UFO Aftermath had a lot to live up to, and it almost pulled it off.

UFO Aftermath's development was a long and complicated process. Well, maybe it wasn't that complicated. Back in 2000, Mythos Games was working on a game called Dreamland Cronicles that would be a spirtual successor to their successful X-Com line. Unfortunately, Bethesda pulled the plug and Mythos folded. They went on to form Codo Games and make the excellent Laser Squad Nemesis play-by-email game. The license to Dreamland Cronicles was sold to ALTAR, who threw away pretty much everything (the engine and story) and started UFO:Aftermath from scratch.

In UFO Aftermath, aliens have come to Earth and launched a cloud of deadly spores that killed most life on the planet. On top of that, the aliens are creating a biomass that threatens to overtake the earth and change it to their suitable environment. Your job is to organize a team to fight off the alien aggressors so that humanity can rebuild itself.

The game beings with a tutorial mission that familarizes you with the tactical element of the game. The tactical portion is done in real time with the ability to pause and set orders for each unit. In the end, however, I found that I grouped my people together in one big ball of units rather than moving them around seperately. There is a limit of 7 soldiers per mission, so moving groups of 3 or 4 is usually the way to go. There isn't much use to sneaking around for the most part, as the enemies will usually always fire off a shot and hit you before you realize they are there. However, I will save that for later. Tactical commands include making your units duck, firing, and walking/running. All in all, it works fairly well. The graphics are pretty well done in this portion, as the game view is in 3D and can be zoomed, tilted, and rotated to the hearts delight. The cityscapes are the best of all environments with a generally run down look. The inside of bases is also well done and goes the farthest towards capturing that X-Com feel.

The Geoscape view is the second part of the game. Between missions, you set up your troops, shoot down UFOs, and research new technologies. This is done in a way similar to X-Com, although there are some major differences. First, you don't build bases. Instead you capture locations and use them to fight back a biomass that spreads across the planet. Second, a base can have only one function. It either acts as a research facility, a engineering base, or a military base. Also, you don't have to worry about money. You get most of your items by capturing bases or winning missions, with most advanced technologies being created in your engineering bases. New missions pop up frequently, and you can choose to delegate some of them to other people (ie, pass the mission) but if you do so, the mission isn't guaranteed to be won. Missions include base defense, recovering downed UFOs, capturing bases, destroying alien bases, and doing scouting.

The game starts out well enough, but soon problems begin to arise. First of all, the missions can get really repetative. I suppose this happens often with games that use randomly generated missions, but with UFO Aftermath it becomes readily apparent because the aliens don't really have that good of AI and usually don't do much other than wait for you to come along. In the X-Com series of games, aliens would split up, seek you out, and generally try to confuse you. In UFO Aftermath, they wander a little and try to beeline towards your location. To compensate for this poor AI, the aliens are usually maxed in all their stats. This means that they will see you at the maximum distance and will fire with pinpoint accuracy. The aliens soon get laser weapons with a long distance and you are left trying to close the distance while they fire off round after round. And even later in the game, the aliens get rocket launchers, which fire fast and are hard to avoid. Missions after the alien rocket launchers quickly turn into a blood bath of your units dying, as they do large amounts of damage that easily rips through even your toughest armor.

I'll be honest with you now. I never finished the game because of this.

I really liked UFO Aftermath in it's beginning states. There is a lot of good things that this game does. Small things like the simplified geoscape could be overlooked, but the fact is that the meat of the game (the combat) quickly becomes more and more annoying as the aliens become more and more powerful. It seems unfair to compare this game to X-Com and set so high standards for it, but the fact of the matter is that it is impossible to not compare this game to X-Com. In the end, it proves to be a decent if not good game that simply can not live up to it's "spiritual successor" description.