Let me give you an example, While the original was punishing and hard they gave you alot of soldiers and you have plenty of room to experiment with, the aliens started off about as weak as you and at worst you can simply zerg rush them. Honestly as a huge fan of all the Xcom games I can't really recomend Xenonauts, I know its an indie game but it really does feel like a 'Off brand' xcom game its very clunky and takes the worst parts of the original and remake. I highly recommend it though, it is surprisingly atmospheric with a pretty cool combat system. Combine that with the sheer amount of missions the game throws at you and it get real annoying real fast. It got so bad that a major strategy for the game was to unequip weapons for each soldier at the end of the turn so when the inevitable mind control came your soldier couldn't attack his teammates. Toward the end of the game they can hit you from across the map without any line of sight. You can have a guy carry a sniper rifle and a shotgun if you want. They get stronger over time but there are no classes, so the only differentiating characteristics are their stats. IMO the best part of Xenonauts is how flexible your troops are. In many ways the ground missions in Xenonauts are more fun as you have much more control over what happens (actual movement system as opposed to the two action of XCOM) but it also has a higher learning curve. I have never played the original xcoms, but I have played XCOM:EW, Xenonauts, and Long War. Also the graphics are definitely not going to win any awards, but I haven't seen ANY squad tactics style games with visuals as excellent as XCOM so it's probably not a fair comparison (maybe Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown as a distant second place). My only complaints so far is that the UI is not very intuitive but takes some getting used to. I've played XCOM EU/EW, but never played X-COM. And instead of a class-based system, you assign your soldiers a role which doesn't directly affect gameplay aside from auto-assigning weapons and helping you keep track during ground battles. When you send a soldier running in one direction, the game cancels the rest of your move as soon as your soldier sees an alien, which allows you to scramble for the best cover available instead of hoping the aliens are on the right side of the cover you already chose.Īlso, more soldier stats. The action point system (Time Units) changes a lot of your tactics.

In Xenonauts, the air game is significantly more tactical than in XCOM.

Xenonauts base building