Xenonauts - Indie Seen

What you need to know: Xenonauts is Goldhawk Interactive's first title, and they've been working on it since they were founded in 2009. The team is decentralised, meaning they work from a variety of locations, and while the core team consists of less than nine people, many more have contributed to the project so far. Xenonauts was initially funded via a pre-order scheme, but later got a huge cash injection via Kickstarter (they raised three times their original target). Now the game continues to get funding via Early Access purchases on Valve's digital service, Steam.

{Xenonauts} is about as old school as you could possibly imagine, and for fans of the original X-COM, for those who've been waiting for a game that truly recreated the experience they had with the original almost twenty years ago, it's going to be like mana sent from heaven.

It'll also be of particular appeal for those who enjoyed the recent update from Firaxis, but who perhaps felt that the Civilization developer may have strayed too far from the original blueprint. There's a few subtle changes to the formula, new ideas that gently soothe the original gameplay so it doesn't jar too hard against our modern sensibilities. Though even with a few antiquated kinks ironed out, Xenonauts is undoubtedly homage to the classic strategy game.

It's been in the works for a while now, but last year it came to the fore after it became one of the first games to launch on Steam Early Access, and in doing so presented itself to a keen and eager audience. We played that first build upon release, and then returned to it recently for a more elongated play session. What we experienced was an interesting game, with bags of potential and its fair share of technical issues.

The technical issues were to be expected, after all Xenonauts is still in Early Access. It's being updated all the time, and there's still plenty to be done before the game is released proper. For a start, it's sloooooow; there's much work to be done on optimisation. The skirmishes take an age to start up, and the break between turns is noticeably protracted. Even some of the animations hang for longer than they should, it dents the immersion as is.

But it's in beta, so we can forgive all these technical shortcomings (for the time being), and looking beyond the obvious issues it's easy to find much to like. What we're greeted with is an intriguing game that holds plenty of potential. Whether it'll appeal to a wider audience remains to be seen, though we suspect that gamers looking to party like it's 1994 will have blast here, although maybe non-purists will find everything they need to in the more modern take of {Xcom: Enemy Unknown}.

If Xenonauts doesn't reach a wider audience it'll be a shame, because from our initial inspection, it feels like a decent stab at a tricky proposition. Teams have been trying and failing to emulate the original for years.

Xenonauts looks like it's going to succeed where so many have struggled before. It's complicated, sure, but it's also clearly deep and immersive. Tactical and strategic in equal measure. Epic in scope, but allowing for the smallest levels of customisation. In short, it's a tinkerer's dream.

Gone are the 3D stylings of comparable recent alien fighting strategy games, and instead we're greeted with a crisp HD makeover. Polygons are replaced with hand-drawn backgrounds, and they look really nice. It might scream retro, but it's well implemented. This handcrafted feel permeates every element of the game, from the different areas of your home base, to the maps that your troops move through on the ground.

Like X-COMs new and old, you play as the commander of a secret military organisation, briefed to combat the threat of an alien invasion. There's a variety of different ways to prepare for the war to come, and each section of your base caters for one area. You can assign engineers to build new planes and armoured scouts, you can recruit troops and tinker with their equipment, your base is modular and needs expanding, and researchers investigate the things you bring back from the battlefield so you can use them yourself in later scraps.

Combat comes in two forms, either between UFOs and the planes in your hangar, or via troops on the ground. Up to three units on each side shoot it out during aerial combat. In the early exchanges that we experienced, the enemies you come up against are weaker and less effective than your fighter planes, so taking them down is relatively straight forward. In a departure from the beaten track of old, the air battles take place in real-time (although action can be paused with a tap on the space bar). Taking down a craft over land means you can send in a recovery crew in order to salvage from the wreckage.

Each ground team consists of up to eight soldiers, and they're dropped into a variety of different encounters. Each member of the team has a certain amount of ‘time units' (or action points), which dictates how much they can move and what they can shoot within a single turn. It's intuitive, you can click on a tile to see how many TUs moving there will cost, and click again to initiate the movement.

It's a similar deal with shooting; hovering over an enemy reveals how many TUs a shot will cost. You can adjust the accuracy, with a surefire hit costing significantly more than loose suppression gunplay. It's an elegant system that's easy to read and plan tactics around. {Xenonauts}, like the Firaxis take on the original, uses a cover-based system for combat, giving greater options and flexibility on the battlefield. The changes made by the team seem to be for the better.

The studio behind this homage to X-COM, Goldhawk Interactive, do rather assume that players know exactly what's going on, and there's not much to help out players new to game. That, for me, is the biggest worry. There's no quarter given in the game, with harsh permadeath lurking around the corner of every ill-conceived decision, and so a bit help for new players in navigating the interface would be nice. I get the feeling that this game hasn't been made for fresh faced players, and that initial barrier my scare of prospective newbies.

In fairness, it's complexity that clouds the menu system, not an unintuitive layout. It won't take an unreasonable amount of time for someone to get to grips with the basics and work out how the main systems work, but it's clear that we're expected to come to the table with existing knowledge of how it all fits together.

If you don't know what's going on, it's another thing that'll get in the way of quickly getting to the meat of the game (the other thing being the slow pace due to the lack of optimisation). Once you've got past these initial issues, even in this early build, there's plenty to get your teeth stuck into. The 2D stylings are evocative and stylishly done, the action is familiar but polished with modernity, and most importantly it feels like X-COM. That alone is praise enough, and fans of the original who've yet to check it out are advised to do so even in its unfinished state. Newcomers can also consider this a recommendation, though for them perhaps it's best to wait until the finished product is available to download, that way there'll be less getting in the way of a good time.