X-COM: UFO Defense Review (BigRowdy)
I love all things xcom. And this is the game that started it all. Why do people still play this game almost 3 decades later?
1. The music is so appropriate you would be hard pressed to find another game that sets the tone so well.
1. Alien AI. The Aliens will shoot first when they see you, unlike other games that always gives the player the chance to act first. They hide. They Stalk. They kill. Success is NOT guaranteed.
1. They UI and presentation. Like comic books there is just something enchanting about the look of every panel in the game. EVERY SINGLE ONE. The ufopedia art, the character stat panels, the base layout, alien ships... I am serious. This game set the UI bar so high, that many games get points knocked off because they cant deliver this level of enchantment.
1. Fully destructable environment that is definitely used in the strategic part of the game.
1. Open xcom. This is a mod that allows this old game to run on modern machines and fine tune the look of every element in the game. From how the sound effects and music are played to how the text looks to making the old 8 or 16 bit graphics look HD in whatever graphics option you choose along with scaling up the UI size to account for resolutions that did not even exist at the time of this games creation. It is a MUST HAVE mod, also adding a ton of additional content AND works perfectly with terror From the Deep. Also every element is customizable. Note: It takes some tinkering to get the look you want.
Wait. Rowdy you made a list where everything is numbered as "1."
I did indeed because it is all of these elements combined that bring the magic to this game. There is no one element that is 'better' than the others. There is a magic about this game that relies on each of these elements (including open xcom for todays rigs).