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UFO: Aftermath is a semi-sequel to X-COM: UFO Defense in that the basic premise and gameplay are both fairly true to the original. Unlike a normal sequel UFO: Aftermath does not follow the same storyline. Instead, unidentified crafts descend into orbit around Earth. Having made no responses to the attempts at communication from world leaders, the ships release a cloud of spores into the atmosphere. The spores multiply and eventually block out the sun. Once reaching critical mass, the spores descend upon the helpless denizens of our planet and quickly eradicate all macroscale life. All life except those smart enough to have holed themselves away underground. This story is all given to you in a very creepy, moving opening sequence in which the movie Independence Day is shown playing in a theatre of rotting corpses.

This is where you come in. The player controls a small squad of surviving paramilitaries intent on retaking the planet from the alien control. At first you only have access to a single base, a few troops, and an unlimited source of terrestrial arms and ammunition. Your goal is to study the alien incursion and beat it back using any methods at your disposal. It’s even less easy than it sounds. The enemies come in all shapes and sizes using everything from melee attacks and plasma weaponry to psionics and stun weapons. The AI is effective enough at times to have one enemy come out in the open with a stunning ability while a small group go around a building and attack your soldiers from behind. Other times though I found myself just grouping all my troops together and overpowering mindless drones as they came running at me with no sense of strategy. Throughout the game I found I had to modify my attack strategy multiple times to keep up with the different types of aliens as well as the increasing numbers and difficulties.

There is more to it than going out and killing alien scum though. In the process of fighting back the alien threat, you must research both terrestrial and alien technologies to get an upper hand in battle. In addition there are multiple research areas that do not assist your physical assault on the alien incursion. Instead they allow you to learn more about the aliens and possibly why they have come with the obvious intent of destroying life on Earth. You can study crashed ship parts, dead aliens, interrogate live aliens, alien weaponry, psionic devices, and the mysterious alien biomass sweeping the Earth. Items that you research, unlike current terrestrial technologies, are not in unlimited supply. If you desire more of them, you must capture them in missions or create them using your engineers. The base system is the first aspect that I had problems with though. In X-COM: UFO Defense, you controlled every aspect of base maintenance from which equipment was at which base to which facilities were built in each base. Unfortunately the base system in UFO: Aftermath is limited to just choosing which type of base it is. Only military bases can house your troops, only research bases decrease your research time, only engineering bases decrease your item creation time, and only anti-biomass bases repel the deadly biomass. There are no governments or huge corporations for you to gain funding from, and you are never needed to keep civilian casualties down. This aspects made X-COM: UFO Defense and its descendents an actual challenge to play completely through.

In the tactical portion of the game, the player views the world with controlled territory lined with a blue border and alien territory shown with the biomass. To increase your territory you must successfully accomplish missions given to you throughout the game. Alien attacks are shown as red marks on the globe and you are asked if you would like to accept the mission. If you choose to ignore the mission, another group will be sent to deal with the mission with only a small chance of success in most cases. If you choose to accept the mission your squad will be sent by helicopter to the mission site and the squad-based strategy portion of the game will begin. During the missions you control up to seven paramilitaries in real time combat carrying equipment that you have outfitted them with. The action may be paused to allow the player to queue up orders to his or her squad. Unfortunately you cannot give standing orders such as posturing or automatic ambushing, but must instead manually order your troops to fire. Most of the time your only objective is the remove the alien threat in any way possible. After the mission is over with any outcome, the items remaining on the ground and on corpses are transported to the nearest base where they are deposited in your stash of items. Your troops also gain levels which increases their effectiveness in battle. You may increase stats by directly using them in battle, using freebie points received during a level up, or by sending your troops to specialty training sessions. Losing a member of your team is a great loss indeed. You can‘t bring them back and you have little choice besides replacing him with an inferior backup member. You only have one squad of seven troops at your disposal while in previous X-COM games you were allowed to form multiple parties and have them going to several different missions at the same time. This led to many missed opportunities and the feeling that you were simply a high-ranking commando instead of the leader of a special ops organization.

Visual effects during missions were stupendous. Extreme detail was paid to character and enemy models as well as buildings, foliage, and vehicles and the animation was smooth even with almost a dozen characters in action on the screen. Explosions were magnificent. Gunfire caused a short burst of light at night and the effect on anything, living or inanimate was fairly realistic. Blood gushed from wounds, ichor from insect-like aliens, bullet holes showed on walls and vehicles, and nearly everything in the game could be destroyed with enough firepower. The only downside to the environments was that the development team decided to leave out the ability to enter any and all structures on the map. In previous games, all buildings could be entered and searched for alien presence, but in UFO: Aftermath few structures allow entrance.

Sound is a mixed bag. While the themes playing during missions and while waiting on the global view are catchy and not too annoying when repeated, there was still a distinct lack of variance of music. I did have two major complaints in the sound effects department. The first one is that when the player is watching a particular bit of action during a mission, he or she cannot hear what is going on elsewhere. This lead to many wasted seconds while my troops were getting shot at but I was not alerted to the fact. Second of the two complaints is that what little voice acting was added to the characters was repetitive and cliche.

Unfortunately there were bugs in the game left over from the beta code. I found myself booted to the desktop on multiple occasions, sometimes with the game freezing up as a black screen and not letting me return to play. When going to Altar Interactive about the issue, I was told that it was an issue of drivers for my computer. I know I had already installed the latest drivers for a previous problem, so I simply modified my graphics options and that was enough to get it to work for a while. After that I dealt with the problem as Altar insisted that the problem existed on my end and not theirs. Interesting considering I’m obviously not the only one to have experienced the problem. After a couple days I found that a patch had been released for the game. After installing it I was able to play with little trouble.

Overall I feel that UFO: Aftermath was a more than decent addition to the X-COM series. Fans of the old X-COM games should feel right at home picking the title up and playing it. For those that have never played the games, there is a chance that this game could change your life and make you go out and find copies of the old games. I would definitely recommend UFO: Aftermath to anyone who enjoys either RTS or TBS games and suggest that even those who have not liked them in the past play the game for a while to give it a chance. It could have been better with more time and attention paid to a few aspects. Including more base management or increased squad capacity would have allowed me to give the game two thumbs up, but sadly I‘m left holding only one up.