UFO Aftermath (PC)

The graphics are fairly decent, and mostly give you a good handle on what is going on, although it can be a little awkward to work out why your soldiers dont have line of sight sometimes without a lot of mucking around with the angles.

The way they have mixed real time action and pausing worked very well for me, removing the limitation and problems of turn based play, while allowing you to make sensible tactical decisions.

My main issues with the game is twofold - deployment on some missions is very problematic, you can sometimes start off with all your men in one group, and three alien rocket launchers able to see you from the start. This can mean your entire party can be dead before you have moved virtually, and with experience and skill being so important later in the game this can destroy an entire games progress in one bad start.

The other issue is later missions start to get very hard to complete, with you needing 4 or more men able to fire at an alien at once to get it down before its killed one of yours, combined with the alien bases odd angles, heavy alien use of area damage weapons.

Similar to earlier releases in this series you also get the slight problem of mission overload, where later on you have to do mission after mission, and while there is a reasonable variation in the maps and opposition, it does make completing the game somewhat of a long slog.

There is a large variety of weapons to find and invent which I liked, although unfortunately most of the weapons you find are of very limited value, there are a few that can help a lot - the grenade launchers probably being the standouts, and limited ammo on all of these makes for interesting tactical decisions - do you take them on earlier missions to get through them, or save them for later.

A general tip - if you need to pick up a wounded alien you can click the actual move command then on the map, rather than clicking directly onto the map which performs the default action (move to empty space, fire at enemy occupied space).

Very nicely post-apocalypse atmosphere and graphics. Lots of fun weapons and devices. Fun to build up the characters.

I am addicted to the game - they did well and I'm certainly happy with it - however I'll mention some of the minus points.

1: The tutorial is a bit lacking. It covers the basics, but check out the manual too. In fact I'm still hazy about how you knock out an alien on purpose for live capture since all I can do is kill them or leave them wounded and unmoving (not the same thing apparently). You're then supposed to pick them up which I've never figured out since you have to stand on them to do this - which you can only do if they're dead! I just wound some, kill all the others, and then you occasionally get given one in the summary screen after the mission. The "abort mission" button is also used as a "complete mission" button - would have been nicer if they changed the tooltip once it becomes this since people end up frustrated, not knowing what to do until you find this.

2: Camera controls are a bit annoying if you want anything apart from the usual isometric view. The "directors cut" whenever you see an alien can be switched off though (which you'll want to do after you've seen them 20 times already)

3: Swapping weapons or devices from your backpack to your hand is cumbersome and not well explained. You get used to it, but usually mess up with a grenade or medipack at the beginning. Save often!

I assume there will be a patch out at some point which will probably cover some of this, and their home website has a good playability faq. I should have probably read the manual more, but usually it's the tutorials job to do this.

Despite these niggles, I do love the game, just thought I'd warn people to not expect a totally easy ride.

MLH