- #XENONAUTS BASE CONSTRUCTION UPDATE#
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#XENONAUTS BASE CONSTRUCTION FULL#
Once a UFO has crash-landed, you then send a dropship full of soldiers to assault the wreckage, kill any surviving aliens and secure their technology so that you can reverse-engineer it and develop new interceptors, weapons, armour and – eventually – a way to defeat the invaders once and for all. One, the geoscape, is where you manage your bases, direct your research and engineering efforts, and send out squadrons of interceptors to shoot down UFOs who are encroaching upon the airspace of the nations who are providing you with your much-needed funding. For anyone reading who doesn’t even know what an X-COM is: Xenonauts is a game where you defend the Earth from a massive alien invasion. I suppose we should start with the basics. I respect Goldhawk’s motivations and their ideas for improving each of these elements of the game having spent 25 hours finishing a campaign on Normal, however, I have to say that where Xenonauts falls down significantly is in execution and balance. They’ve attempted to streamline the twenty year-old UI (inventory and store management in particular), make the geoscape layer less braindead by beefing up the UFO interception and funding elements of the game, and close some of the game-breaking loopholes you could exploit in the original. That’s not to say that Goldhawk have just copied X-COM outright, though – if they had, I’d be pillorying the game far more harshly than I’m about to. There’s TUs, automatic reaction fire, beating the shit out of aliens with shock sticks and dragging them back to the laboratory, multiple bases whose construction is identical to that found in the original, a research, engineering and personnel system that’s also pretty much a full-on clone, base assaults, base defences, losing your best soldiers to being shot in the back by sneaky alien assholes you somehow didn’t spot – pretty much everything you’d expect from a game whose quest was to replicate the core experience of the original in its entirety. So in as far as Xenonauts is supposed to be a more faithful remake of the original Enemy Unknown, Goldhawk can consider that mission statement as fully accomplished. Boot up Xenonauts for five minutes and it’s far easier to see the X-COM DNA, and while there are substantial under-the-hood changes, particularly on the geoscape layer, the tactical combat and the progression towards the endgame hew far more closely to the precepts laid down in the original game more than twenty years. Xenonauts was now releasing into a world that already had a resurgent XCOM franchise, and so that initial mission statement had to change slightly: its unique selling point is no longer that it heralds an X-COM revival, but rather that it’s more X-COM than XCOM itself.
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With their turn-based pedigree and a lead developer who loved the series and knew what he was doing, initial scepticism turned to critical acclaim when the game was released in November 2012.
#XENONAUTS BASE CONSTRUCTION UPDATE#
It turned out that there was a proper update of the X-COM series in the works, produced by none other than perennial Civilization-peddlers Firaxis. Unfortunately for Goldhawk their inexperience with game development meant that this work dragged on and on, running into difficulty after difficulty. Thus it was that Goldhawk Interactive was formed, and work began on Xenonauts. X-COM had been criminally neglected for over a decade, with only Altair’s excruciatingly mediocre 1 UFO: AfterX series carrying the torch in the meantime, and there was definitely a gap in the market for an X-COM remake - especially after 2K announced that their own X-COM reboot would be a third-person shooter (this was the game that would eventually become the insipid Bureau). This was very much a good idea at the time. When Xenonauts development started all the way back in 2009, it had a simple mission statement: to be a modern update of the X-COM series, giving things a new lick of paint but otherwise preserving the mechanical core of the game.
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