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The X-Com Files / Little review/aar after finally finishing the mod
« on: March 14, 2023, 06:13:08 pm »
Phew. I did it.
Took me more than half a year, because for reasons described below I really, really lost steam in the latter third of the game and basically had force myself to press on at least a couple of times a week.
Post-game said I played 1179 missions, and it sure felt that way.
First, let's get the good stuff out of the way:
- it's still X-Com, and it shows. The basic gameplay loop works just as well as it always has, and as long as all the pillars of the original formula are in place, the game (and thus the mod) is as addictive as it used to be.
- Few bugs. For a mod that changes as much as this one does and contain as much stuff as this one does, I hardly ran into any issues. For whatever reason I once failed to get the loot one mission should have yielded, I never managed to exterminate EXALT (or did I?) - at least I could've researched EXALT HQ again after already finishing them ... but besides fairly minor issues like these that can be ignored or resolved by editing the savegame, there was nothing to write home about in terms of errors.
- Visuals and sound. Sure, these are outdated by a few decades now, but the art direction is still good and the game mostly does a very good job bringing in assets that fit the mood.
- Lot's of content. I'm listing it low in the list, because it ended up also being a negative for me.
Now the things I didn't enjoy so much:
- The first phase of the game, in which you play an undercover organization, doesn't work so well. It's impressive how this has been jury-rigged into an engine that wasn't designed to accomodate it, but that doesn't change the fact that it FEELS jury-rigged. Stuff like the civilian car "aircraft" just are a little weird. And X-Com-style missions with two soldiers leave a little bit to be desired, imo.
- In I'd say about the first half of the game, there's too much reliance on interrogation. Before you get any of the advanced toys, capturing aliens with the early-game arsenal can be taxing, especially if an unlucky roll of the RNG dice have you run into mutons in a couple of the first alien waves. This phase of the game was brutal and taxing, and frankly, not fun. One way to address this would be to field mutons only in later waves, if that's possible. Alternatively, there could be a way to get to advanced equipment without relying so heavily on live captures.
- There's a couple of tech bottlenecks, in which there's hardly anything left to research before you got over a certain hurdle - for example before you get access to the final lab, which requires a complicated web of things to be captured and researched - again, this wasn't very fun, and often months had to pass before I got a chance to assault a certain vessel or somesuch.
- Finally, the last third of the game was totally and utterly barren for me. I'd completely run out of research opportunities, and had 250 researchers twiddling their thumbs. I had 80 engineers twiddling their thumbs. Occasionally, a mission spawned which granted me some long obsolete project, for example I think the last techs I researched were Dino Egg and the Throwing Axe. Go figure.
Between loooooong periods of playing the waiting game and just doing standard missions - most of which should imo have long stopped spawning at that point, such as raving mad man, crop circles, jarhead factory etc - and way, WAY, WAAAAAY too many underground cavern missions, I eventually did the aquanaut missions (the entire underwater portion of the game was undercooked and felt a bit tacked on, imo), the zombie/mummy missions (also felt like a weird addition) and the doom missions (I'm not sure I ever finished that plotline), and then it took me about half a year (maybe more, I'm not sure) of ingame time to finally get through the moon mission chain.
Afterwardy, cydonia was surprisingly easy - and, frankly, I'm kinda glad this is over.
Regardless of my criticism, hats off to the dev(s) for creating this mod, it's undoubtedly quite the achievement and experience.
I hope none of my points offends anyone, and I don't expect any of them to be fixed just because I say so - frankly, having finished the mod, I don't care THAT much.
But if I could write a wishlist to santa, I'd at the very least wish for a couple of guaranteed "weak alien" waves very early in the invasion and some steamlining in the end to either make the road to the endgame less time consuming or redistribute research so it isn't so terribly boring in the final stretch of the game.
In any event, thanks for creating the mod.
Took me more than half a year, because for reasons described below I really, really lost steam in the latter third of the game and basically had force myself to press on at least a couple of times a week.
Post-game said I played 1179 missions, and it sure felt that way.
First, let's get the good stuff out of the way:
- it's still X-Com, and it shows. The basic gameplay loop works just as well as it always has, and as long as all the pillars of the original formula are in place, the game (and thus the mod) is as addictive as it used to be.
- Few bugs. For a mod that changes as much as this one does and contain as much stuff as this one does, I hardly ran into any issues. For whatever reason I once failed to get the loot one mission should have yielded, I never managed to exterminate EXALT (or did I?) - at least I could've researched EXALT HQ again after already finishing them ... but besides fairly minor issues like these that can be ignored or resolved by editing the savegame, there was nothing to write home about in terms of errors.
- Visuals and sound. Sure, these are outdated by a few decades now, but the art direction is still good and the game mostly does a very good job bringing in assets that fit the mood.
- Lot's of content. I'm listing it low in the list, because it ended up also being a negative for me.
Now the things I didn't enjoy so much:
- The first phase of the game, in which you play an undercover organization, doesn't work so well. It's impressive how this has been jury-rigged into an engine that wasn't designed to accomodate it, but that doesn't change the fact that it FEELS jury-rigged. Stuff like the civilian car "aircraft" just are a little weird. And X-Com-style missions with two soldiers leave a little bit to be desired, imo.
- In I'd say about the first half of the game, there's too much reliance on interrogation. Before you get any of the advanced toys, capturing aliens with the early-game arsenal can be taxing, especially if an unlucky roll of the RNG dice have you run into mutons in a couple of the first alien waves. This phase of the game was brutal and taxing, and frankly, not fun. One way to address this would be to field mutons only in later waves, if that's possible. Alternatively, there could be a way to get to advanced equipment without relying so heavily on live captures.
- There's a couple of tech bottlenecks, in which there's hardly anything left to research before you got over a certain hurdle - for example before you get access to the final lab, which requires a complicated web of things to be captured and researched - again, this wasn't very fun, and often months had to pass before I got a chance to assault a certain vessel or somesuch.
- Finally, the last third of the game was totally and utterly barren for me. I'd completely run out of research opportunities, and had 250 researchers twiddling their thumbs. I had 80 engineers twiddling their thumbs. Occasionally, a mission spawned which granted me some long obsolete project, for example I think the last techs I researched were Dino Egg and the Throwing Axe. Go figure.
Between loooooong periods of playing the waiting game and just doing standard missions - most of which should imo have long stopped spawning at that point, such as raving mad man, crop circles, jarhead factory etc - and way, WAY, WAAAAAY too many underground cavern missions, I eventually did the aquanaut missions (the entire underwater portion of the game was undercooked and felt a bit tacked on, imo), the zombie/mummy missions (also felt like a weird addition) and the doom missions (I'm not sure I ever finished that plotline), and then it took me about half a year (maybe more, I'm not sure) of ingame time to finally get through the moon mission chain.
Afterwardy, cydonia was surprisingly easy - and, frankly, I'm kinda glad this is over.
Regardless of my criticism, hats off to the dev(s) for creating this mod, it's undoubtedly quite the achievement and experience.
I hope none of my points offends anyone, and I don't expect any of them to be fixed just because I say so - frankly, having finished the mod, I don't care THAT much.
But if I could write a wishlist to santa, I'd at the very least wish for a couple of guaranteed "weak alien" waves very early in the invasion and some steamlining in the end to either make the road to the endgame less time consuming or redistribute research so it isn't so terribly boring in the final stretch of the game.
In any event, thanks for creating the mod.