My personal Aftershock

[Ralph Hawk]

I have mixed feelings about "UFO: Aftershock". It would be a fairly good game without all those Bugs. I have played it for maybe 20 hours now and had to reinstall the game once already - checking out some user forums I had to learn that this will happen more often and there is a chance that I will not be able to finish the game!!! That is very disencouraging.

In game weak points include:

- Very tedious handling of Bases. They have very limited room for improvements. In a world that is mostly uninhabited this can not be explained by limited space. So you keep rearanging focus for your Bases until halfway satisfied. This is not fun and from my pov a real design flaw.

- The Track-System, sort of a pipeline to channel ressources towards Bases, is awkward. The explanations given in the manual leave you mostly in the dark, so it´s trial and error here. Again not exactly what I would call good gameplay.

- Due to tedious research- and basemanagement I keep falling behind the technology curve. My allies do have technologies that I am unable to manufacture. This led me to some sort of exploit: I keep hiring guys with the sole intention to take away their gear. They are really cheap.

- Battles with lots of Psionics in the opposition are a nightmare. I can handle these battles, but it´s not fun to play them. Ever so often my whole squad is completely confused, even though they are all quite high on Willpower and I also usually have a character with leadership bonus against psionics with me. Still those pesty psionics cause a lot of reruns - its usually a race of my snipers against the enemies psionicists.

- Assault rifles rule the battlefield! Compared to other weapons assault rifles are overall the best choice. All those heavy weapons have too many disadvantages, I do have one or two missile launchers as backup but most of the time four rifles and one sniper are all needed to get the job done.

- Developement of the fancier implants and psionic gear takes an eternity and the payback is lousy.

There are more of those points that give me the impression that the developers knew very little about small group tactics or military technology at large. Not really a big deal, I admit that I am a Nitpicker here. One thing that deserves mention is the many flaws in the localization into german. Maybe this version is an exeption, so this is no concern for people playing another version. Again I am just a detail fanatic and actually I got some good laughs out of some of the fancy grammar and misspellings.

So why do I keep playing the game? Simply because even with all those bugs and flaws it´s still fun. Character advancement and training yield visible results in the battles and while some real life tactics just don´t work the game offers you a wide range of possibilities to develop your own and that´s one must have in a tactical game.

Another big plus is the good background story and that there is a multithreaded plot to uncover. The aliens are not just mindless targets for shooting practise, no, they have agendas, factions and all that. That is just wonderful.

One last thing: I do recommend the game to fans of the Ufo series, but remember: Don´t rely on the autosave (these files get damaged by the game on a regular basis). Use regular savegames (often) and have backups of them. That way you save yourself a lot of frustration and might enjoy the game just like I do.

EDIT

Encountered serious performance problems for the first time. The game froze for half a minute. This is ridiculous, considering the hardware I am playing on:

Core2 duo 2.0 Ghz; 2 GB Ram and a decent Radeon X1600 w/256 MB Ram. This exeeds the recomended specs by far, so any lag has to be due to sloppy implementation. Adding this to the numerous bugs in the game I would say that the publisher is in dire need of a Quality Assurance Department. Or maybe a new management ...

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Another thing. I know now why I have troubles with the Trac system. The interface goes completely against the grain of human behaviour. You have to pick a connected spot, then click on Trac, and THEN find the new spot to be connected. Just silly. Because I am curious and wanted to know if it´s just me I put it to the test:

Even after getting an explanation on how to properly handel this, 9 out of 10 people keep hitting the Button first, then the connected area and THEN the one to be connected. It is just what seems logical. This is not abig deal really, but such details show how little thought is sometimes put into user interfaces. A shame, because that is one of the reasons why computer games just don´t appeal to many people.