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.
For us. For them. For you.
