Finished
Xenonauts (Beta V21)
Pros:
- True spiritual successor to X-Com: a game based on all your favorite concepts and mechanics, with some stuff changed / added. Examples below.
- Air combat is fun, albeit little clunky ATM (frustrating interface, broken autoresolve).
- Suppression mechanic is simple, yet fun and very effective.
- New equipment (shields, shotguns) add new gameplay possibilities.
- Grenades are much more essential than they were in X-com (IMO).
- The game is addictive as crack, same way X-com was. Due to multiple layers (geosphere, base management, air combat, ground combat), there’s always something to do. "Just one more mission, mom!" [...] "Shit, it's 4 A.M.?".
- Graphics are very nice and fit the atmosphere perfectly.
- Ground combat interface is simple, yet close to perfection (except relying totally on mouse controls - see cons).
Cons:
- It’s still beta, so some things don’t work that great. Examples below.
- The game is prone to crashes, especially when loading saves (for example: 90% chance of a crash when loading a save with some units bleeding).
- There are still some outright bugs present (broken autoresolve, getting resources from fighters downed over water, alien phase being very slow sometimes, despite low number of enemies, killed zombies spawning reapers with full AP), nothing game-breaking, though (except a bug in a tech tree in V21, but it can be fixed via file editing + it was permanently fixed in V22).
- The interface relies almost entirely on mouse controls, which can be tiresome (constant clicking on various GUI elements). While ground combat interface works fine (many useful keyboard shortcuts: crouch, end turn, use inventory item, etc), geosphere an especially base management interface would benefit from some tweaking / adding keyboard shortcuts.
- Some menus are so small (use only small part of the screen), that you spend way too much time clicking on some small buttons / sliders (personnel window having only 10 entries visible, workshop window requiring way too much clicking).
- The variety leaves a lot to be desired. UFO recovery missions always start with your team being in the East, and the UFO in the West. There’s only one ufo layout for each type of the alien craft (improved in V22). In most missions there’s only one level of height (huge ufos are the only exception, unfortunately, alien bases are completely flat...) There are less enemy types than in X-com (but enemies can use various equipment, which lessens the problem). Soldier portraits repeat way too often.
- There are now 3 types of resources, which can be acquired only from aliens (alien alloys, allenium and power cores). If you want to gather a reasonable amount of them (and it’s essential for survival in later part of the game), prepare for doing >9000 ground missions (you receive some alien resources from downed alien fighters, but not from regular ufos - you can clear the crash site yourself, or nuke it, but the latter means 0 resources).
- The authors decided to change / modify PSI drastically, but the outcome is still as broken as it was in X-com (yet). PSI is alien-only now, so there’s no PSI training. This would be fine, if alien PSI attacks weren’t game-breakingly strong. And in the V21, they are: one enemy with MC ability can control ~four humans in one turn, and two different types of PSI aliens on map can dominate your entire team (MC+Dread+Fear+Berserk = OMG everyone died). The authors decided to nerf alien PSI attacks in V22, but IMO adding some kind of anti-PSI training for humans (or increasing soldiers’ bravery after surviving PSI attack) would be a better idea.
tl;dr
Will buy, as long as it appears on GoG.
I think you will LOVE MGS3.
