X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995) - Review

I have mentioned this before: When jumping into a game series I haven't tried out before there is always the question as to where to begin. The first game? The reboot game? The best game? With Assassins Creed I just picked one at random (Unity), and that was a mistake. With Saint's Row I picked the one that looked like most fun (IV) and that worked out pretty well. With Star Control I started from the beginning and that ended very quickly...

Here I am, doing it again. I decided it was time to check out X-COM even though I am no big fan of strategy games (except Settlers 2 which I love, and this odd little game I tried ages ago called Steam Marines), but I have heard so many good things about these games that I figured I needed to find out what the fuss was all about. What caught my interest was talk about how you invested in your fighters, always worrying that you would lose them. Then, of course, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle really put X-COM in the forefront as being its inspiration. While I never wanna lay my eyes on a Rabbid ever again, it only further increased my curiosity towards X-COM.

So I looked in my library to see which games I owned and it turned out I had the first five to choose from (skipping First Alien Invasion). The very first one, UFO Defense looked too old-style for me, so I opted for the second oldest - Terror From the Deep, released by MicroProse (famous game developer also known for Sid Meier-games, the Civ-series and MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers to mention a very few) in 1995 for MS DOS.

As I boot it up I am immediately thankful that I can control it using my mouse, and not some odd keyboard combination of keys. Off to a great start, because with these old games from the 90's it really is the wild west when it comes to gameplay controls and I never know what it's going to be like. Unfortunately it can be a big reason that some of the older games are difficult to play. I am greeted by some great, creepy music that sets the tone right from the start. I am a sucker for some good atmospheric tunes and XCOM TftD does it well. There is a threat lurking, somewhere, and I need to root it out.

The game starts me off by asking me to pick where to build my base. It has to be somewhere underwater, which makes sense based on the title of the game. Clicking around in the menus I can access a "Geoscape" which allows me to look around on the surface of the Earth. At first I have no idea why I would want or need to do this, because as will become very clear, the game doesn't explain a single thing to the player. I am assuming this is because it originally came with a thick manual, but unfortunately the version on GoG doesn't (old games on GoG in fact often come with the original manual, but for some reason this one doesn't). 

For that reason I decide to simply learn as I move along. Best case scenario I will learn by doing, worst case scenario I will fail horribly without knowing why. In this Geoscape scene I can choose to "Intercept". It's the first button on the menu so I click it. Apparently I have submarines that I can launch around the globe, so I give it a go. It seems straightforward enough and I can also ask my subs to do things like patrolling, though at this point I have no idea what will happen if I do. The subs need to refuel and do so automatically, it also seems like my base can't run out of fuel. I also discover the time buttons, which allow me to choose at which speed time moves forward. The options are plentiful, I can move at 5 second increments - i.e very slowly - up to1 day increments, which is the fastest. I stick to 5 sec for quite a while before I dare try to move faster, and it's not until I do that things actually start happening, because TftD is a game that values its slow pacing. As soon as something does happen though the time moves automatically back to slow, so that you have plenty of time to make your decisions - a very welcome game mechanic.

She's a beauty, she is.

Continuing my exploration of the menus I find where I can actually go to my base and do some good old base-building. The menu here is pretty self-explanatory and familiar even if you're mostly into more modern games. I can choose to do research and allocate researchers. I can choose to manufacture and allocate technicians. I can expand my base, gear up my team, recruit more people and a bunch of others things that I am not sure of. I am in fact not sure of anything, I just click around and see what happens.

Suddenly I get the message that an alien sub has been spotted. I can send my sub to intercept, which of course I do. I get the mission briefing that I need to neutralize the alien threat and try to find alien technology if possible. I can always choose to abandon the mission if I feel like but I guess that isn't something I should strive for.

Intercepting aliens moves you into an isometric, top-down view of a more classical action strategy style. I've got my squad of marines that are ready to move out and a bar of buttons to order things around. Yet again I have no idea what any of the buttons do, but figuring that none of them are likely to cause me to explode I try them out at random. They do the obvious things, open up inventory (which also lets you pick things off the ground like in many CRPGs, move between characters and between layers of the battle field (layers being height differences). I move my characters simply by clicking on them and then where I want them to go. They both seem to have something similar to action points, dictating how much they can perform within a turn, and something similar to stamina, which I think is affected by the quality of the terrain. It also seems my marines get tired after some fighting (who'd have guessed?!) and start walking extremely slowly. Or maybe they are weighed down? It is anyone's guess.

Underwater, no one can hear you scream.

I frankly love the graphics of this isometric view though, it's for the most part clear what I am looking at and the sprite work is beautiful. All my little marines are named and I can see what gear they are hauling, though I have no idea how useful any of it is. I can without much trouble see that none of them are wearing much more than a pretty basic weapon and what I think are throwing weapons (they all automatically wear what they need to be able to breathe underwater), so no armor. 

I move my characters around the field and notice that if I move a character that is out of screen view, it will teleport into position. It is only when I look at them they go through the full motion of animating their movements. This is also a welcome function since this saves you from just looking at a screen waiting for your marine to get into position. Once all my characters have moved and I end my turn, the aliens get to do their turn, hidden from me. Unless I have spotted them of course. Just like in Heroes of Might and Magic.

The first aliens I encounter are tiny things that I one-shot with trouble. They also aim like Stormtroopers so I make quick work of them. My son suggests I shoot some stuff inside the alien space ship, which makes things blow up and incapacitate two of my marines. Thanks kid. But it is cool that the environment is interactable, I really like that because I am thinking it can probably be just as easily used to my advantage.

Not for the claustrophobic.

Hyped on my easy win over the little aliens and coming back with some alien artefacts to research on I quickly set out to discover more aliens to kick back into space. But then I learn that TftD is not as gentle as I first thought. Wrestling my subs turns out to be tricky, I am unclear whether I have to boat around the oceans and patrol to come across aliens or not. When I do my subs inevitably have to come back to refuel, and that is also inevitably when the aliens show up. The nations of the world who decide on my funding each month aren't happy that my subs sit back in the base refueling instead of coming to the aid of the people of the world. Neither am I! 

Then, when I finally catch up to another alien sub, I come across some other aliens who definitely don't play nice. Maybe they realized that sending their weakest troops didn't do them much good, because whatever they're sending out now can easily one-shot all my marines as soon as I see them. There is just no chance for me to fight them, and so I rather flee than send my troops into an early grave. The tables have turned. So I start to think. My marines clearly need more of everything to fight those guys - armor, better weapons and health packs. So I start researching those things. And maybe I can try to grind some of those weaker mobs when I come across them, for materials, or whatever they drop.

The game can feel a bit unfair at times. Just stepping out of my sub I get murdered by something off screen. Good bye Malory, it was nice knowing you. I guess that is the harsh reality of alien warfare, but it is difficult to know what I could've done differently. In another mission I find out the hard way that the weapon I decided to bring only works underwater, which I happen to not be. Well... that sucks. In some missions you are supposed to save civilians which seems like a fairly impossible task, as I hear them getting slaughtered in the distance. 

But otherwise there isn't much I don't enjoy about XCOM TftD, and the things I don't like are because I don't know the mechanic yet. For a game that's over 30 years old it plays surprisingly modern. Nothing is explained, but it's also quite welcoming to just try things around and see what happens. It is also a very slow paced game, which requires you to tinker, add a thing here and there. I was already expecting to have to do a few restarts to get the hang of it, but I have in fact survived longer than I thought I would. Usually money is the first thing that goes out the window but the slow pace semi-tricks me into thinking I am doing ok although only a short amount of time has actually passed in-game. In this it is similar to one of my all-time favorites - Settlers 2 from 1996.

This is how you do it.

Fortunately, nowadays a manual is only a quick AltaVista search away. The manual is actually really instructional, showing how to get through the different parts of the game step-by-step, just like a tutorial. An IKEA manual would be proud. It is to the games credit that I got most of the steps from the manual just by trying things out dynamically in-game.

To modern sensibilities the feedback-loop is probably too slowly tuned on XCOM TftD. Even though there is always a feeling of something to do, the sense of real successes are, at least initially, far in-between and hard-earned. If this sounded like it could be your thing, but maybe want something with a quicker turn-around, I can highly recommend FTL: Faster Than Light. It retains the same feel of tinkering and micro-managing, and high level of failure (in a good way!). But for a game from 1995, X-COM: Terror from the Deep is a banger.

Stellaris (PC, 2016)

 One of my favorite games from my childhood is Escape Velocity (and the subsequent reboot Escape Velocity Nova). As a budding new captain of a tiny but loveable space ship you roam the galaxy, explore worlds, trade with aliens, fight off pirates and build your fleet. It is great and I highly recommend it still today.

Ever since EV I've been looking for a similar game to give that feeling of exploration and expansion. I failed hard with Star Control and got lost in the stars with Rymdresa. But Stellaris looked promising, with a similar world map to EV.

One major difference between EV and Stellaris that was obvious from the start is that in Stellaris you play the controlling God of your kingdom, not a character with their own ship to control like in EV. In Stellaris you end up creating an empire, in EV you end up creating a fleet. What this mainly means, gameplay wise, is that in EV you have a natural learning curve from your one ship and onward. And while you start off small in Stellaris there is already from the get-go a hundred things to keep track off. 

Dozens of resources, leaders, ship types, planet types, ship skills, planet buildings, events, hostile and friendly aliens and so on. Things happen so quick you often and suddenly find yourself in a situation and have no idea how you got there. When my kid tried the game his planet was annexed by a hostile alien after a handful of turns, even though he played on easy.

I figured from the start that this was a game where I would need a lot of help to begin with, at least to get acquainted with the different systems and how to control them. Fortunately Stellaris realizes this as well and offers different tiers of tutorial. I ticked the "full" one which meant I had a friendly robot chatter in my ear without pause about everything I needed to look at and deal with. You can pause the game at any time, or choose to play it at different speeds, which all also is very helpful, at least once you learn to identity what situations require more focus.

So I send my science ships on missions to survey new systems, after I have chosen an appropriate science leader from the leader pool. I choose edicts and things to research. My construction ships build mining stations and research stations and star bases. There are limits to how many leaders I can have and other limits to my resources and expansion that can be changed with the right research. I survey more systems and send my colonizing ships to terraform planets when I have the luck to find a suitable one. Then there is another planet system to take care off, what should they produce and how do I want to treat the people that live here? 

The list of things to deal with quickly grows long. I make contact with aliens, prompts pop up every minute about curious things that my science ships find on their survey missions to different systems. I end up feeling like most of what I do is click things, without really having a grasp or understanding of it. I could've just as well played Cookie Clicker at this point.

I can't deny that it is fun though, somehow. I don't get a sense of purpose and empowerment the way I do playing EV, but I do get a strong sense of achievement. Every second there is something to tinker with and tweak, something to explore and possibilities to expand your territories. I almost feel like I need to be three people to be able to properly manage everything. When the tenth alien contacts me about a trade agreement or breaking down in our relationship I really want to care. But while the alien is talking, seven other things have popped up on my screen that need my attention just as much.

The UI does a good job at helping you keep track of things and there are quick buttons for everything important, as far as I can tell. After having played around 7 hours on easy and normal mode I didn't find the game particularly challenging, besides all the things you have to keep track off. Even when aliens did attack me or declare rivalries I didn't notice it make any big difference, except maybe block out a certain area for me to explore. Maybe my kid was just very unlucky on his first try. But I have been playing it extremely safe and peacefully, making sure to grovel and throw smiles and goodwill at any and all aliens that cross my path. It would be interesting to play the game as a military race, and attack everything on sight.

The creators of Stellaris have put a lot of time into making the universe feel alive and full of fascinating things to explore. Almost too full (which is also proven by the fact that it takes 1-2 minutes just to start the game). In EV there is a quiet and, unless you're being chased by pirates, serenity to space that Stellaris just never comes close to. It probably doesn't have the intention to either. But it fills you so much with the bigger picture that you lose the meaning to why you want to care about the smaller stuff. On the other hand there is so much to see and do and probably different ways to approach the game (this is also true for EV I want to point out) that the replay value feels high. In that sense I guess Stellaris is probably a pretty good Empire Management-game (that's a genre I just made up). There is a lot to get good at, a lot to fine tune, but you can also just click around randomly and get pretty far, at least on the easier modes. Something for everyone then, maybe.