UFO Aftershock

[Jinxed]

I've played the game for a few hours and I must say that it's very much improved from the original. Though the improvement is there, it's still not a very good game, that's the impression I got.

Cons

Real time system - It wouldn't really bother me that much except one thing in it, every time a soldier finishes their action it switches to that soldier. I mean, I have a group of 4 selected and when they kill a monster, it switches to them. Say I have 3 of them shooting a monster and someone else sneaking. If I had the other one selected at the time the 3 finished, it would take away my control from him and warp me over to them. I know I'm not very clear on this, but it's ultra annoying in a lot of situations.

Mission variation - so far, I've had 5 types of missions max. 5 types of terrain in europe max as well. It kinda gets boring really fast if you revisit the same mine 10 times over.

Graphics - while not bad by itself, you can only play at 1024x768... And the camera does not zoom out enough.

Bugs - It crashed twice on me and rebooted my comp when I tried to run it again

Starforce

Pros

A good character development system - While nothing stellar it gets the job done. You earn xp points and level up. That gives you a character point to add to the many characteristics that have many levels.

Music - Not bad

Strategy - Building bases, dyplomacy, etc. all adds flavor.

 

[Slaughter]

I've played the game for quite a few hours Jinxed, and I can confirm it's a great improvement over Aftermath!

Real time system - It wouldn't really bother me that much except one thing in it, every time a soldier finishes their action it switches to that soldier. I mean, I have a group of 4 selected and when they kill a monster, it switches to them. Say I have 3 of them shooting a monster and someone else sneaking. If I had the other one selected at the time the 3 finished, it would take away my control from him and warp me over to them. I know I'm not very clear on this, but it's ultra annoying in a lot of situations.

This is solved quite easily. If you check out the options screen, you can customize the S.A.S. system quite a bit. I've got it set to only pause (and move the camera) when a new enemy is spotted. I don't know if this solves your problem, but I believe it will.

Mission variation - so far, I've had 5 types of missions max. 5 types of terrain in europe max as well. It kinda gets boring really fast if you revisit the same mine 10 times over.

There should have been a greater variety, but there are more variations than what you've encountered so far. In addition, you have a surprise or two in store...

Graphics - while not bad by itself, you can only play at 1024x768... And the camera does not zoom out enough.

They meant to have more resolutions, but had to leave it out due to time constraints. You can get some fairly good looking graphics with the right settings however, as you can see in this thread (SPOILERS!!!).

Bugs - It crashed twice on me and rebooted my comp when I tried to run it again

Patch coming by the end of this month, but you're right that there are too many bugs and CTDs.

I've been playing the game for quite some time. I'm far from through it, but so far my pros and cons are:

Pros:
- Customisable weapons (adding scopes, silencers and so on).
- Training system (makes soldiers unique, snipers can target body parts).
- Story has some interesting twists.
- Base management, diplomacy, resources.

Cons:
- Bugs and CTD.
- StarForce.
- One resolution mode.
- Repetitive missions at times.

I'll give a more detailed report when I've gone through the game if anyone's interested, but so far I've enjoyed it quite a bit!

 

[obediah]

I'm waiting for the patch to play some more. The RT combat is far from the worst I've seen, and does allow for some nice strategery. I'd still prefer TB, but I've had a few fun moments that TB can't give you.

For example, some rocket prick was giving me a real hard time, so I set my guy with the semi-auto shotgun at a corner and had my fastest guy jump out into the pricks view and then haul ass back. Sure enough he bit and came around the corner and my readied shotgun dropped him before he could react. An overwatch system might give you the same results, but it was nice to see it play out without temporal ping-pong.

Moving around and getting the camera where you want it is still more of a pain than it should be. It's not the worst but it intrudes on gameplay.

 

[Slaughter]

Yeah, I've stopped playing while waiting for the patch as well. Played well to begin with, but the longer I got into it, the more frequent the crashes became. A pity that they release a game with so many bugs, but they had to choose between releasing when they did or get shut down.

 

[Circuitbreaker]

I'm steadily progressing through the game and the game is much better then it's predecessor. I think the biggest problems are simply lack of funds and lack of time. With more funds the content could have been improved and with more time, mutants & aliens rather then bugs would have ruled the game...

I do hope the patch comes soon as the more I seem to progress in the game, the more crashes I get.

 

[obediah]

I must have stopped just in time. I only had one crash and that was because the fan on my laptop died. So unless this game is REALLY buggy, i can't blame it for that.

One nice thing about the laptop is that while I was waiting for a NO-CD fix, I was looking at all the starfuck and other anti-starforce crap. The program said I had to unplug the IDE cable to the CDROM drive. This seemed like way too much hassle for a laptop, but after a 'doh' revelation I pushed the button to eject the entire drive and it worked fine.

 

[Elwro]

Starforce

That's a disease nowadays. I bought Still Life today (a fabulous game BTW, with a free interesting prelude here) and had to crack it to make it work.

And I just reinstalled my system, have no virtual drives and no recording software! (YET, of course, it's a matter of minutes). How this copy protection stuff works is beyond me. Up to now I thought it noticed my DaemonTools. But now I have a completely fresh system and Starforce still has problems.

 

[Jinxed]

This is solved quite easily. If you check out the options screen, you can customize the S.A.S. system quite a bit. I've got it set to only pause (and move the camera) when a new enemy is spotted. I don't know if this solves your problem, but I believe it will.

I don't think you can stop it from switching to the character. You can adjust camera, pause, and verbal notification. Maybe something else too. I was talking about it switching to the soldier automatically.

 

[kingcomrade]

It sticks in your registry, doesn't it?

Anyways, there's a program I've got called "sfclean.exe" which erases Starforce from your computer. I don't know where I got it but you could probably search for it.

 

[Slaughter]

This is solved quite easily. If you check out the options screen, you can customize the S.A.S. system quite a bit. I've got it set to only pause (and move the camera) when a new enemy is spotted. I don't know if this solves your problem, but I believe it will.

I don't think you can stop it from switching to the character. You can adjust camera, pause, and verbal notification. Maybe something else too. I was talking about it switching to the soldier automatically.

I thought that stopped happening once you unchecked the "Move camera" option?

 

[Elwro]

It sticks in your registry, doesn't it?

I thought so, but I formatted my drive and reinstalled XP so the registry is new. Currently I have no programs installed that I'd think such programs would consider suspicious. And no virtual drives.

Anyways, there's a program I've got called "sfclean.exe" which erases Starforce from your computer. I don't know where I got it but you could probably search for it.

Thx, I'll search for it (although I cracked the game already), it might be helpful in the future.

EDIT: how large should it be? 18kb or 557kb or what? Some stuff I found has probably viruses inside so plz tell me.

EDIT2: OK, forget it, I found it as an official tool supported by Codemasters (!).

 

[Jinxed]

I'm not getting that many crashes, although I'm just out of Europe. The thing that bugs me the most until now is that some maps take ultra long to load. I'm feeling like I'm loading a game in fallout 2 on a celeron 400. Sometimes I get very choppy graphics too, my pc should handle it even with with everything maxed out (16x AA etc), going with the fact that it's opengl and I've got a 7800GTX card.

 

[Slaughter]

Just wanted to mention that the first patch is out for the retail version of UFO: Aftershock. More information can be found here.

 

[Jinxed]

Gonna test it out tomorrow. I took a quick look at the bugfix list and pretty much all of the major things I noticed are supposed to be fixed. I kinda got tired of Aftershock after I saved over when my entire team was stripped of armors, weapons ammo etc. I had that bug before but always managed to load, it finally cought me though. I had to manufacture all that stuff again and it really slowed me down for about 2 days. I miss the old X-Com strategy fun though. Manufacturing items, selling them and stuff. Kinda made more sense to make excess stock. Hell, you could even sell alien corpses for cash. Who owns the license these days? Firaxis? I'm definetly not familiar with the x-com community, it looks to me like someone is sitting on a license that still has a big potential. But I guess it's too late now.

 

[Slaughter]

Makes sense that there's no money in Aftershock, as most of the worlds population died in Aftermath. It would be good if you could barter items and resources between the factions however, that's true. And I understand that you were annoyed with loosing all your equipment! Takes quite some time manufacturing new stuff...

Regarding X-COM, Atari still had the license last time we checked. I haven't in a while, but they still list the X-COM games in their support section.

 

[Jinxed]

Well, it would be cooler if diplomacy had a bit more impact. Say the provinces would still be under the control of the other factions, but provided you with the resources, something ala JA. It would make more sense to keep good relations with them.

 

[Sisay]

Regarding X-COM, Atari still had the license last time we checked. I haven't in a while, but they still list the X-COM games in their support section.

Considering how Fallout and Jagged Alliance licenses have been skullfucked lately, I'm beginning to wonder when we'll be seeing a sequel to Xcom: Enforcer.

 

[Slaughter]

Regarding X-COM, Atari still had the license last time we checked. I haven't in a while, but they still list the X-COM games in their support section.

Considering how Fallout and Jagged Alliance licenses have been skullfucked lately, I'm beginning to wonder when we'll be seeing a sequel to Xcom: Enforcer.

Indeed! I think our best option for X-COM is to persuade Nival into buying the license. They way I see it they are pretty much the only decent TB developer we have left that has proven themselves in a similar type of game.

 

[Sisay]

I think our best option for X-COM is to persuade Nival into buying the license. They way I see it they are pretty much the only decent TB developer we have left that has proven themselves in a similar type of game.

Yeah, can't really see anyone else making a decent squad-based TB combat game. Silent Storm was horribly overhyped* in Finland but it's a good game and there hasn't been a lot of good games in this genre for a long time. Just gotta hope there won't be anything like panzerkleins in their future games.

*
Probably sounds ludicrous to people in NA but the game got ridiculously high points in the only Finnish game magazine worth a damn, Pelit (their GOTY too). There were a lot of people saying how it's better than Xcom: Ufo Defense (Ufo: Enemy Unknown here) or JA2 and I think that's just delusional. It wasn't overhyped in the sense that it got a lot of advertising, though. Still, I believe it managed to sell extremely well here.

 

[drexciya]

I've recently finished the game and it's a mixed bag.

The semi-real time with pause like approach works for me, but will not be everyone's cup of tea. I like the improvements with crouched vs. standing and snap shot vs. aimed shot, this makes a lot of difference regarding tactics.

Initially the game is VERY hard, enemies are relatively powerful, your units are weak and they have lousy weapons.

When you start picking up items and manufacturing things start to change. Note that you must invest heavily into Weapon research and Weapon Manufacturing before you get those weapons.

By the time you get assault rifles and sniper rifles whether by manufacturing them or picking off Cultists things become a lot easier. Your units become much better and with fine-tuned equipment (I really like the weapon add-ons) you can easily wipe out most opposition.

After some time another group of enemies pop up which will be difficult the first time around. But if you've invested heavily in research then you'll laugh at them.

Yet another group of enemies pops up in mid- to endgame and they are tricky not difficult; you have to know which weapons to use and have a variety of arms at your disposal. From the moment they pop up and the moment you can wipe them out it takes a lot of in-game time and that was just frustrating. The finale itself was a bit boring.

Like the previous game in this series it has a lot of potential but it just doesn't manage to pull it off. What can be improved gamewise?
- Make the base building more interesting/strategic. What I did was simply build lots of facilities and switching when some options where not interesting anymore. Since you can acquire lots of bases you don't have to make much choices - lots of weapon research items? Just build lots of Weapon Labs and so on.
- More variety in the enemies and settings. There's too little variety and too little personality in the enemies department. Some more variation in the settings for missions would be a plus as well. Bigger maps and more in-house fighting requires different tactics and offers more variation compared to the spot and snipe strategy which you'll be using a lot mid- to endgame.
I really hated and feared Deathbellows in the first game and now I really didn't get across very memorable enemies.
- Research is inconsistent, if you are lucky with harassing the Cultists or attack your friendlies you can get access to weapons which you would normally only get through extensive research and manufacturing a lot later.
- Lack of interaction with the different factions. Maybe something like a trading system as some others have proposed or diplomatic options would be good. What I did was hire some people and ask for resources and giving away surplus resources to keep everyone happy.
- Difficulty of the game begins at hard and falls off to boringly easy later on. If you have proper equipment and handled your team well initially, nothing can stop you from mid-game on. Given the development of weaponry in the game that would be tough to balance with the capabilities of your enemies.
- At some parts of the game, progress depends on researching something. Given the fact that your units are already on top of things you're not really happy when you have to wait 6 days (in-game time) for a research topic while 2+ encounters/day pop up.

What's good?
- I like the research tree and the way research is handled in the game overall.
- Weapon add-ons and other add-ons (Armor, Mines) are very nice; customization is always good.
- Base management has improved a lot.
- The semi-realtime system.
- It's got a decent plot which progresses nicely further in the game.
- Lots of different weapons and different "builds" for units. i haven't done much with melee weapons, but others have.
- No more landing in the middle of an ambush, I guess they fired the chopper pilot from the previous game.

I definately have the impression that the game was rushed or limited; several things could have been worked out properly when given the time and money to do that. I'm afraid we'll keep on seeing this in general with smaller developers and hope that modding can add something to the game.