UFO: Alien Invasion

By: ithamore

On: October 10th, 2007

For the past few days, I’ve been enjoying this free, X-COM inspired game:

“UFO: ALIEN INVASION is a squad-based tactical strategy game in the tradition of the old X-COM PC games, but with a twist. Our game combines military realism with hard science-fiction and the weirdness of an alien invasion. The carefully constructed turn-based system gives you pin-point control of your squad while maintaining a sense of pace and danger.”

<img src=“http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2320/1534524266_9694b96a77_m.jpg” width=“240” height=“180” alt=“ufoai” align=right vspace=10 hspace=10 />I wish they had kept the Greys, but it retains much of the spirit of X-COM, and it’s more than just a graphical upgrade of the original games. There is multiplayer support, you can choose to play as aliens fighting against the alien invasion, and it’s cross-platform: stable releases for Windows and Linux and a beta for MAC OS X Intels of the current version (downloads).

The open-source programmers behind UFO: AI will soon release version 2.2, and they could use some beta testers to find any bugs created by the beta’s new features. It shouldn’t need to be mentioned, but, for clarity’s sake, there isn’t a 2.2 beta for Mac users yet.

A special thanks goes out to Adrian Werner and his guide to freeware games released in or significantly updated during 2007, which Tim pointed all of us to a couple of weeks ago and thus lead me to this game.

Posted in Freeware, Linux, Macintosh, Strategy, Windows

Anonymous

A warning – they do not have destructible terrain or any plans to add it. I’d stick with the original.
Skyleak

I’ve been playing it too. Indestructible terrain kind of sucks in in two ways:
1: It was cool to see the battlefield get torn up

2: some times the safest way into a house was to blow a hole in the side and flank the aliens.

Indestructible terrain in a strategy games kind of kills it for me mostly because of reason 2. I sighted an alien behind a fence with a unit still on the ship; so I took a couple of shots at the fence hoping to remove it from the battlefield giving my team a clear shot. WRONG.

But I believe they made this game out of the Quake 2 engine which is pretty admirable.
PHeMoX

I love how the title says Alien Invation, as if they were “invited”. “D

Still, it’s a cool game, thanks!
Erahgon

I can’t figure out how to shoot at anything. I can get reaction shots to work, but I don’t know how to fire shots on my turn.
http://ithamore.blogspot.com/ ithamore

You might want to open the above in a new tab or window to get a better look at it at Flickr to see what I’m going to describe:

In the bottom left corner, next to the equipped weapon is a crosshair icon. Clicking on it will bring up a small menu that shows what kinds of shots the character can make with the equipped weapon and the TU remaining. Selecting one of the shots will turn the cursor into a crosshair with a trajectory tail following it for aiming.

Also, you might want to go to the online manual to see the default controls and key commands: http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Manual/Keymap There were a several there that I hadn’t discovered yet.