What a curious era we are wandering through, where lovers of tactics and alien-murder have XCOM, Xenonauts and now OpenXcom to play with. There are almost too many opportunities for the slaughtering of aliens in turn-based universes. Almost, but not actually, because there are never too many options.
OpenXcom hit V1.0 just before the weekend, and that’s really quite exciting. Five years in development, OpenXcom differs from the re-imagining that is XCOM and homage that is Xenonauts as it uses the foundation of X-COM UFO Defense – even requiring the original’s data files and thus demanding that players own the game – and makes a slew of quality of life improvements to the interface, squad management and lots of other things.
It also chucks in a slice of modernity by supporting modern resolutions, mouse wheels, autosaves and all the other stuff we’ve learned to take for granted. Take a gander at the features trailer below.
There’s mod support too. So if you really, really love X-COM and never really wanted to play anything else, well now that’s a more feasible lifestyle choice. It’s like someone making it so you can eat nothing but steak and suffer no consequences.
It’s open source, so all you need is the original X-COM UFO Defense (which you can get for a few quid all over the place) and you can download OpenXcom and enjoy the rest of your life.
Cheers, RPS.