The ground combat missions in Xenonauts are the real meat of the game. They are turn-based battles between your soldiers and the alien forces, whether the objective be to capture a crashed UFO, clear a terror site of aliens or even to defend your base against an alien attempt to destroy it. The soldiers and vehicles you bring to battle are all that you will have to use in the mission – there are no reinforcements and no restocking of equipment. As your soldiers level up and grow in strength through combat experience, it is important you keep them alive – and you will quickly get attached to your favourite soldiers! Knowing that you are only one wrong move from losing them to a plasma bolt keeps even routine missions tense.
Units in Xenonauts recieve a set number of action points each turn, and can spend these performing all sorts of tasks – moving, firing weapons, picking things up, reloading, tending to wounded companions, etc. Once they are spent, the human turn is over and the aliens have their turn (it is possible for both humans and aliens to interrupt the enemy turn if they have unspent action points remaining from their own turn). The objectives of the mission depend on the mission type – on a terror site it may simply be extermination of all aliens, but in a UFO recovery mission it would be possible to win by capturing and holding the UFO as well as through extermination of all the aliens on the map.
The battlefields of the game are hugely important to combat. Evey single tile in the game is destructible, so you have the freedom to use whatever tactical approach you might want. Worried there is an alien guarding a doorway? Blow a hole in the wall and go in that way. Want to get through a fence, but don’t want to walk all the way round it? Drive a tank through it and then have your men follow through the gap created. With certain tiles being explosive and flammable, there are plenty of tactical options available.
Of course, the main feature of the battlefield terrain is the cover it offers. Xenonauts contains a fully-fledged cover system, as well as advanced tile modelling which allows different states of a tile to have different properties. For example, take a brick wall with a window in it - in its undamaged form, it can be seen through but not shot through. When damaged (shattered), you can see and shoot through it. When destroyed, you can see, shoot and walk through it. The system supports different stopping values too – you’ll have better chance of hitting your target if you’ve destroyed the window and the entire wall around it than if you’ve just shot the window out. This may sound complex (and behind the scenes it is), but the bottom line is that Xenonauts lets you interact with the battlefield in an unprecedented level of detail.
With a huge variety of vehicles, weapons, equipment and armour types available in the game, the ground combat has huge replayability. The randomised maps, several mission types, countless types of aliens to fight against and numerous different tilesets to do it in all mean that you will stay interested for a long time. Plus, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of trying out the new weapon you’ve researched for the first time!
X-Com’s ground combat missions were one of the first examples of emergent gameplay, and their spirit lives on in Xenonauts. The game does have a story (told through the Research projects), but that is not the story you’ll remember after you finish playing the game. The story you will remember is the heroics of your crack team of soldiers as they fought their way from the beginning of the war to the very final mission, the story of how they lived or how they met their end. That’s the real story of Xenonauts…but you’ll have to buy the game before you start telling it.
