UFO: Aftermath Preview
Will ALTAR Interactive's upcoming strategy game be a worthy successor to X-COM? Take a closer look at UFO: Aftermath.
X-COM: UFO Defense is widely considered to be a computer-game classic. Though the game's premise--fighting off an alien invasion--might have seemed extremely cliché, its inventive combination of tactical combat and addictive technology research wasn't. In the game, your squad of soldiers would carefully crawl through the ruins of the besieged planet in search of a variety of alien enemies to clear out. Once you had gunned down your extraterrestrial foes, you could then collect bits and pieces of alien technology and use them to research upgrades for your existing weapons and armor or to research completely new items for use in battle. UFO Defense was the start of a series of X-COM games, but none really recaptured the magic of the original game.
Some years later, the developer of X-COM began work on The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, a new game inspired by X-COM, but the game was canceled and changed hands many times until it ended up in the care of Czech developer ALTAR Interactive and was renamed "UFO: Aftermath." After all the false starts and delays, the game is finally well on its way to completion. We recently had the opportunity to try out an early version of the game.
UFO: Aftermath takes place on a futuristic version of Earth overrun by aliens. However, in the new game, you must also combat a new threat known simply as "the biomass." The biomass is a bizarre and humongous alien growth pattern that corrupts everything it touches and aggressively expands over the course of the game--the ultimate goal of this mysterious new threat seems to be blanketing Earth completely, and if it succeeds, you'll lose the game. To counteract this threat, you must build antibiomass facilities, which push the alien growth back. However, you can't build an infinite number of bases, since you must successfully clear out alien entrenchments at flashpoints all across the globe and research certain levels of technology in order to expand your own holdings. In addition, you can't succeed by building nothing but biomass bases, since you'll also need to fortify your holdings with other types of bases, including research facilities to improve your ability to research alien technologies and military bases to increase your military power.
You'll begin the game from a global view of Earth that shows your own pitifully small area of influence around your two starting bases. From this screen, you'll begin using UFO: Aftermath's unusual time-dilation system, which lets you pause the flow of time indefinitely or set it in motion on one of three speed settings (slow, normal, and fast), similar to Maxis' popular life-simulator The Sims. However, the flow of time in UFO: Aftermath tends to have much more dire consequences, especially if you get lax about letting Earth cycle through continuous days and nights until the biomass devours everything. However, as time passes, various events will occur, such as finding a new soldier to recruit, uncovering a new flashpoint to conquer, or completing your current research. The events are tracked in a ticker window that you can scroll through and peruse, but major events, such as uncovering a new battlefield, will give you the option to act on them.
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- GameSpot Score 6.4 fair
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- Cenega Publishing
- Altar
- Sci-Fi Turn-Based...
- Release: Oct 15, 2003
- ESRB: Teen
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