I am one of many who miss playing endless games of UFO:Enemy Unknown(XCOM). IMHO, even the original developer's own sequel, XCOM Apocalypse, failed to catch the magic of the original. Especially given the feelings of unbridled rage that all RTS inevitably brings to me, I have been yearning for a decent turn-based squad management game to come along and now finally my needs have been met. While this game is not a direct successor to the XCOM series, it has at its core an unfinished XCOM development, and the spirit of the game is the same.

I don't often play a demo to death and then order a game instantly. Additionally it is the sort of game I try and fit into every spare half hour, losing entire evenings to it. It is simply so compulsive.

I will begin with the negative, so don't turn off automatically.

The first warning I would give is that all the forums warn of compatibility issues, and many user rail against the use of the StarForce copy protection system, which apparently damages windows installations under some circumstances. In their defence, Altar interactive appear to be a Czech Republic-based developer of limited resources. It is unlikely that they were in much of position to test in multiple environments. However, this does not excuse the publisher, Cenega, from not taking up the burden of quality assurance. Nevertheless the game has worked flawlessly on my system since day one, and i have only encountered one (unreproducable) bug.

I should also point out that there is no multiplayer, nor is any planned, which is a shame.

The other warning I would give is that this isn't a game for eye-candy freaks, or content-whores. Graphic design is basic, almost old-school in its approach, and the variety in environments and units is pitiful. Almost all of the enemy units you will encounter, you will have seen by the second or third mission. Unit speech is highly limited and unintelligent. Sometimes units respond with the painfully irritating "what? more orders!?" and then respond next time with the polite and helpful "what do you need?". There seems to be no correlation between response and state. Additionally the game is littered with sloppy UI rendering, such as the highlighted icon which indicates that a unit can level up, which does not go away unless you move to different screen and back again.

Having said all that, the time which has not been invested in gfx and sfx has clearly gone into tuning the gameplay. The frustrating turn-based system with time allocation has been replaced with a real-time orders system, which displays the time a unit will take to perform orders, and orders can be given in sequence, nicely to produce elegant effects. For example, it is possible to walk a pair of units down a corridor, which alternately turn and look into doorways to clear rooms and then crouch and provide cover at the end. Time plays at the requested speed with action occuring in realtime, pausing whenever an event occurs. Furthermore, the events which trigger a pause can be customised, although there are few events selected by default you would not wish to respond to.