UFO Enemy Unknown Download PC

The game received strong reviews and was commercially successful, acquiring a cult followingamong strategy fans; several publications have listed UFO: Enemy Unknown as one of the best video games ever made, including IGN ranking it as the best PC game of all time in 2000 and 2007. It was the first and best received entry in the X-COM series, and has directly inspired several similar games, including UFO: Aftermath, UFO: Alien Invasion, UFO: Extraterrestrials andXenonauts. A remake of the game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, was created by Firaxis Games and published by 2K Games in 2012.

Plot

The story of X-COM, set in the near-future at the time of the game's release, begins in the year 1998. The initial plot centers around increased reports of UFO sightings as tales of abductionsand 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 December 11, 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 defense and research organizationExtraterrestrial Combat (X-COM), over which the player assumes control at the start of the game.

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 inCydonia 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 which the council of funding nations make a futile attempt to negotiate with the aliens. If, however, the player is victorious in the final attack, the game ends in mankind's victory. UFO Enemy Unknown Game free Download Full Version.

Gameplay

The game takes place within two distinct views, called the Geoscape and the Battlescape.According to GameSpy, «Playing it again in 2012, it comes off as both completely brilliant and slightly insane. In effect, X-COM 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.»

Geoscape

The game begins on January 1, 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 artifacts 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.

There are twelve regions of the globe where the player may put bases (North America, South America, Europe, Siberia, North Africa, South Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Arctic, Antarctic, and Pacific) and where alien activity may occur. Aliens have several possible missions they can run, from harmless research missions designed to collect data about the Earth and its inhabitants, to terror attacks on cities with the aim of convincing governments to reduce X-COM's funding.

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 of the X-COM project. Any of these nations may quit, if the nation's government has been infiltrated by the invaders. Through reverse engineering of recovered alien artifacts, X-COM is able to develop better technology to combat the alien menace, and eventually uncover how to defeat it. UFO Enemy Unknown game free Download for PC Full Version.

Battlescape

Gameplay switches to the tactical combat phase whenever X-COM ground forces come in contact with aliens. In the Battlescape screen, the player commands his soldiers against the aliens in anisometric view and turn-based battle taking place on a semi-randomly generated map. The combat features a system of action points, known in the game as time units, that can be spent for movement and a variety of actions (through an icon based GUI), such as managing equipment, picking up or throwing objects, kneeling down, using items (such as medi-kits) or priming hand grenades. The time units can be also spent on managing ammunition and discharging firearms, using either a snap shot, an aimed shot, or possibly a burst if a given weapon has an autofire mode (some weapons can also have alternate types of ammunition loaded, such as high-explosive rounds or incendiary rockets). There is also a feature called opportunity fire, enabling combatants to automatically shoot at a spotted hostile during the enemy turn in case if enough of their time units have been reserved for this. In addition, some aliens possess mind control abilities that can be used to temporarily take control of your soldiers or cause them to panic. By capturing a mind control-capable alien alive, the player will be able to harness these abilities for his squad and eventually use them against the aliens.

There are seven different terrain types in the game (farmland, desert, forest, ice, mountain, jungle, and urban) each of which pose advantages and disadvantages to the player. In addition, fighting in alien bases or your own base produces two more types of terrain.

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 result is based on the number of X-COM operatives lost, civilians saved or perished, aliens killed or captured, and the number and quality of alien artifacts 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. Dead soldiers are permanently dead, but can be replaced with raw recruits. In addition to combat personnel, the player may use unmanned ground vehicles, outfitted with heavy weapons and armour but not gaining experience. Recovered alien artifacts can then be researched and possibly reproduced. Captured live aliens may produce information, possibly leading to new technologies and even an access to psionicwarfare.

One reason for the game's success is the strong sense of atmosphere it evokes. Soldiers are vulnerable to alien attacks even when armoured (a single lucky shot from an alien can bring a soldier in perfect condition to death), and the use of features such as night-time combat, line of sight and opportunity fire allows for alien sniper attacks and ambushes. The enemy comes in numerous forms, and players run into new, deadly aliens repeatedly without any knowledge of their characteristics and capabilities beforehand. The course of skirmishes is also dictated by the individual 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. At night, the battlefield needs to be illuminated by flares or fires or else the humans can only spot their enemies at a very short range.

Fan-created content

Fan-made patches fix a notorious bug which results in the game always resetting to the easiest difficulty level («Beginner») after completing the first Battlescape mission, no matter what difficulty level has been selected. This glitch was not noticed by MicroProse and was not fixed in the official patches, resulting in the very high difficulty of the sequel due to many complaints from veteran players who believed that the original game was still too easy even on seemingly higher levels. IBM Master Inventor Scott T. Jones' noted 1995 patch-turned-mod, named XComUtil, fixes it as well as addressing many interface problems and better balancing the game; in 2010, a task of its further development was given to David Jones.OpenXcom is an open source reimplementation of that game to fix all the known bugs and limits, improve the AI and user interface, localize in more languages, and enable customizing and modding, among other changes and expansions.

Development

The game was originally conceived by a small British video game developer company, 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. The Gollop brothers (Julian and Nick) approached three video game publishers, Krisalis,Domark and MicroProse, eventually brokering a deal with MicroProse. 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.

Although supportive of the project, the publisher expressed concerns that the demo lacked a grand scale in keeping with MicroProse's hit strategy gameCivilization. The Civilopedia feature of Civilization also inspired an addition of the in-game encyclopedia, called the UFOpaedia. All that and the UFO theme was suggested by MicroProse UK head of development Pete Moreland. Julian Gollop's personal inspirations included several traditional games, in particular the board wargame Sniper! and the tabletop role-playing game Traveller.

Under MicroProse's direction and working at its Chipping Sodbury studio, Julian Gollop said that while the research and technology tree somewhat emulates the role of advances inCivilization, «it also helped to develop the storyline.» He changed the setting to modern-day Earth and expanded the strategy elements, among them the ability to capture and reproduce alien technology. He has cited the 1970s British television series UFO as one of the influences for the game's storyline, in particular an idea of an international counter-UFO organisation and the psionic powers of some alien races, even as the series itself was «a bit boring». A book by Bob Lazar, where he describes his supposed work with recovered UFOs at Area 51, inspired the concept to reverse-engineer captured alien technology.Timothy Good's 1991 book Alien Liaison provided inspiration for several of Julian Gollop's revisions, such as the notion that world governments might seize alien technology or secretly conspire with the invaders (a negative result which can occur in-game). Inspirations also included Whitley Strieber's book Communion and other «weird American stories».

MicroProse UK graphics artists John Reitze and Martin Smillie provided what MicroProse described as «popular 'manga' look and feel» visuals. Julian Gollop credited Reitze with «a distinctive comic book style» and Smillie with «very detailed environment graphics». John Broomhall composed the music while Andrew Parton handled the sound effects. There were also major contributors who were not acknowledged in the game's credits, such as the designer Steve Hand, a Laser Squad fan who helped the project get signed, put input into the «big game» concept, actually came up with the name X-COM (derived from Mike Brunton's initial idea of X-CON, where «CON» originally stood for «contact»), and helped to define the comic book-like art style. Hand thought the original video game design document was very poorly written, especially regarding the initial, more interactive and action-oriented UFO interception system; nevertheless, the final game turned out to be very close to it. Certain creature types deemed «boring» were removed during the development, as were the Men in Black, who were unused due to MicroProse's abortive project to make a MIB-themed standalone game.

A public demo of the game was released under the North American version's working title X-COM: Terran Defense Force. Despite numerous changes from the first demo, the tactical part of the game remains true to the turn-based layout of Laser Squad and the Gollop brothers' earlier Rebelstar series. The AI system of those games formed the basis for enemy tactics, with Julian Gollop programming his own unique algorithms for pathfinding and behavior; in particular, the aliens were purposely given an element of unpredictability in their actions.It was the first game programmed by them for the PC. In retrospect, Julian thought he should have concentrated on game design and left all of the programming work to Nick. Producer Tim Roberts was described by him positively as «very laid back» and for most time allowed them to work on the game without any interference and schedules, only checking in once in a month to conduct meetings in a pub.

The original contract was for the game be completed within 18 months. In the course of its development, the game was nearly canceled twice: in the first instance due to the company's financial difficulties and the second time under the pressure from Spectrum HoloByte after it had acquired Bill Stealey’s shares in MicroProse in 1993. Julian Gollop said the quality assurance team (Andrew Lucket, Phil McDonnel and Jason Thompson) helped save the game from cancelation; their feedback also helped to polish the game. The game was in fact officially ordered to be canceled by Spectrum HoloByte, but MicroProse UK bosses Pete Moreland, Adrian Parr and Paul Hibbard held a meeting and decided to ignore it and simply not inform Gollop about any of that. Thus, the development team continued their work without any knowledge of the parent company's executives, until it was eventually completed in March 1994, after 30 months in development since the initial contract. During the final three months, after Spectrum HoloByte was eventually informed of the game still being in production, the Gollop brothers were forced to work 7–12 in order to finish it before the end of the fiscal year. The overall development of the PC version cost £115,000. UFO Enemy Unknown Free Download Torrent.