UFO: Afterlight Review

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            UFO: Afterlight

Review by SteerpikeApril 2007

No, Dammit

The UFO series is a collection of tactical strategy games influenced by 1994’s X-COM: UFO Defense, one of the best and most important PC games. Like its forbear, UFO is part big-picture military and logistics management, part small-squad tactical combat. Czech developer Altar Games has tried to fill some pretty big shoes—shoes so big, in fact, that no one else has dared attempt it. “Potentially the next X-COM” is a loaded statement. And if “potential” were all games needed, the UFO series would be awesome.

2003’s UFO: Aftermath was solidly okay, but no more. 2005 saw UFO: Aftershock hit close to the mark, but it was too easy, too repetitive and hobbled by bugs. Rather than patching Aftershock, Altar left it crippled and moved on to UFO: Afterlight, producing an odd Sims-in-space mutation of a strategy game that, despite some interesting ideas, can’t overcome the ruinous information management, humdrum tactical encounters and poor design decisions.

The primary issue they fixed is stability. This installment is crashless and largely bugless, the opposite of previous installments.  But though they repaired that one perennial series gripe, Afterlight also retains too many of the classic UFO problems—boring tactical, convoluted interface, lousy organization. And while I applaud the developers for their willingness to explore some new play styles, they don’t really add much to the fun level.

Simply put, I don’t enjoy playing this game, which was not true about either predecessor.

General Mars-pital

Aftershock and Afterlight both tell the story of what happened if you lost the first game in the trilogy.  Midway through that one, the Reticulan Empire, busily invading Earth, offers to transport humans to a safe haven and end the war. Take the deal, lose the game. The sequels have humanity beaten, near extinction, and without hope for the future. Some of the population was transferred to space stations called Laputas, whose story was told in Aftershock. But most survivors of the Reticulan bombardment of the Earth—a few million people—are stuffed into freezers and carted off to Mars. A skeleton crew of scientists and engineers remain thawed to terraform the planet and defrost everyone once it’s habitable. That’s your job in Afterlight.

Turns out, though, that Mars is like the most popular and vied-over planetary body in the galactic supercluster. Approximately five gazillion species of alien, mutant, robot and combinations thereof have staked a claim, and what was meant to be a fairly routine scientists-only gardening job turns into a bloody battle for the planet. You’ve only got about thirty people, and, of them, few have combat training.  Mars can’t yet support all of humanity, so the folks in the freezers are nothing but a vulnerable albatross.

Your talent pool must therefore wear many hats. Engineers and scientists are also soldiers. You might pull a mechanic off the line for a mission simply because you lack the knuckle-draggers—or because the mission calls for an expert who can, say, repair a water main (the aliens are constantly blowing up your water main). And if that person dies, his spot in the workshop remains vacant and your production suffers. Losses anywhere along chain are felt throughout your entire war machine. Moreover, these people are people. They know each other, they intermarry and breed. They have histories and moods and best friends, and they get dejected if they lose them.

While this sounds like a cool idea, it also means that you can’t name your troops like you used to, a seemingly insignificant subtraction that dramatically diminishes the fun. They feel less like your troops. Despite occasionally interesting (and hilariously mistranslated) background info, I really never identified with any of the shallow characters in Afterlight. And it’s so irritating to manage daily lives that the whole “pull so-and-so out of the lab to do a mission” thing is more tedious than scary.

As you play, you get to watch Mars slowly turn green thanks to your terraforming efforts. Strategically, your job is to oversee territorial expansion, fight and negotiate with the many enemy factions, manage the income of various resources, assign jobs to your people and direct R&D. The tactical side of the game is fought in a time-shifted combat environment that puts your spacesuit-clad, pocket-protectored Urkels in direct conflict with those who want a piece of your planet.

Afterlite-Brite

The stylized, colorful, cartoony look of Afterlight is a big change from its gritty predecessors. Afterlight has a much brighter, more vivid world than the other UFOs, and while the graphical change is jarring at first, it actually works really well in the context of this game. Graphics in general are excellent, with bold, confident designs that belie Altar’s talented art direction. This game engine has been in service for a long time and still works well for the genre. Since I’m guessing this is the last UFO game, Altar really got its money’s worth from the codebase.

The music, on the other hand, sounds like it came out of a porn movie. Bowng-chika-bow-wowng does not evoke an environment of pressure and fear and seems out of place in this sci-fi drama.  Obnoxious voice acting doesn’t help matters either; all of the characters are annoying, but later on teenagers (the offspring of your main staff) join the active squad. I got really sick of hearing “Shya!  Like, that’s a totally bogus alien.” You know what I’d like to hear from a soldier acknowledging an order? “Yes, commander,” not “Again?! *sigh*”

Afterlight doesn’t introduce any really revolutionary concepts to the genre. This is good because the first line of the manual warns you not to read it (seriously). Controls in general are the same as the previous titles. The camera is still fussy and hard to manage, particularly if you allow the game to set your perspective.  And while some controls are intuitive, most are not, requiring too many clicks of mysterious iconic buttons to produce the effects you want, particularly in tactical encounters. Altar has always struggled with interface design and never gotten it right.

Tied into this is the issue of information management. Strategy gameplay all comes down to information—there’s a ton, coming in from all sides, and in order for the game to work, the interface must categorize and present it elegantly. In Afterlight, that doesn’t happen. Breaking news pops in from the perimeters of your screen and vanishes, disappearing before you can click the accompanying info button. You need to switch windows, sometimes more than once, to compare data that should be side by side. Facts that should be at your fingertips are often buried in a labyrinthine menu system not at all improved from those of its predecessors.

Example: suppose one of your characters has finished a training exercise. Your HR person pops on and says, “One of your characters has finished training.” Great. Which one? These people have names, you know, names I can’t change. How about, “Rita has completed Advanced Suit Handling. Her spot has opened in Tactical Training, and she has returned to work in the lab.” And that’s just a status update—in this game, even information of vital importance (you know, stuff like, “we’re being invaded,” “base under attack,” etc.) flies in and vanishes with no elaboration. The buttons to drill down for more information on an update disappear so fast you’ll rarely get to them in time, making the strategic view feel like a game of Whack-a-Mole. Ultimately, learning to manage your information flow and play effectively becomes an onerous task, and you feel lost for a long time.

Making Mars Safe, One Bullet at a Time

The tactical game is a little better, including a few new controls for your people and better use of interesting landscapes and maps.  In Afterlight, you tend to visit the same places over and over again, which gets boring after a while, though at least you appreciate the value of crucial strategic locales in your theater of war. Once again, the game is time-shifted, allowing you to pause, issue orders, and then start the clock when you’re ready.

Combat is more challenging and remains so throughout the game.  Some of the enemy factions are quite heavily armed, and some are even proficient with psychic weapons against which you initially have no defense. Just when you think the game is getting plateauishly easy, something that hurt Aftershock, a new alien with a giant rocket launcher turns up. You will lose people if you’re not careful, though another problem with the these-people-are-your-people thing is that casualties usually lead you to reload rather than suffer the consequences.

Over time, you’ll research a selection of spacesuits appropriate for various mission parameters. However, changing a character’s spacesuit also causes him to lose all of his equipment. I’d like to have been able to create a database of standard loadouts and just click once rather than dozens of times to equip each person.  You can outfit several teams differently, which is handy; so rather than manually arming troops for each specific mission’s objectives, you can make templates and just send the one that’s appropriate.  It’s really for equipment, though; you’ll use the same squad on pretty much every mission so as not to disrupt base activities like research.

Environmental hostility is a cool addition to the game. Mars is an unpleasant place, and you can’t safely visit all regions all of the time. This changes with solar activity, the day/night cycle and seasonal weather, and it can be very cruel. If a vital province is invaded during a solar flare, your troops will get cooked without the proper spacesuits. The alternative is to wait it out or risk the exposure and hope you finish fast enough that it’s survivable.

Aliens all come equipped with their own weapons, some of which are interesting, but once again basic human weapons seem to work best. Your scientists research advanced rifle technology, producing a weapon cleverly called “Rifle” that holds you through most of the game. As your alliances with other factions materialize and dissolve, you may get access to alien soldiers with special capabilities. Your scientists will become adept at researching alien technologies, and your troops adept at killing specific extraterrestrial species.

Tactical makes better use of elevation, but more often than not that turned into an unfair advantage for my side. The vast majority of encounters can be completed by putting your squad on top of a cliff and simply lobbing grenades down at the enemy, who always seem to conglomerate below. Ultimately, very few tactics are necessary to dominate in tactical encounters.

UFO: Uninspiring, Feeble and Ordinary

I assumed that Afterlight would be an evolutionary improvement on Aftershock, as that game was on its predecessor, but it’s not the case. It is not fundamentally broken, but it’s a lot less fun to play than its predecessors. It is loutish and hard to manage; many of this game’s more unique ideas simply work better on paper than in play, and some things, such as interface and tactical controls, have actually devolved. In a word, it’s boring.

Trying to make a game mimicking X-COM is like trying to remake Citizen Kane: a very dangerous idea unless you’re absolutely sure you’re doing it right. From one point of view, Altar deserves credit for trying; from another, they’ve had three chances and missed with each. In my Aftermath review, I quoted Bill Harris, who said this about the 2003 game: “It seems that everything I like about this game is everything they copied exactly from X-COM, and everything I don’t like is anything they changed.” And it holds true throughout the entire trilogy.

The UFO series has been pretty successful in Europe, less so in the States, and will probably come to an end with Afterlight, if for no other reason than all three games essentially sing the same tune, and four would be pushing it. Recently, a rumor started floating around—based on a leaked document, now vanished—that claimed Irrational Games was working on a new property called …  X-COM. The veracity of the rumor is anyone’s guess; Irrational is owned by 2K Games, which does in fact possess the X-COM IP, and Irrational founder Ken Levine has described that game as his “first love.” Irrational, with a credit list that includes System Shock 2, Bioshock, Freedom Force and more, could probably do something really amazing with the X-COM franchise.

I bring this up because X-COM still lingers in the hearts of gamers, thirteen years after its release. Some people don’t bother to mince words and just call it the best game ever. Gamers the world over would thrill to play a soup-to-nuts remake of X-COM, updated with modern tech but otherwise essentially the same. In trying to mimic X-COM but also leverage original ideas, Altar’s UFO series has succeeded only in highlighting its shortcomings—shortcomings particularly egregious in this disappointing installment. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Altar Interactive Publisher: Cenega Release Date: March 1, 2007

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows XP/2000 DirectX 8.1 (DirectX 9.0c recommended) 1GHz CPU (2 GHz recommended) 512 MB RAM (768 MB recommended) nVidia GeForceT 5700 or ATI Radeon 9500 (nVidia GeForceT 6600 or ATI Radeon 9700 Pro) DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card (Sound Blaster X-FiT sound card recommended) 4 GB free hard disk space DVD-ROM drive

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      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

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