Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10528 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Cenega
• Released on: 2005-10-21
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
UFO: Aftershock is the sequel to the highly successful 2003 title UFO: Aftermath and follows directly from one of the endings of the first title, where the player agrees to hand over the Earth to the Alien scientists, who are trying to change the planet into a giant living organism. The Council of Earth and their followers take refuge on an orbiting satellite prepared for them by the aliens, but not all the survivors of the original invasion were re-located.

The game starts after many years in their new home, with no sign of the aliens and a failing life support system--the player must find out what happened to the Earth, the people left behind on the surface and the new visitors.

UFO: Aftershock is a mixture of squad based tactical action and global strategy with the gamer controlling the actions of elite ground troops, and the running and construction of an intricate network of interlinking bases.

Customer Reviews

Excelent!
This game is the best of the X-COM/UFO saga i have ever seen. Base management, research, manufacture, squad management and diplomacy are so developed and detailed , giving it a real strategy flexibility, not available in previous games, even in X-Com Apocalypse.

The tactical combat is quite good, but the camera management can be a bit boring. Perhaps the system used in UFO Aftermath for viewing was a bit more user friendly.

The story is envolving, as you have to rediscover and rebuild all human based earth technology and history, apart from dealing with the surviving humans on the planet and the new extra-terrestrial threat. Overall UFO Aftershock can take you through several weeks, if not months, of adictive non-stop gaming.

Would have been great if they'd finished it
This has the potential to be a great strategy game. If you've played and enjoyed the XCOM games, this offers a very similar mix of base bulding, squad management and tactical combat elements. It is a mammoth game, offering weeks of gameplay. I can only give it a qualified recommendation, however as it was obviously rushed out by the publishers before the developers had finished it. Even with the most recent patch it is far too prone to crashes. There are also design flaws, the worst of which can mean that players can find themselves unable to complete the game without doing anything obviously wrong. Prospective buyers are strongly advised to read postings on the user forums at www.ufo-aftershock.com before purchase.
There aren't many other squad-level strategy games around and, when it works, this is a good addition to the genre. If you are looking for a strategy game this is worth considering, but only if you have a high spec. machine, considerable patience, and are prepared to put in the effort not only to play through the game but also to work around various flaws.

Disappointed
Well, looks like I cannot join the hype of the previous posters.. I was sadly disapointed by this game. The graphics are outdated, the user interface during missions clumsy at best. The whole technical aspects are lacking, be it graphics, sounds or UI (btw. why can't I use any resolution higher than 1024x768? - makes running the game on my TFT look even worse).

The thing that drove me insane right from the start was the camera control, take a step, readjust the camera, take another step, completely spin the camera around, I spent more time readjusting camera than planning my moves.

The "tutorial" is infuriating, it consists of small text windows that pop-up in the early stages of the games pretty much every other minute, showing you sometimes 15+ "screens" worth of text drivel that you have to click through in order to get back to what you're doing. If you've never played the game, you do need to read those however, since the manual doesn't really explain the things mentioned in the tutorial.

For the first 10 missions, the mission areas were uninspired and, sorry, plain boring. I gave up afterwards. Some iteration of the same factory building with random junk filling the other half of the mission area. Or, big change: some hillside area that makes the camera problem even more fun is all I've got to see. Not to mention that the mission areas I've seen so far are patheticly small to begin with. Mission objects cycle between kill everything that moves (mainly) or either rescue or kidnap x. Haven't seen anything else so far.

Squad mates get stuck on random things in the landscape (reload time), navigating a door can turn into a major challenge. (Ok guys, everybody back to the start, lets try this again, you go here, you go there, nope, still cant get through the door even though nobody is anywhere close to it). When moving around the whole squad team at once, they always end up so bunched together that at least half of them can neither shoot nor move and you gotta go untangle them first. The constant teammate "XYZ cannot do this" - is annoying as hell, and how about telling us why he cant do it and what it is he cant do?

I thought I'd get another Jagged Alliance in a SciFi setting, with the base building and research as a bonus / additional depth.. I am not sure what I got. I really wanted to like this game, since turn based strategy games in a SciFi Setting are rare, but this ain't it. After 15+ missions, i couldn't stand it anymore and buried the game on the pile of games that are just no fun... Hey, at least it was cheap. I am sure there are thousands of XCOM and UFO fans out there that love this game, I think this game was released 5 years to late and the glitches, interface problems are killing any fun there might be for me.