Apparently this came out last year. I had it bookmarked and finally decided to pick it up. Extraterrestrials is not to be confused with the Cenga UFO games (ET was developed by Chaos Concept). It seems to have gotten a limited release (the official forums are dead), which was a shame because this game is the closest thing to X-Com heaven that I’ve played since 1985. So I thought I’d pop in here and see if anyone else has played it, and describe it for those who haven’t.
It’s basically an attempt to recreate X-Com with better graphics and the ability to run on modern machines. The familiar Geoscape is here, the mission and loadout screens look right, the bases are pretty similar. The bases work a little bit differently in that there’s no living quarters to build - you start out with one for your soldiers, every laboratory adds space for 10 scientists, and every workshop adds 10 workers. You can’t build anything other than hangars, radars, and base defenses at your secondary bases. Otherwise the game functions just like X-Com. ET is also moddable , and the mods are what makes this game shine.
I downloaded most of bman’s mods and they really add a lot to the vanilla game (which I didn’t play much). The mods make the sprites sharper, add new graphics, items, and alien types. Also adds an option screen to tweak tons of options like soldier mortality and leveling speed, research and production speed, alien frequency and difficulty, and lots more.
The game plays exactly like X-Com. You have AP to spend moving and shooting, and with mods you can reserve some for reaction shots. Your soldiers get XP for hits and kills, and you can raise their stats on level up. The bad thing about this is you pretty much have to play Ironman (reload if anyone goes down). Even with soldier mortality turned off, getting shot down means a long hospital stay. Once you progress further into the game, you just can’t take rookies on missions - their stats will be too low for them to be any use other than bait. I’ve tried to compensate for this by building up a team of 12, but the sheer number of missions means I just can’t have a lot of guys out of action at once. So you have to reload a lot, which doesn’t really bother me but might be a turn off for some. I found the game with default mod options to be a tad difficult. Had to restart a few times in the beginning, then I found a nice balance of options after some tweaking. One of the mods adds the original aliens from X-Com, and they’re all pixelated like the original heh. There’s a ton of weapons and other goodies to play around with, including many different types of explosives. It’s definitely going to take a few play throughs to explore everything. My research is progressing pretty well, I have about 7 or 8 labs going. The game difficulty is increasing nicely, giving me lots of targets for my new toys.
Minor complaints: the aiming calculator on ground missions is screwy. I had 2 soldiers standing next to each other, one had 48% chance to hit and one a 1% chance (same target). The number and type of UFO’s you get seems pretty random. The first 2 months I got 3-4 ships per month, then in March I was hit with over 20 (all near my original base). You can’t chose the location of your starting base. Soldiers can heal each other, but not themselves. Unconscious soldiers can’t be healed. These are all pretty minor issues though, and don’t detract much from the game.
I’ve seen a lot of attempts at fan made X-Com remakes, and most of them never made it out of the gate. This one has a few minor issues, but recreates the original X-Com experience better than anything else I’ve seen, including the Cenga games. It’s a shame this game didn’t get the attention it deserved. It can be found for under $20 (I got mine on ebay for $14 including shipping).
Anyone else played this?