I've been watching Let's Play videos of the original X-com for years. I bought the game years ago on the thought that I might one day play it myself, although I was a bit too intimidated to ever give it a real try. However, my confidence increased when I started watching another series a few weeks ago and started getting so frustrated at their misplays that I thought "Surely I can do better than these idiots" . They were playing The Final Modpack, to be fair, which make the game WAY harder. I tried that at first, but deduced after some more reading that it was way too hard for me. Already having Openxcom installed to play that mod-pack, I used it to play through the vanilla game mostly in tact, with most of alterations just being quality of life things.
Elkin gave me the idea to name all the soldiers after Racketboy peeps, so I did! Much hilarity was displayed in the RPG Progress Thread and the Slack chat about it over the past week or so. The mods I started the game with were very simple quality of life things like zooming out the camera for more visibility and letting you position all the buildings in your first base when you start the game. I made the mistake of playing the game with Openxcom's ironman mode enabled, so even though I did ironman this, I did end up turning on a mod near the end that forced a line-of-sight to do PSI-attacks, just because I REALLY wanted to finish the game and not have to totally restart. In the end, it took from the start of 1999 to September 23rd when we finally blew up the final alien stronghold. X-com is a bit of a grand SRPG. Managing bases all over the world, designing them, telling them what to manufacture and research, all on top of launching fighters to take down alien ships and ground teams to assault the survivors is a LOT to take on and it can be really intimidating. That said, it's not the most complex game out there in that space, and is far more easily taken on with the help of a wiki or some quality of life stuff like Openxcom's launcher provides (both of which I used extensively). Verdict: Recommended. I'd definitely say that Openxcom makes it far more playable for modern tastes, if only because of that option to zoom out the camera on missions. Then using Openxcom's built in options and mods to make the game just as hard or easy as you want is a very nice way to ease into it for players of any seriousness. Xcom is definitely a game that rewards already knowing its systems going in, so going in blind isn't super recommended, but it will certainly give you some crazy war stories if that's the route you go
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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