Lord of Dread

Firstly, I just want to say thank you to Goldhawk for making this game. I want to make this one of my favourite franchises, and I love and respect the work and dedication needed to make this game happen. That being said, with my first and probably only completion coming a few days ago (despite being an original kickstarter backer), I feel a review may or may not be helpful, because I'm not so sure I'll be coming back for the sequel now. This was my steam review: ' This is a very conditional recommendation.If you found the rebooted XCOM games a bit dumbed down; the complete removal of any business sim elements, the 2 actions per turn thing, only one base with very limited strategic options, then Xenonauts might be for you.It's basically the original X-COM UFO Defence/Enemy Unknown, but with less exploits, less bugs, and a fresh setting. It does this extremely well. It updates what needed to be updated, made the setting more grounded, has a good and modern UI and QoL features etc. When its firing on full cylinders, it really does scratch that classic strategy itch in a way most modern games don't come close to doing, because they are too scared to respect the player's intelligence and allow them to form their own strategies without being explicitly told how to do it first. The QoL features are fantastic, the medal system and constant stat upgrades independent of rank are great. On paper it does everything right, so why do I still feel somewhat underwhelmed?A lot of this comes down to the nature of this game. This was a kickstarter that began life well before we knew an XCOM reboot was coming IIRC or at least before we knew XCOM would actually be decent. I was a backer from very early on. This game was the holy grail, something to carry the X-COM torch and be faithful to the original. It took me years to get through this game because I found it got repetitive (I'll come onto that), so by the time I finished it, I've played a lot of XCOM 1, 2 and Long war 2. This may colour my perception somewhat, but I think I still would have felt the same even if they didn't exist. The point is that the 'faults' of this game are exacerbated massively by XCOM's existence because of what XCOM got so right that Xenonauts doesn't.This thing I speak of is presentation. It's by far the biggest fault of the game IMO but it was by design. Many kickstarters and open source X-COM like projects came and died over the years, this is one of the only ones that actually survived AFAIK. This is because they didn't over reach. It's all 2D sprite work not too disimilar from OG X-COM (obviously much higher quality and resolution). This allowed such a sprawling game to be accessible on many systems, but more importantly made it manageable for the devs and retained the spirit of the original. Which was by design. The thing is, its just very flat. I love the realistic aesthetic and weapons, love the setting, its all better than X-COM in that regard, but the animation is so lifeless, there's so little detail, you can't even tell your soldiers apart. Again, by design. But I feel like it needed to be more in that regard, and the devs seem to be aware of this judging by the sequel.It's a modern version of a very old school game, done well. For the amount of time you play a game like this though, the flat presentation makes it get stale. Toward the end of the game I found myself avoiding ground missions because they take so long, play out pretty much the same every time (clearing ships gets to be a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chore) and were kinda dull affairs once you've done a bunch of them. The other mission types werent so bad but they took even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ longer.This game was great proof that gold hawk can make a game like this, but for the sequel I really hope they take some presentation queues from the new XCOM reboots. Don't dumb down or water down any of the old school game mechanics, build on it, jazz it up, give us more cinematic stuff, more personalised stuff etc. If Goldhawk can make a game as customisable, personalised and cinematic as XCOM but with the tactical and strategic depth of xenonauts, then ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that game will be legendary and able to directly compete with rebooted XCOM. Throw in mod support via steam workshop, a squad system like long war 2, a darkness system more like the original X-COM and some more horror/terror elements to make it creepy AF (something all the X-COM's had but is sorely missing from XCOM) and you would have something I could recommend to everyone with a brain.As it stands though, I can't really recommend this one to anyone other than people who love the original X-COM game and wonder what a more modern version of that specific gameplay would be like.Edit: after checking in on xenonauts 2 and seeing that either they are sticking to the same engine or using similar assets, its pretty clear that the level of cinematics and graphical fidelity I thought they were going for is absent although I coiuld have sworn there was an early mission showed off with something in 3d that looked like it was running on unreal. I could forgive that with one change; atmosphere. The bright clean colour palete should be left behind. A dark grungy colour palette is the only way I can personally see this being redeemed. That hidden movement screen? Add some desperate wounded soldiers barely getting away from an unseen or barely seen monster. A lighting system (or fake it like in X-COM). Make alien noises more terrifying, make movements and speed unsettling, make soldiers verbally loose their ♥♥♥♥. Bloodstains around the place. Mutilations lying around. Make the aliens menacing incomprehensible monsters rather than just enemy combatants. This franchise desperately needs something to elevate the presentation because if its more or less the same game but you can rotate the camera now, it saddens me to say it but I doubt I'll really be on board for that.' I'll still obviously see how the game is when it lands, but after seeing some footage of a recent demo I just feel a bit sad.

Hi all I don't know if this has ever been brought up, or even if its too late too even think about, but has anyone considered that these could be an interesting addition to the game? You could garrison them with a small number of troops and aircraft and use them to patrol areas that are out of your radar/base range, and launch ground/air operations from them. They could be attacked by aliens under certain conditions too. It would add some flexibility to the game without being a necessity. They would take a long time to produce and a lot of funds too, you could even add submersible vehicles if you wanted to introduce a nuatical alien threat like TFTD for some additional variety. Maybe troops that get transferred to them become marines and get some kind of perk/stat/rank alteration? I think part of the X-COM/Xenonauts fantasy is feeling like you are in command of a proper military organisation, which means thinking about air, land and sea in some capacity. The sea is often overlooked unless the setting is specifically the ocean, but it could be useful in any earth setting. Just an idea!

Hi Mask I've heard of This is the Police but I haven't played it unfortunately. But the post about operations from Chris is what originally inspired this, is there another one somehwere that you created? I would 100% recommend Long War 2 if you enjoyed XCOM2 though. Its a free mod available in the workshop that was officially supported by Firaxis in a deal with another development studio. It was a better expansion than WOTC in my opinion but there was a single mechanic that was unabalanced and made it very difficult to complete, which is my only frustration with it. The nuts and bolts of it is that it significantly rebalances the game and adds new mechanics. So instead of every mission being relatively scaled to your tech level, you would get a mix, some easy missions you could deal with using a couple of troops, some that would be very difficult even with your best squad and weapons. It would tell you what kind of threat level to expect before embarking. New missions spawn all the time with the idea that you can't and shouldn't try to do everything. You pick your battles. But because it remixes the skills, it gives you more options on how to win too. You can basically have as many squads as you want, give them squad icons and squad names, up to 12 men per squad. I called them legions being a 40k fan. So Fox Legion were all decked out in black power armour, were all clones of the commander (MGS style) but with different specialities, haircuts, weapons and voices. They were my hard hitters, for the most difficult and most mission critical operations so I would give them the best gear first (weapons/armour are manufactured individually like xeno 1 and X-Com) and reserve them for when they were needed. The training mechanic at geoscape level allowed you to keep giving them extra stats/skills while not on mission. My other squads did most of the work, I'd send them out on lower priority stuff. So rather than having a somewhat 2 dimensional menu based operation like WOTC where its all behind the scenes, you would actually do the fighting for varied objectives (more varied than in vanilla XCOM2), and as you had a LOT more soldiers under the organisation, often with different mixes of soldier specialisation, this would allow you to tailor squads as you saw fit, and deploy the most relevant squads according to the tactical situation. It really adds character to the game to have squads with their own feel, strengths and weaknesses. I still had squads with ballistic level weapons doing the light grunt operations while my legions had power armour, plasma weapons and bolters (that last one being another mod weapon). Others still were stealth specialists, others had psionic troopers. You essentially deployed whole squads but you could draft in people from other squads to fill the gaps in they were under strength, or split them up to cover more operations if needed. The squad Icons would show were they were on the geoscape. You could apply uniforms to whole squads rather than doing it individually, you would have one officer per squad with an officer perk/rank progression tree, and everyone else had the standard rank progression (but perks are all remixed in LW2 anyway). You could also assign a soldier, engineer or scientist to a regional haven to give that region a boost in things like recruitment, intel/more missions etc. As you can imagine, going back to XCOM2 WOTC, despite the fancy new graphics and new mechanics, felt like being used to commanding and coordinating an entire war, but being demoted to overseeing weekly food shopping. Some additional info on LW2 in general Missions had infiltration times, fitting in with the resistance theme, which also makes contextual sense with the cold war setting here. They would have to infiltrate behind the scenes until the timer ran out, at which point you could start the mission. You could start prematurely but this would make it much harder, you could also allow them to infiltrate longer than required for an easier time. This meant you could have say 6 squads on deployment and one in reserve, with the option to instantly recall squads if something more pressing came up. You didnt have to deploy all soldiers in the squad either, the ligher armed and less of them there were when you launched the mission, the less resistance you would experience unless it was one of the mission types where it was always going to be guns blazing from the get go. One of my best memories of LW2 was going into a mission that was extreme difficulty, I sent in 1 guy, who was a stealth specialist with a shotgun and katana. This dude avoided enemy patrols, broke into a base, stole a resource I desperately needed, stole a fancy alien corpse I hadn't seen before (there a lot more variation of enemies than vanilla XCOM2, and I had a mod that allowed you to pick up corpses like in OG X-COM) and set off all the alarms. Then he made a hasty retreat to the extraction zone under fire, but dishing out death as he fled due to him being one of my best and also having extra movement tiles due to his speciality. I managed to win a mission I had no business winning due to the flexibility of the systems. Writing this has made me want to play it again god damn it

Hey Goldhawk I think XCOM WOTC is the wrong game to look at for more geoscape depth/variety. XCOM Long War 2 has been hands-down the best thing to come out of the Firaxis camp (even though it was technicall Pavonis), despite its issues, even possibly one of the best games I've ever played. The shift from just sloshing a mix of soldiers together for a mission to having prearranged squads that you sent out on operations, each squad with its own weapons sets, skills, uniforms etc added 1000% more depth and immersion. It's insistence that you behave like an actual commander, sending squads out on operations where there would be a set up time and they would then deploy made those choices infinitely more interesting. I played WOTC twice and always found myself getting bored, whereas I've played LW2 4 times, sunk probably more than 100 hours in each time, failed, and still went back for more. Give me the option to promote a squad leader, give me the option to name squads and define their uses and styles with different gear and training/skills! The missions you sent a single dude out on in WOTC and the buddy system really felt like a wet-fish slap to the face after getting the full tactical treatment of LW2, where I could send 3 elite specialists out to try and stealthily infiltrate a heavily armed facility, steal something and then get the fuck out ASAP (in an actual tactical mission), or know that men serving under a familiar and experienced commander would get buffs due to unit cohesion. In a sense, LW2 has ruined TBS games for me now because I'm not sure if anyone will ever do something that good again. But I feel that added layer would be right at home in Xenonauts and would make the game infinitely more satisfying and immersive. More missions of varying scale that are optional, and squad mechanics to back it up. FYI I grew up on and have played all of the X-COM games (except enforcer), I have played all of the XCOMs and Xenonauts 1. Just my 2 cents as a die hard fan of the genre. With the exception of the political and economic simulation of X-COM apocalypse (which would probably be a nightmare to try and develop, but would also be fitting to a cold war setting especially), I think squad mechanics are the biggest and best development for player satisfaction. Edit: It's also bit silly having 10 Generals in a single squad, it makes more sense to have officer and troopers with different rank progression, the player being able to promote officers themselves