X-COM: UFO Defense

I usually don't show these old games. But this game is incredibly fun to play. It's considered a classic and been credited as 'the best strategy game'. It was made 1993 and plays on DOS!! Does it hold up?

Story - What's it all about?

X-COM starts on January, 1999. You are in charge of X-COM, an extraterrestrial defense force, funded by almost all of the major countries from back in the 90ies. Russia, Brazil, China, USA, India, South Africa, Libya, Egypt and all of the major european countries like France, Germany, UK and not some others like any Nordic ones or Netherlands, Austria. Probably because these countries wouldn't or couldn't fund a project such as an extraterrestrial defense force. Regardless, you are now supposed to cover the 'entire globe'. Well not entire, you will only have to cover the ones that do fund you and since many countries actually doesn't fund you, you can safely let aliens land in their areas. But if you're like me, you will probably want to go ahead and cover as much territory as possible anyway.

Gameplay - How does it play?

You are in charge of everything. You put up your base, you intercept and shoot down all of the UFOs, you lead your tactical squads on mission, conduct research and manufacture weapons. This game is amazing in all you can do and research is vitally important to you as it leads your progress throughout the game (like research bloody should!). At the start of the game you know nothing about these aliens and even as a player that kinda frightens you because these aliens, already from the absolute start of the game, they utilize far more superior weapons than your own. As the game progresses, the aliens don't really, but if you're able to stay in the game for long enough and have spent some fair amount of money in scientists you will realize that you can reverse engineer the alien technology and even construct even more superior weapons than them: GENIUS!

Criticism - But what isn't that great?

_Well for instance, the aliens start out vastly superior to your people in every respect. This is not bad in of itself but it makes some of the future things you can construct somewhat redundant. For instance; you can construct armor for your soldiers eventually, but it doesn't protect well as the aliens fire incredibly damaging salvos of plasma matter at them which basically melts the armor instantly. Without the armor your soldiers only have 1 hit point as far as you're concerned but even with the armor they barely raise that to 2 hit points. Also, when one of your people dies; you cannot recover their armor. Which means that you must make a 20000 dollar armor for every individual you want to protect.
     My other criticism with the game is that many of the expenses doesn't make much sense. For instance; you never buy interception planes. No you RENT them! What the earth? And when they get shot down (not if), you don't even have to pay anything. I think they could just as well have sold the interceptors instead, but seeing as it is the very first plane for a very long time I can see why they decides to make the planes that way. The funny thing is that the rent of bloody 600'000 dollars and you have to pay every month! I know it's state of the art but holy cow man. USA's funding is barely 700'000 - 800'000 and they expect you to have a base there plus at least one interceptor to keep all of the aliens at bay!?
     Of course I am nitpicking a little but that's what great with the game: It doesn't really have any flaws other than that. Sure the aliens are hard as balls to fight but that's the point of the game!

Conclusion - So what rating do you propose?

I propose a rating of 6 out of 6. This game is bloody amazing strategy game. It's almost as if it was made for me. The amount of content in it is huge for a DOS game of barely 6 MB and even by today's standards it's incredibly fun to play.