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).

ufo aftermath
Review date: 2004-05-05 Rating: 8 out of 10

Great to see the return of a PC classic that is now unavailable.The original UFO enemy unknown & UFO terror of the deep are brought up to date and greatly enhanced. Graphics are spot on with the 360 degree alien view showing great detail and giving the combat an extra dimension (Ha!) The game is in a similar format to the original but is just as challenging tactically. One of my better recent purchases

Disappointing
Review date: 2004-02-24 Rating: 2 out of 10

First, there was UFO: Enemy Unknown, and all was well. Then there were a myriad of official and unofficial sequals that, well, never cut the mustard. I have a large pile of them in my room; this one just joined the top of that pile.

If you can get past the control mechanism, that isn't ideal, you simply won't be able to get past the sound. "Lookey what ahh seen", "I dun it", "under fyah, under fyah".

It actually made me angry to play through this.

Sorry.