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How does Xenonauts compare to Silent Storm?


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Hey guys I heard about this game and decided to look into it because I got kinda obsessed with Silent Storm (and its add-on... I even sort of enjoyed the extremely unpolished "Hammer & Sickle" spinoff) and was sad that there wasn't really anything else like it out there.

I tried JA2 but could never really get into it, I think part of the reason is that the combat just didn't feel as deep as Silent Storm, possibly because of the lack of the bullet penetration/destruction and combat across multiple stories of a building that SS has. (i.e. shooting a guy peeking his head through a doorway from the floor up above by blasting a hole in the floor with automatic fire)

I also enjoyed the RPG element that SS has, in terms of choosing what skills to level up, was more interesting to me than JA2's purely "by the numbers" system.

Also SS had some nice shooting options, for example you could spend AP points over several turns on a single sniper shot.

So I was wondering does Xenonauts have gameplay closer to JA2 or Silent Storm? I never played X-com unfortunately.

thanks

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I haven't played Xenonauts yet, but I have played SS and X-Com a lot, so I'll compare those two.

X-Com is not as sophisticated as SS when it comes to bullet penetration/destruction, and I don't expect Xenonauts to be either. Actually, there isn't really any bullet penetration in X-Com, the bullet simply stops at the first point of contact (destroying the scenery if the shot was powerful enough).

It is possible to shoot a guy on a floor above in X-Com. You just shoot a floor-tile next to the enemy and take another shot at the enemy itself through the hole. When you shoot the tile exactly underneath the enemy, he falls through. So you are shooting away tiles, instead of actual bullet holes in scenery.

X-Com lacks a lot of the RPG elements you mention, but it does feature more in-depth research, base construction, weapons manufacturing etc. I feel SS is really lacking in those areas.

All in all SS is a lot closer to X-Com than to JA2. It's obvious that the makers of SS had X-Com in mind when they were making the game (in my opinion). Silent Storm finetuned the combat, but left out most of the strategic management/research stuff. It's this combination of games (high level strategy and turn based tactical combat) that makes X-Com and Xenonauts so interesting, I think.

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Hey guys I heard about this game and decided to look into it because I got kinda obsessed with Silent Storm (and its add-on... I even sort of enjoyed the extremely unpolished "Hammer & Sickle" spinoff) and was sad that there wasn't really anything else like it out there.

I tried JA2 but could never really get into it, I think part of the reason is that the combat just didn't feel as deep as Silent Storm, possibly because of the lack of the bullet penetration/destruction and combat across multiple stories of a building that SS has. (i.e. shooting a guy peeking his head through a doorway from the floor up above by blasting a hole in the floor with automatic fire)

I also enjoyed the RPG element that SS has, in terms of choosing what skills to level up, was more interesting to me than JA2's purely "by the numbers" system.

Also SS had some nice shooting options, for example you could spend AP points over several turns on a single sniper shot.

So I was wondering does Xenonauts have gameplay closer to JA2 or Silent Storm? I never played X-com unfortunately.

thanks

G-Bee summed it up pretty good. Xenonauts plays much more like X-Com, it is modeled after it.

I love the Silent Storm games. One day maybe we will see geoscape/base elements from X-Com, a ground combat engine similar to Silent Storm, and the character interactions from JA. Weeeeee! That is GoldHawk's next project right? :P

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The main difference is that in JA2 and SS you lead a small-ish group of characters that are more or less persistent throughout the game and are developed in more detail in the sense that they can have skills, background stories, voices, etc. They're a relatively small scale tactical rpg tbs-es so to speak.

In X-Com and, consequently, Xenonauts you lead what's closer to a small army with dozens of soldiers, vehicles and aircraft. You also deal with things like base building, research, manufacture and other details. On the other hand the soldiers here are much simpler and more expendable, you are expected to lose and replace quite a lot of them by the time the game's over. Losing a few guys every mission can be considered acceptable loses in these games whereas in JA2/SS it'd be an unrecoverable tragedy. X-Com/Xenonaut soldiers do have some stats, portraits and such but they're a lot less distinct and don't have as much individual character like those in JA2 or SS.

So Xenonauts could be said to have less rpg elements in favor of more strategic management.

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