UFO: Enemy Unknown (original title), also known as X-COM: UFO Defense in North America, is a 1994 science fiction strategy video game developed by Mythos Games and MicroProse. It was published by MicroProse for DOS and Amiga computers, the Amiga CD32 console, and the PlayStation. Originally planned by Julian Gollop as a sequel to Mythos Games' 1988 Laser Squad, the game mixes real-time management simulation with turn-based tactics. The player takes the role of commander of X-COM – an international paramilitary and scientific organisation secretly defending Earth from an alien invasion. Through the game, the player is tasked with issuing orders to individual X-COM troops in a series of turn-based tactical missions. At strategic scale, the player directs the research and development of new technologies, builds and expands X-COM's bases, manages the organisation's finances and personnel, and monitors and responds to UFO activity.
Despite its troubled development, including having been almost cancelled twice, the game received strong reviews and was commercially successful, turning into a runaway sleeper hit and acquiring a cult following among strategy fans; several publications have listed Enemy Unknown as one of the best video games ever made, including IGN ranking it as the best PC game of all time in 2007. It was the first and best-received entry in the X-COM series and has directly inspired several similar games. An official remake of the game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, was published in 2012, and subsequently regarded as also being one of the greatest games of all time.
Plot The story of UFO: Enemy Unknown, set in the near-future at the time of the game's release, begins in the year 1998. The initial plot centres on increased reports of UFO sightings as tales of abductions and rumors of attacks by mysterious aliens become widespread. The nations of the world come to perceive this as a threat and attempt to form their own forces – such as Japan's Kiryu-Kai force – to deal with the crisis, but these efforts are unsuccessful. On 11 December, 1998, representatives from some of the most powerful nations in the world secretly meet in Geneva to discuss the issue. From this meeting is born the clandestine defence and research organisation Extraterrestrial Combat (X-COM), over which the player assumes control at the start of the game.UFO: Enemy Unknown user manual.
In the beginning, the player will only have access to conventional weapons, but as the game progresses, the player learns more about the enemy, their species, mutated creations, and technology. It is ultimately revealed that the "leaders" behind the alien invasion are a race known as Ethereals which possess powerful mind control abilities and enslave other races of aliens to perform their bidding and that their main base in the Solar System is located in Cydonia region of Mars. The player must then prepare the final assault team, attack Cydonia and destroy the mastermind behind the alien invasion, the biocomputer Alien Brain.
The game may end in several ways. If the player's performance is poor or worse for two consecutive months, the player runs a deep deficit for two consecutive months, all the player's bases are captured, or the player mounts an assault on the aliens' Mars base and loses, the game ends in defeat (in the PC version, the funding nations sign pacts with the aliens promising peace, but the aliens instead destroy every city and poison the water and air to destroy any resistance, the remaining survivors are put in slave camps to help reverse-terraform Earth for future alien colonisation; in the PlayStation version, the council of funding nations makes a futile attempt to negotiate with the aliens, who violently murder the negotiator). If, however, the player is victorious in the final attack, the game ends in mankind's victory.
Gameplay The game takes place within two distinct views, called the Geoscape and the Battlescape. As described by GameSpy, UFO: Enemy Unknown "...melds an SSI Gold Box RPG with a highly detailed 4X game like Master of Orion, making it in some ways two entirely different games."Kat Bailey, Enemy Unknown: An X-COM Retrospective , GameSpy, 19 January, 2012
Geoscape
The game begins on 1 January, 1999, with the player choosing a location for their first base on the Geoscape screen: a global view representation of Earth as seen from space (displaying X-COM bases and aircraft, detected UFOs, alien bases, and sites of alien activity). The player can view the X-COM bases and make changes to them, equip fighter aircraft, order supplies and personnel (soldiers, scientists and engineers), direct research efforts, schedule manufacturing of advanced equipment, sell alien artefacts on black market to raise money, and deploy X-COM aircraft to either patrol designated locations, intercept UFOs, or send X-COM ground troops on missions using transport aircraft.
Simultaneously, the aliens may run various activities, from research missions designed to collect data about the Earth and its inhabitants, to searching for and attacking X-COM bases, to establishing their own bases, to terror attacks on cities with the aim of convincing governments to reduce X-COM's funding. The escalating alien activities need to be uncovered and countered, mostly by detecting and shooting down the alien crafts and sending ground troops to investigate and salvage the UFO landing and crash sites.
Funding is provided by the 16 founding nations of X-COM. At the end of each month, a funding report is provided, where nations can choose to increase or decrease their level of funding based on their perceived progress (or failure) of the X-COM project, in particular the UFO activities in their areas. Any of these nations may quit if the nation's government has been infiltrated by the invaders. Through reverse engineering of recovered alien artefacts, X-COM is able to develop better technology to combat the alien menace and eventually uncover how to defeat it.
Battlescape
Gameplay switches to the tactical combat phase whenever X-COM ground forces come in contact with aliens. Each ground mission takes place within a procedurally-generated, voxel-based 3D map, evenly divided into square-bottom cubes and vertical layers for gameplay purposes. However, the actual game world is only used internally by the game engine for line of sight and firing calculations and is hidden from the player.Nevertheless, screenshots of it as seen from the perspective of currently selected soldier can be made by pressing F10 in OpenXcom. Instead, it is presented in a symbolic form using isometric-view 2D bitmap graphics. It also features a highly destructible environment where almost all game objects and the landscape itself can be damaged or destroyed by weaponry.
The Battlescape's turn-based system uses action points, known in the game as Time Units (TUs), that are distributed between individual soldiers according to their statistics (including the total weight of carried equipment relative to their strength, and the top and current levels of stamina). Each turn, their TUs can be spent for movement and a variety of actions (through an icon-based GUI), such as firing weapons, managing their equipment including ammunition (items carried in hands, pockets, belt, and backpack), picking up or throwing objects (limited in this to friendly or enemy equipment or bodies), kneeling down, using items, reloading weapons, and priming explosives. Shooting options include a snap shot, an aimed shot, and possibly a burst if a given weapon has an autofire mode. Some weapons can also be loaded with non-standard types of ammunition (such as high-explosive rounds or incendiary rockets) and some are non-lethal for capturing aliens alive. A major feature called Opportunity Fire enables combatants to automatically shoot at a spotted hostile during the enemy turn if enough of their TUs have been reserved and left unspent.
The combat is highly unpredictable and often challenging, especially for new players. Soldiers are vulnerable to alien attacks even when armored (a single shot from an alien has a good chance of bringing a soldier in perfect condition to death), and the features such as night-time combat (when the battlefield needs to be illuminated by flares or fires or else the soldiers can only spot an alien at a very short range), fog of war, and Opportunity Fire allows for alien sniper attacks and ambushes. The enemy comes in numerous forms, and the players that are new to the game will run into new kinds of aliens without any knowledge of their characteristics and capabilities beforehand. The course of skirmishes is also dictated by the individual fatigue and morale levels of their participants on both sides; a low morale can result in them either dropping their weapons and fleeing in panic or going berserk and opening fire indiscriminately. Smoke obscures vision and drains stamina, and fires are a hazard for both sides. Injuries may be sustained to different body parts, differently affecting the wounded soldiers' statistics (and thus performance), and often result in the states of unconsciousness or bleeding, the latter leading to death if they are not treated or if the mission is not finished in time.
One of three mission outcomes is possible: either the human forces are eliminated, the alien forces are neutralised, or the player chooses to withdraw. The mission's score and the result are based on the number of X-COM operatives lost (either dead, unconscious, or under alien control), the AI-controlled civilians saved or perished, aliens killed or captured, and the number and quality of alien artefacts obtained. Troops may also increase in rank or abilities if they made successful use of their primary attributes (e.g., killing enemies). Instead of gaining experience points, surviving human combatants might get an automatic rise (a semi-random amount depending on how much of the action in which they participated) to their attributes, such as Psi or Accuracy. The soldiers who have been killed on a mission will remain dead, but can be replaced with raw recruits back at base. In addition to combat personnel, the player may use unmanned ground vehicles that are outfitted with heavy weapons and well armored but large, costly, and not gaining experience.
Recovered alien artefacts can then be researched and possibly reproduced. Captured live aliens may produce information, possibly leading to new technologies and even an access to psionic warfare. In it, some aliens possess mind control abilities that can be used to temporarily take control of human soldiers or cause them to panic. After capturing a mind control-capable alien, the player will be able to train soldiers in using these same abilities against the aliens.
Development The game was originally conceived by a small British independent video game developer, Mythos Games – led by Julian Gollop – as a sequel to their 1988 science fiction tactical game Laser Squad, "but with much neater graphics using an isometric style very similar to Populous." The initial 1991 demo presented a relatively simple, two-player tactical game then known as Laser Squad 2 (or Laser Squad II), which ran on the Atari ST. Due to bad experiences with Blade Software in selling their previous game, Lords of Chaos, the Gollop brothers (Julian and Nick) approached three other video game publishers, British Krisalis Software and Domark and the international MicroProse, eventually brokering a deal with MicroProse.Interview With XCOM Creator Julian Gollop , NowGamer, 30 August 2011. Julian Gollop was especially happy about it because he greatly respected MicroProse and believed it was probably the best video game company in the world at the time.