This time the game takes place another ten years before the original X-Com and your technology is truly rubbish compared to the aliens who are about to rip you a new one. Your task is to stop the invasion, you go about doing so by completing objectives that appear in the corner of the "geoscape". Simple things like; capture an alien officer, the only problem is that you have to wait for the "officer" to show up somewhere. If you progress very quickly, you'll end up waiting around for the game to continue because, you've done everything to that point.
You build bases in the style of the original X-Com by picking areas on the map, and constructing in which ever way you want. Those "bases" don't come cheap either, if you don't cover as many nations as you can, then you'll lose your funding nations, your funding, and then the operation gets terminated if you lose enough nations. It is indeed difficult to set up extra bases as money is almost always in short supply.
This time when shooting down UFOs, you get to play a little mini-game, where you control your fighters and set way-points to engage and shoot down the UFO, while avoiding its firing arcs. Some UFOs are literally impossible to do with one fighter jet as it simply doesn't have enough ammunition to shoot it down. If your fighter happens to get shot down, you don't lose it forever, but it simply get transported back and repaired to full working order, but that takes about four days, and during that time, you may have more UFOs messing up your relations without any defence. Getting left without working fighters can mess up your ability to fight back and then further cause you problems later on.
Then when you manage to shoot down a UFO, you get a choice of either air striking it and getting a fixed sum of money, but no loot, or you send in your troops to murder all of the aliens and get all the extra resources, like alloys and new research material. But that possess a risk of losing troops, which are expensive to replace. Just to note; you get about twice as much money sending in the troops than you would using an air strike, and that cash is very valuable to you early on.
Ground battles are what you'll be doing until the aliens are wiped out or you start over. You land in an area of the map which you don't get to choose (yet), and you take turns to battle the aliens until somebody wins. A welcome new addition are "local forces", which will help you out, you can't control them, but they provide a nice distraction for your troops. At the beginning, the aliens are pretty weak, but later on, if you don't upgrade your arsenal, they will become near impossible to defeat.
You can obtain different types of weaponry, which are usable in different situations. You have a choice of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, snipers and LMGs, and as a backup you can have many types of grenades and a rocket launcher. Don't think that you should go with only an assault rifle squad, shotguns become unmatched in the crowded buildings or when attacking the UFO. If you happen to want to use a shield, you will have to arm your soldier with a pistol. Also the smaller firearms have a faster reaction time, which is the ability to shoot during the aliens turn using left over time units. Don't dismiss the shield as useless, it's great for opening those scary doors.
Winning these battles will net you alien loot and other goodies (like corpses), new research will become available if you find something new. Research will lead to new technology like laser weaponry, and later plasma weaponry. It will also unlock new aircraft and other things to make your life easier, like stun grenades, but you'll need engineers to build that new shiny stuff, and money to fund it, it's not cheap either, one of the advanced aircraft you can construct costs a massive half a million in cash up front, and your captured alien materials too. But you also need to construct laboratories and workshops and hire those specialists which also costs time and money.
Managing your finances is not as easy as it may sound. Spend too much and you won't be able to carry out new projects. Don't spend any and you won't be able to keep up with the alien threat, which gets more aggressive as time goes on. Losing battles or planes will cost you, with either needing to hire new recruits or missing the opportunity to shoot down UFOs. How effective you are at fighting the aliens all boils down to how many millions you can spend to do so, and the problem is that those millions are hard to come by.
Conclusion:
It's a great game and I had plenty of fun moments with it. I would completely recommend it to anyone, even if you haven't tried a turn based game before. You will definitely have memorable moments with this game if you give it a chance to shine. If you don't like the graphics, well then tough luck I suppose, it's a fun game and you should give it a chance. Though at times it may be hard but easy going at others, it has plenty of good qualities which rival other 3D games of the same genre(Like XCOM:Enemy Within).Get it!
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