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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Screenshots

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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

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

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

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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