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Forums > Submission Feedback > EmP's Xenonauts review

This thread is in response to a review for Xenonauts on the PC. You are encouraged to view the review in a new window before reading this thread.

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Author: wolfqueen001
Posted: July 12, 2014 (05:43 AM)
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Nice review! So this is the game you were talking about a week ago. It sounds like it'd be worth checking out, especially for first timers to the X-Com franchise.

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Author: EmP (Mod)
Posted: July 12, 2014 (06:34 AM)
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Yeah. I think this started getting made when The Bureau was announced and all us X-Com fans starting nerd raging out. Of course, then Firaxis came along to soothe us, but this was still happening in the background. It has issues that still existed back in original X-Com, and it certainly invents a few of its own, but I love it and have real trouble pulling myself away.

Did you spot the Easter egg in the review? Don't say what it is if you did!

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Author: wolfqueen001
Posted: July 12, 2014 (07:11 AM)
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Which one is the Fireaxis one, then? The only reboot I remember seeing was that one where they turned it into an FPS or something and was supposed to be awful for it. (Unless I'm completely confused)

Haha. I didn't think I had found it when I first read it but I looked again. Pretty awesome.

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Author: EmP (Mod)
Posted: July 12, 2014 (07:19 AM)
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This is the Firaxis one.

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Author: Suskie
Posted: July 13, 2014 (02:33 PM)
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Very good review, EmP (and I particularly liked the sneaky working-in of Will's second opinion). Do you think you'd recommend this game to me? Bear in mind that I always found the original X-COM too unwieldy for a youngster like myself to get absorbed in, but as you know, I did quite enjoy the reboot, which I felt did a better job of explaining/contextualizing everything. Can I get into Xenonauts? Is it accessible enough?

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Author: EmP (Mod)
Posted: July 14, 2014 (03:32 AM)
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What a handsome question. I’m pretty confident in recommending Xenonauts to people who enjoyed the Firaxis game, because it works really well as a bridge between the remake and the original. It’s not as rigid and linear as the reboot, but nowhere near as sprawling and chaotic as the original.

Original X-Com just kind of dumped you in the middle of the war and then forced you to do everything without ever explaining why or how. I loved that at the time, but understand how people can find that extremely daunting. Xenonauts holds your hand a little more – you don’t have to ever worry about running out of bullets or grenades or medipacks. Night missions see your soldiers automatically equipped with infinite flares. Some R&D is done unprompted, and advances are automatically applied throughout. It’s harder to mess up on the field, too. Troop movement is colour coded to warn you how far you can go without losing your reaction shot ability. Stuff like throwing a grenade used to be a hell of a faff as you dug it out of your backpack, put it in your hand, primed it then lobed it. Here, you click on a grenade option. And chose where you want it to go. You can decide for yourself what kind of solider each troop is going to be (including completely new classes like riot shield guys I never use but other adore) and his loadout is saved – this alone saved me hours from the old interface of re-equipping troops before every single bloody mission.

Accessible is a good word for it, so let’s go with that. It’s not perfect, and in streamlining the original’s interface it creates brand new problems of its own. Will’s also right when he notes the tile set for the missions is super limited and even though the missions are randomly generated, everything will start to blend into one after a while. What Will didn’t mention (because there’s no room for the amount of gushing he’s dropped on this particular achievement) is that it’s the first game to wrap their geoscape in a globe rather than a square. Fair warning, though: if the game does grab you, it will take over your life in much the same way as XCOM did.

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Author: zippdementia
Posted: July 14, 2014 (02:38 PM)
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Never did play X-Com. The people I know who played it are the kind of people who laugh at Starcraft and consider it's multiplayer beneath their notice. You know. Because they can multi-task seventeen times faster than the average human.

This seems like a more accessible version of X-Com, something that (maybe a little bit like Baldur's Gate) has a lot of complicated things going on under the surface that take a while to wrap your mind around, but are easy to control once you understand the premise.

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Author: Suskie
Posted: July 15, 2014 (10:18 AM)
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Ben's backlog = whatever I've been praising lately :)


You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.

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Author: WilltheGreat
Posted: July 16, 2014 (07:45 PM)
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Actually, Xenonauts also uses an equirectangular globe projection - it's just up-front about that fact so you don't make assumptions about flight routes that turn out not to work.

The only XCOM or similar game to use an actual spherical globe is OpenXCOM. Classic XCOM used a 3D globe but didn't teach the AI how to do Great Circle pathfinding, while New XCOM just stretches an equirectangular projection around a ball. That's less an issue because in New XCOM you can't manually set flight paths, but at the same time more noticable because distortions get really extreme as they approach higher/lower latitudes. Also Firaxis forgot what they were doing and wrapped the North and South edges of the world map.

1. Set HQ in Europe
2. Respond to terror mission in Australia
3. Fly Skyranger straight north
4. Teleport to Antarctica
5. Proceed to Australia

There was a thread on the forums where someone suggested that Xenonauts should use a globe projection. One of the devs said they considered it, but rejected it "because while more accurate, it isn't actually more intuitive to the player". Which is a perfectly fair reason to do so.

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