Its set on a colony planet and not Earth, so some of the buildings and such look a bit weird (all alien-style elevators, no stairs), but everything blows up. In X-Com fashion, which is to say you can still blow out the entire first floor and the second floor will be floating in mid air…

Be sure to check out the mods for it, as they add quite a bit to the stock game. (like the troop lethality a previous poster mentioned- in the stock game troops don’t “die” you just scrape their brains off the floor and clone them).

UFO: AI is pretty good, and I think when they’re “done” with it it’ll be excellent. Agree on the interface being ass, though.

And to complete my trip into off-topic land, I REALLY, REALLY want to see a X-Com 2 with the Silent Storm engine for tactical battles. If blowing shit up TBS style is your thing, that game is the best out there. Unfortunately its also limited to a set of stock missions, little strategic activity, and if your main character goes unconscious or dies the game ends.

You’d have to have very low-detailed scenery, but it’s worth it for the massive augmentation it gives atmosphere (immersion, realism) and strategy (make your own backdoor, indiscriminant firebombing). With a game like UFO, the strategy element should always take priority over the graphical element.

LSN now has a web interface which mostly-automates the turn sending and receiving, and I played it regularly for a good two years. With four races with varied play dynamics, strategy is very deep.

Oh, and for those of you who were wondering, yes, there is destructible terrain, and the overall balance of the game is very well-done after being tweaked through the years.

If Aftermath had been turn-based and had overwatch and other tactical elements that are required in a TBS then i think i would definitely prefer it to UFO.

BTW, does anyone remember that email-client knock off of UFO that you had to pay a subscription for and couldn’t just buy the game? I thought it looked really interesting but didn’t want to pay for my sending emails to battle someone else. :)

still no destructible environments?

Dynamic environments are a big design decision for a 3d engine. You have to choose early and make alot of sacrifices to make it work. The core engine tech behind most modern games assume static environments on purpose. Many technical challenges are far easier to deal with if things don’t move around. (Pathing is a big one – which is why you see many more dynamic environments in turn-based games, where the CPU can spin for a while on nothing but getting from A to B.)

Publishers being big fans of cheap, fast and sparkly – they’re reluctant to put money into technical challenges that may not have workable real-time solutions and almost certainly won’t be keeping up with the Joneses in the effects department. Not when so many gamers are eager to throw scads of money at chrome bumpers and more polys on last-gen engines.

I disagree that it would be that underwhelming– I actually first played the original just two years ago, after playing a lot of JA2 (which is my favorite). I think I can say that my enjoyment was pretty much nostalgia-free, and I did think it was fantastic.

As with JA2, I was amazed that the features it had have been in no games since these– the strategic world-map level, combined with the tactical level. (At least in no games since when it comes to turn-based, which is the purest form of tactical gameplay, like chess). Preceding these in my games history was Silent Storm, which got me started down the path, but it lacks that world-map level and is very nearly just a set of linear missions.

However, the learning curve with that decade-old interface was indeed pretty darn steep, and some things stayed clunky even after you climbed it (equipping your squads is a total chore). I never made it past the middle game because it just got too frustrating when your squad members started getting possessed and killing each other. But if this challenge was de-coupled from the interface issues, I think I would have persevered longer. So a faithful remake with a well-thought-out modern interface would probably even beat JA2 for me.