Xenonauts (PC) Review

There are so many strategy games on the market today, and even more games with aliens. Xenonauts brings something new to the table, a clever system that makes online players work together for one cause – to fight off the invading aliens surrounding our planet. Think of Falling Skies, a setting where mankind is nearly eliminated and those who are left are forced to fight together and/or die together. Xenonauts is similar in some ways, as the planet is surrounded by aliens but they haven’t had the opportunity to destroy us all yet.

The aliens you fight in this game come from a planet with a much different, more thin atmosphere. Basically, they have no choice but to modify their spacecrafts before landing on Earth. During the beginning of the game it will seem easy, but the enemies will slowly build up as they get their ships modified to invade our lovely planet.

On this game you will spend a great deal of time building bases in different regions so you can monitor the sky for incoming aliens. Of course, this takes up a lot of cash, so you will blow through most of your money building bases and hiring military units. It can be difficult because if you want to protect another region you will have to spend a lot of you cash and you might not have enough to develop new and improved weapons.

When you play Xenonauts for the first time, come up with a plan where you can still get the new weapons and tech needed to put up a good fight. It really makes you think because if one of your bases fails to do a good job then you will lose funding, and who wants to let down mankind during an alien invasion?

There are missions for you to accomplish as well, such as capturing an alien leader or recovering alien technology. The battles start off easy and get harder as the alien ships will get faster and stronger about half-way through the game. This is to be expected, but Xenonauts did a good job on the transition as more difficult enemies head down to our planet with horrible intentions.

What exactly do the aliens even do on Xenonauts? Well, they can actually do quite a bit of damage and it’s best to take them out as soon as possible before they start abducting people and bombing cities. They will attack your bases, making it hard for you to rack up cash as you will be spending it to hire troops and develop new weapons. If they attack your bases and you can’t properly defend yourself then the Xenonaut project will lose funding… so don’t screw up!

There is an auto-resolve feature on the game which will play out the battle for you and use basic aircraft statistics to decide who wins. In the beginning of the game when things are still slow and easy, you will be worried about the smaller spacecrafts like corvettes and probes, which are easy to intercept. The auto-resolve feature will work great with them, but as your enemies get tougher it is advised that you play out the fights so you can control your jets.

As you make it through the game and capture technology from alien aircraft, you will learn more about the aliens and why they are here. Humans are simply trying to reverse-engineer the alien technology so we can put up a good fight and keep our planet.

Xenonauts is a great strategy game for the PC, probably the best one I have played in a long time. No matter how many games or movies use the alien invasion scenario, I am truly happy with this game’s narrative and overall gameplay. It’s really cool to play online when everyone else has the same goal as you, so I give this game a 4 out of 5 star rating and recommend it to anyone who likes a good strategy game. It is not the most unique or original game, but the handful of features that make this game different from others are what make it worth playing.

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