The classic

The first game in X-Com series places you in the lead of X-Com, a multi-national force founded by world’s governments to fight the extraterrestrial threat (the aliens). The game was released as X-Com: Enemy Unknown in North-America and went by the name UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe.

As the leader of X-Com (Extraterrestrial Combat), you must organize your troops, manage the funding and command the researchers as well as order units to intercept the UFOs. All this is done in the Geoscape mode, where you’ll find yourself watching the world map.
In the map screen, you see your bases and crafts. As the radar of your base picks up an alien craft, it appears as a red dot in the world map. Then you must order aircrafts to intercept it. As soon as your interceptors have managed to make it crash land (or to blow it to bits, depending on your craft’s weaponry), a new part of the game is about to start.

Yay, a cinematic intro

Once the UFO has been shot down, you must send units to neutralize the survivors and salvage the alien technology. All that takes place in the game’s turn-based combat mode where you control your soldiers in an overhead perspective.
Each soldier has a certain of time units and each action you take (walking, firing a gun, etc.) consumes them. Once you have run out of the time units, you switch to next soldier and repeat the process.
When all of your troops have taken their action, it’s time to end the turn. After that the computer does the same for aliens with hidden movement. You can’t see what they’re doing, unless one of your soldiers sees it, but you can hear what the aliens are doing (opening doors, firing shots…).

One of the most important aspects in making UFO a classic was the line-of-sight system. The fact that you only see what your soldiers see, keeps the game interesting. You may hear sound an see bits of movement happening, but you don’t truly know what’s going on until one of your soldiers is at the scene.
Once an alien is spotted, you have to neutralize it. This means you’ve got two options: either you kill it or you stun it and take to scientists for researching. (Pay back all that probing they did to us…)

Once you’ve taken care of all hostile units, the mission ends. Then you’re presented with a review of your performance. Obtained alien artifacts and neutralized aliens add to score while own casualties reduce it.
In addition the normal cleanup missions, there are terror missions where aliens have attacked a city and X-Com must come to deal with the threat. (Interestingly the textures the game uses indicate that aliens only seem to attack city outskirts with cabbage fields and occasional gas stations…) There you also need to protect the civilians on the scene. Aliens enjoy firing at them and each casualty shows up negatively in your mission performance reviews.

Bases start small burt eventually grow huge

Happiness is a warm gun

The combat mode is very well done. You can blow up everything you see (Which always is a great feature…), the line of sight is very well done and both the obstacles and lighting affect to your field of vision. The maps can contain multiple floors and sniping from the roof is always fun.
Speaking of weapons, the arsenal is huge! You have just about everything: rifles, hand guns, grenades (standard, smoke and motion detecting), heavy explosives, laser weapons, plasma weapons, stun rods, motion detectors, cannons (with different types of ammo) and even a homing missile launcher! Not to mention the battletanks you can use…

You start with very basic equipment and the aliens weaponry seems far superior to yours, but once your scientists manage to complete some of their their projects, the aliens soon find themselves outgunned. As you get your hand on alien technology, you can create more powerful equipment and armors which are essential to your success.
At the beginning your troops are true one hit wonders, who drop dead from nearly every hit they take while the aliens can survive two or three. Once you get the armors, your soldiers can switch to personal armors and eventually to flying suits (extremely spiffy armor which is not only durable, but allows the soldier to hover in the air).

Interceptor is the first fightercraft you’ll get

One of the best parts in X-Com is that eventually you start caring what happens to your soldiers. They all have names (You can even change the names if you want to) and ranks and it’s fun to observe as John Smith advances from rookie to sergeant. And soon you’ll be genuinely pissed off if poor John gets shot in the back by some alien punk. You want revenge and find yourself using your most powerful weaponry to get that alien bastard…

Even though I’ve talked a lot about the combat system, the Geoscape mode shouldn’t be forgotten. You’re able to control the projects the scientists are researching, build additional structures to your base (or even a new base if you feel like it), buy or sell weaponry, hire or sack people, build new weaponry or view the UFOpedia encyclopedia which contains all information you’ve gathered about your equipment or about your enemies.

After each month in game time, you’ll get a review from your funders. The governments may increase or decrease your funds, based on your performance within their borders. The more alien attacks to their cities you stop, the happier they’ll be.
If you, however, have neglected protecting, for example, Great-Britain, they can reduce your funding or (if you’ve really screwed up) sign a deal with the alien invaders, cutting their support entirely. Which is NOT a good thing… (Although the nations aren’t good at keeping secrets, you immediately get notified of their ’secret pacts’). Loose enough supporting nations and the game ends.

One thing less to worry for Asia

The game has no actual time limit (at least not that I know of), but as the time goes by, the alien’s attacks become more frequent. You can advance by getting information from the alien leaders you capture. First you find about their bases on earth, than about their plan and finally you’ll be able to locate their home world and end the war with a counterstrike.
When you congratulate yourself on finding an enemy base, it’s good to remember that the aliens may assault your bases as well. Therefore it’s good to invest on base defense systems. If they get inside, you’ll have defend your base with all the men currently stationed there. If all your available troops are still on their way back from a mission, it sucks to be you…

You don’t see games like X-Com very often. Game’s which have nearly no flaws at all. Sure, it lacks some features. Soldiers can’t run or crawl, just to mention the most obvious ones. The lack of those things, however won’t change the fact that the game is near perfect.
If you haven’t played X-Com, now is a good time to give it a try. The game has that kind of an atmosphere that many games nowadays don’t have. They’ve even added all those cattle mutilation references to the game! Don’t let the now outdated graphics frighten you, playability is the most important thing and X-Com really has lot of it. This is a game you find yourself playing again and again.

I knew I should’ve brought weaponry

Even though I talked about the PC version for X-Com, they’ve ported Enemy Unknown and it’s sequel Terror from the Deep for PSX and possibly for other consoles as well (although I’m only aware of the PC & PSX versions).
Even though the PSX version hogs an entire memory card (yeah, 15 blocks…) and isn’t as easy to control as the PC version (PSX pad doesn’t suit to X-Com as well as mouse does), it’s a great game nevertheless. They’ve also added some cut scenes to PSX version, as well as new opening and ending videos, which look great. Also, getting the PSX version may be easier to find because the PC one is really rare (and doesn’t work well on fast computers).

If you like the X-Com series you should also try the Jagged Alliance series, which has an entirely different setting, but the combat system is very similar to X-Com. And Jagged Alliance 2 is much easier to find, as it was released much more recently.

Before…

…and after. Viktor Andianov’s finest hour.

• Platform: PC, PSX
• Publisher: Mythos / Microprose