien prisoners, develop new weapons and armor, create a networked global defense against the alien threat, and take the fight to the aliens. By the end, your psionic veteran supermen will quite literally strike terror in the hearts of aliens with the aid of mind-control devices.

It is too much to describe every feature this game has, but here is just a taste:

+ Aliens have better night-vision. Fight during the day if possible. If you must fight at night, bring flares to illuminate the surrounding areas. Set fire to vegetation to light up the jungle.

+ Terrain is fully destructible. Crouching behind a stone wall may protect your men from stray plasma shots, but it won't stop a grenade blast. If aliens have occupied a building, don't knock on the front door - they will be clustered and waiting for your arrival. Blow a hole in the wall and hit them from the sides. They won't see you coming. Try not to hit the civilians.

+ Build your first few bases around your main funding countries, clustered in Europe, North America, and East Asia. You must establish a strong presence to prevent alien infiltration. You are accountable to your sponsors, and if your performance is unsatisfactory, they will cut your funding.

+ Try to follow UFOs, rather than shoot them down. Assault them intact on the ground to pick up valuable alien artifacts, and capture prisoners for research. But if a terror UFO is headed for a major city, shoot it down ASAP. Try not to shoot down UFOs too close to your base. The aliens will come hunting if they are losing too many spacecraft in one area. If they find your base, they will directly assault it with a battleship, and you will be forced to defend against alien ground assault.

+ Keep a close eye on your personnel. The loss of an officer in combat may cause the whole squad to panic. Pay attention to their skills, and use them accordingly. Have soldiers with high reaction walk point. Have those with high accuracy provide precision fire, and have those with high strength carry the heavy weapons.

+ Pay attention to sounds. You may hear the aliens before you see them.

X-COM is a difficult, immersive, and completely compelling game. I urge you to spend one hour playing it, because that's all you'll need to get hooked. When your first trainee Dieter Esser tenuously steps off the skyranger, only to catch a brief, shadowy glimpse of a gray humanoid, lurking in the dark bushes, you'll begin to understand why this game is a true classic.

I recently bought the entire X-Com series and I have to say that this one is the best of the series. Its graphics are quite primitive and its sequels did introduce some nice features that improved the gameplay, but I couldn't help but play this one the most. Though, don't get me wrong the other games in the X-com series are good too.

Gameplay seems simple at first, but there is alot of depth to it. The set-up is that you (the player character) are running an agency to protect Earth from an alien invasion. To succeed in this, your going to need to recruit a squad of soldiers (don't worry too much about them dying, they can always be replaced if you have the money, but it is also good to have a few experienced soldiers) to combat the aliens, scientists to research alien tech, engineers to build better and stronger weapons and vehicles, and a lot of cash to fund it all . When I first tried out the game, I focused on combating the aliens and didn't explore the other options I had at the base (like research) and it bite me hard. Let me be frank here, if your new to strategy games, start on a low difficulty setting because this game can be hard. But don't let that scare you because, once you get your ball-bearings, it is a world of fun. Shooting down saucers and finishing them off with your battalion of lethal alien killers is a blast once you learn to understand things like keeping track of your time units. A little tip, focus on protecting America as they will fund you more than any other nation in the game.

Like mentioned before, the graphics are a product of their time and look dated by our standards, but their not ugly so it shouldn't affect your enjoyment too much; they even have a sort of charm. The story of the game is pretty much absent for 90% of the game so this might not be the kind of game for people who love games with engrossing stories (when I said it was about running an agency to stop an alien invasion, that was pretty much all there was to the story). However, despite myself liking games with stories, I didn't really mind the mostly absent plot (I kind of made up my own one, yeah I know that sounds childish, but it is fun). The music is neither bad nor great, no memorable tracks here, but I did find the music that is here does its job.

On the whole, X-Com UFO Defense (or Enemy Unknown if your from Europe) is a classic title that any strategy game fan will enjoy. If your not a strategy game fan, but are interested in the genre, trust me, there is no better game to introduce you. However, I would not purchase this off amazon.com unless you are a collector of some sort who wants the original packaging and the such.

To those who decide to buy this game from amazon.com, you might have to use dos box to get it to run on your computer as many of these old games don't work well on newer computers. Dos Box is freeware.

I picked up X-Com after reading a magazine review (back then we read things in magazines). I was not disappointed: The game pulled me in and never let go. There was so much to do, so many different ways to play and such a long campaign that I spent many late late nights just taking down one more alien ufo before going to bed. The only shame about it is that today's faster processors make game unplayable, and its almost primitive graphics will turn off most newcomers.

How I would love to see a new version.

I first played this on the playstation1 back in the day. I was hooked from the opening view of the globe.

I recently picked up the PC version off of Steam and while the graphics are dated, I can honestly say that after 15 minutes of playing, I hardly even notice. This is one of those games that I just keep going back to every few years to see what other things I can do.

I spent the last week going through remakes and "Homages" to this game, none of them can touch it.

I have read that the team from Bioshock is looking to do a faithful remake of this game so I am looking forward to that. But until it comes out, I will be playing the original game that came out 10 years ago.