A Remake that falls well short of the original.

User Rating: 1.9 | UFO: Extraterrestrials PC
As a HUGE fan of the original XCOM series, I really had high hopes of what might be released as a remake after more than 10 years of technological advances. I realized that this was not going to be a remake of Apocalypse, but nonetheless, I felt confident that games had moved in the right direction in the last decade, and the original had been able to stand the test of time.

I won't make that mistake again.

I honestly think this would be a bad game even 5 to 7 years ago. The animations are extremely poor. The landscapes (battlescape scenes) are difficult to navigate due to poor graphics. There are two unforgivable errors in the game, in my opinion. First, the speed of gameplay feels (and likely, is!) slower than the original; characters move at about 2 squares every 3 seconds, in some sort of painful slow-motion stride. The other major error is that the game does not include some of the nicer features that were included in XCOM: Terror From The Deep, like the ability to "save" enough points at the end of movement to allow the character to kneel.

There are other gameplay issues that are nothing but detractors. Key amongst these is the lack of peripheral vision of your characters. If a character is facing West, and an alien is occupying the square immediately South of the character, the character does not see the alien. Also, you do not hire agents (characters). Instead, they just show up. If you have everyone in the hospital, you can't recruit more to back fill your losses. You have to wait for them to show up at your door.

On the plus side, I did not experience any errors. Also, if you did not get the opportunity to play the original, this would at least give you the opportunity to understand the gameplay of XCOM.

I'm not a game-basher. I'm not a complainer. But this title was completely underwhelming. Unless you really need to relive the glory days of 1994 VGA graphics, and the excitement of what was possibly the best game ever, I strongly suggest passing on this one.