After I had played the remake of this game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I decided to give the original game a try, and I have to say that originally, I couldn't get into this at all. Everything was confusing to me, battles seemed ridiculously one-sided and hard even from the very beginning and I quit very very quickly. But one day I eventually gave it another shot and looked up tutorials on how to actually play to a decent level, from then I was having a blast and I sometimes wonder if this is better than the remake made years later, although both are so brilliant that I find it hard to choose one over another. I will say that one thing did help me with enjoying this game, and that was OpenXCOM. OpenXCOM is a source clone of the original game and improves several aspects that made the original somewhat annoying to play. I can't remember all of these changes since it has been very long since I played the very original version of this game, but the changes are basically added to make the game more accessible and some features are added that are just useful in general, such as equipment stacking for your craft or the geoscape showing a bases radar coverage. I would highly recommend getting this version of the game, you do however need the original files but that is as simple as buying the original game on steam. Now that I'm done rambling on and on, let's start the review.

Story-
The year is 1998, aliens from who knows where have decided to pay a not so friendly visit to earth and have begun abducting civilians, terrorizing cities and generally being quite mean. Reports of these terrible acts increase until other countries decide to act and use their best soldiers and weaponry to fight back against the invaders, to no avail. Eventually the strongest nations of the world band together to start a organisation that utilizes the worlds best manpower, researchers, engineers and technology: The Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-COM). You assume control of the X-COM organisation in an effort to fight back against the aliens and send them packing. The story is not exactly as important as the remake series makes it, but you do uncover the aliens agenda (to some degree) and where they have come from.

Gameplay-
Jeez, where to start? X-COM: UFO Defense/UFO: Enemy Unknown is a strategy game in which you control practically all aspects of the X-COM organisation including researching, engineering, base building, equipment manufacturing and organisation, intercepting UFOs, battling the aliens in ground missions and so on. There is a lot that you have to do in this game and it can be very very overwhelming for a first time player which is why I recommend looking up tutorials for a general idea on how to get started. I will try and cover as much as I can in the gameplay department since I like to be thorough with stuff like this, this will be very long and if you can actually read all of it, then you probably have enough patience to play this game.

Starting Off: You begin the game by choosing a location for your first base, this can be pretty much anywhere, though I would be reasonable and choose somewhere that isn't in a ridiculous location like Antarctica. You then name this base and from there the game begins and you can choose what to do from here. Not much to say here except that you should probably start somewhere in Europe, at least that's what I've always done.

Base Management: There is a lot one can do with their base so I will try and keep this short. Once you have chosen the bases menu, you have given a view of your first base, which is always pre-built, from here you can add facilities onto the base which vary from facilities that increase the capacity of scientists, soldiers, engineers and equipment as well as radar systems and defense systems. You can build a new base at any time although I would wait at least for the first month to end before doing that. From within these bases you can choose research projects, choose production projects, equip aircraft with equipment (for skyrangers which transport troops) and weapons (for interceptors that shoot down UFOs), buy and sell equipment, hire and sack staff, view soldiers stats and so on.... yeah, quite a fair bit I must say. The interface is pretty well done for the base menu, everything is labelled very clearly and navigating the menus here is quite easy once you mess around in them for a bit, it will take some time to learn, but I could say that about everything when it comes to this game.

Research: You can choose to have a certain amount of scientists in your staff research a lot of new things (the limit of how many depends on how many labs you have in the base where this research will happen). This includes new weapons and armor, information on the aliens different species via autopsy, new materials, new aircraft and so on. Research is very important for you to stand a chance at beating the aliens, you will gain access to new research projects as you collect items from battles you have won, including alien corpses, alien craft parts, weapons, etc. You need to research some of this stuff as quick as you can, as the aliens start using more tough enemies very quickly and your pathetic rifle won't even scratch the much later enemies. A problem that I have had though however is that I find that armor has never really been a huge improvement to your troops in general, it does improve chances of survival but you might as well consider every hit a one hit kill for your soldiers since that can and will still happen with even the best armor in the game. Research time depends on the project at hand and how many scientists are working on it.

Manufacturing: Your engineers can be ordered to manufacture certain equipment that has been researched (such as laser weapons) for use in the battles, aircraft or sometimes materials for other equipment. Like with research, the amount of engineers that can be utilized depends on how many workshops your base has. I have little to say here apart from the fact that you should always be making something, even if you don't really need it, since you can sell the equipment for a small profit, as long as you mind your important materials being used, mainly elerium. Elerium cannot be made, it can only be found in UFOs you have raided, this can be a bit of a pain if you can't get enough elerium for equipment you want but this isn't a huge hassle, just DON'T SELL ELERIUM, you need it and selling it is a complete waste. Again much like research, manufacturing time depends on the amount of engineers working on the project.

Equipment Management: You have to assign what equipment you want to take on missions all by yourself. This can be a bit of a pain since you can easily forget to put equipment in your skyranger and then end up without having a tank that you bought for a mission since you just left it at your base. You choose what equipment you want in your skyranger via the equip craft menu, it of course has a limited amount of space but you should have enough space for everything you need even at the later points of the game. Adding equipment can be a little confusing but you get used to it eventually. You can buy equipment via the purchase menu although there won't be too much you buy here since most equipment will be made yourself, though you do need to hire staff through this menu.

Funding: Funding cannot be controlled directly, but is quite important as well... money is kinda needed to buy things and manufacture stuff. You get some money to start off with although it probably won't last long when you start expanding your base so you will need to consider selling in order to get some money during the month. Soldiers want money for putting their lives on the line as well as scientists and engineers so you won't be keeping all of the money you earn at the end of each month, you also pay for aircraft and base maintenance so keep this in consideration. At the end of each month the united nations will give you a rating for the month depending on the score you have earned throughout the month, depending on how many points you have you will get a rating that ranges from terrible to excellent. You earn points by researching, winning battles, shooting aircraft down, winning terror missions and saving civilians and generally any good kind of progress.

The aliens themselves have a score that you cannot see but they earn points on basically how well they are beating you, such as winning battles and making you cry, completing secret missions of their own (all ships have missions they undertake that you won't find out till much later), and generally letting them upset people even more than they have already. I believe (I can't remember if this is true exactly, and UFOPAEDIA is currently down so I could not clarify) the aliens score is subtracted from your own, giving you your final score for the month. Depending on how well you have defended a country (or basically how many UFOs you have shot down in that area) a country may give you more funding, or vice versa if you neglected a country, they could also leave the organization entirely if you tick them off enough or if the aliens infiltrate and force them to sign a pact that says they will not shoot their innocent people to bits and will share technology if they leave X-COM, surely this is not a ploy to let earths last defense die, can't possibly be that. If you get a rating of "bad" or "terrible" (of a mix of both) two months in a row, you get the pleasant satisfaction of being informed that the united nations think that X-COM project is a waste of time and that we should try and negotiate with the aliens for a surely better tomorrow, you soon find out in a pretty horrifying game over sequence that the aliens weren't exactly here for peace and decide to enslave us all. Fun times, eh?

Base Management Overall: Despite the fact that you have a lot of stuff you need to do yourself (and we haven't even got to battles yet!), once you get used to everything you need to do, I find base management very satisfying. You feel you have complete control over the organisation as a whole and every decision you make is crucial to success and making the whole thing run like clockwork and basically having the organisation run smoothly is just a great time overall. With so much to do, it is overwhelming to the first time player (believe me, I hadn't a clue what the heck I was doing when I first played), but if you stick with it you might just find it as enjoyable as I do. Now that base management is out of the way we can move onto battles... in a moment, there is still the geospace and intercepting.

Geospace: The geoscape is a representation of the globe, earth, terra firma, home. Here you can choose to let time pass at different speeds while you have nothing to do in base management (waiting for research or manufacturing to finish, equipment or staff to arrive, etc). You can zoom in and rotate all you want but all you will really be doing is waiting for UFOs to show up, which will happen if they move into your radar range. Once one pops up, the game stops to inform you of this, from here you can choose to intercept and shoot the thing down by choosing which aircraft you want to brave facing this advanced warship. The interceptor will then chase the UFO down to the best of its ability until it comes into firing range of the UFO or if the UFO decides to speed up and leave your interceptors view, which means the UFO gets away, you lose a chance to get some resources and promptly consider smashing your keyboard, although if a UFO gets away, you can choose to have your interceptor search its last known location which may have them find it again, if not then you can choose to have the interceptor come back and refuel or have it fly around until it is forced to refuel. The UFO can come back into view at any time so there is hope of catching it. If you do happen to come within firing range, the game shifts into a little sequence in which you can see how close the interceptor is to the UFO, from here you can choose to attack cautiously, aggressively or normally which basically dictates how close the interceptor will get to the UFO.

Each weapon has a range so you will have to consider how close you want to get to the UFO, the closer you get, the more chances that the UFO will strike back and hit you, get hit enough times and the interceptor is destroyed forever, you start saying naughty words and have to buy another interceptor which isn't exactly cheap. If you hit the UFO enough you will eventually take it down, it will either blow up completely, leaving no trace, or will crash land which allows you to investigate the crash site for a turn based battle which will net you resources depending on the UFO type. If you intend to make it crash land, don't shoot it over water since it will then crash into water and everything you wanted from it will be lost. Yay. I do find intercepting quite fun but you do need to be careful since bigger UFOs can destroy interceptors in one hit and no one wants that, right?

Battles: Now we can actually begin what is probably the most important part of the game. Only 2400 words into the review and all. Battles start out with the soldier equipment screen in which you choose what equipment in your craft to arm your soldiers with (take note that giving them 8 grenades is not exactly wise since they need high strength to carry more heavy stuff or more stuff in general without a penalty), which has always left a little clunky to me, since you have to click and drag into boxes representing different areas on their body and you can't swap one with another, say for example you have a pistol in a soldiers right hand and you wanted him to have a rifle, you would have to take the pistol off first and put it in the craft stocks first before putting the rifle in his hand, trying to put it in his hand while the pistol is already there does nothing when I would have expected the two to basically swap, but that isn't the case. Once everyone is equipped to your liking it is time for your troops to start the operation and this is where the game tends to be at it's most cruel. Your soldiers start inside the skyranger, something I absolutely hate about this game since it is very possible that a alien is sitting outside waiting for a soldier to step outside so they can take a shot on them and kill them in one hit. This has always been unfair to me and is the worst thing about battles since you can't do much about it apart from save and reload if things go wrong and then hope your soldier doesn't get mutilated next time.
The battles play in a turn based fashion in which you move your soldiers and then end your turn for the aliens to have theirs.

Every soldier has time units, which dictate how much you can do with that soldier in this turn, time units are spent when moving, firing, opening doors, crouching, turning, throwing grenades, rummaging through inventory, blinking, breathing, sweating, etc (might be exaggerating on the last three there). Once a soldiers time units have been spent, they can do nothing else and will sit there until the next turn where their units are replenished (unless they carry too much in which case they will have less for that turn, I believe carrying a lot while moving also spends more units). Once a soldier sees an alien, they will stop if they are moving and a red box will appear in the corner, clicking this will centre the camera on the alien in question, from here you can have a soldier that has a line of fire on the alien (even if they don't see this alien, but they can still shoot it and a wall is not blocking the shot entirely) they can take a shot on the alien with different shot types, each with varying degrees of accuracy, time unit cost and shots fired, auto shot will usually be your shot of choice since it is the lowest cost with the lowest accuracy but the soldier will fire three times, don't let the low accuracy percentage fool you, there is a bigger chance to hit than you may think. The soldiers accuracy is also determined by their own accuracy stat, the weapon being used and if they are wounded.

If you leave a soldier with enough times units to take a shot at the end of their turn, they have a chance depending on their reactions rating, to take a shot on an alien during their turn if they move into their field of view, the aliens can do this too and they very much enjoy using this tactic. Grenades can be thrown by first opening your soldiers inventory, dragging the grenade to a hand they have free, and then choosing to throw the grenade and then clicking where you want it to go, the accuracy of the throw depends on the soldiers throwing accuracy stat. Once all aliens are dead, the mission is over, you win, you get the goods from the UFO and the skyranger returns to base with the living soldiers. Soldiers that have been hurt but not killed will not be able to do battle for a few days, so keep them as safe as possible, but don't expect battles to go perfectly every time, this game is very hard and won't back down even from the beginning.
Lastly, soldiers (and on rare occasions, aliens) can have different conditions inflicted on them, none very good, at least if it's on your own soldiers. Depending on their bravery (or lack there of), your soldiers can panic if their comrades are getting slaughtered, leaving them to move on their own and be unable to move on your turn, they could also drop their weapon and do ridiculously stupid things that makes everything far worse. They can also go berserk which could make them shoot in any direction (probably in the direction of your other soldiers) and do even worse stuff, I think one may have even thrown their weapon, not dropped it, THROWN IT. Some aliens also get mind control capabilities which as one can guess, lets them control a soldier for their own benefit, most likely involving a soldier, a laser weapon, another soldier and a lot of death screams.

Battles in X-COM are very very tense, very difficult, but when you win a battle, that makes it all the more satisfying. X-COM to me delivers a feeling of everything is against you, even as you get better tech the aliens get far far worse (chrysalids I hate you, please just leave me alone), but despite this you can pull through and win battles, make breakthroughs in technology by capturing tough aliens and come out on top by the end of it all. Battles aren't exactly simple, anything could happen, aliens could be anywhere, you don't even know if new ones will appear until you are staring them in the face. The battles are more complex than the remake but as with the rest of the game, once you learn how to play the game to a decent degree, you can beat the aliens at every turn and feel great doing it (running theme here isn't there, eh?)
I won't talk to much about the aliens, though I will say I do like the designs for most of them and they can be pretty imposing, though some feel like a complete joke in a battle, such as the terror mission alien, the reaper. The reaper is some strange big armoured beast that looks kinda threatening, but only can hurt you via melee and they only really have a lot of health (well not after you get laser weapons) which makes them any kind of threat, pretty much every weapon can kill you in one hit anyway so why would something that has to walk up to you be a threat when most can kill you from a distance. The real melee threats are chrysalids which are just the most horrible things ever conceived. Also, go and have a look at the celatid... what am I looking at here?

I will lastly talk about terror missions, which are unfortunately something I never ever look forward to with this game, or in any other X-COM game for that matter. In these missions, the aliens have started attacking a city and you can choose to go to the city to defend the citizens and prevent the country from cutting its funding. These missions bring the worst of the worst when it comes to the alien forces and I just hate the structure of the maps where they could be hiding anywhere since there are usually loads of buildings with varying designs for them to hide in. On top of this you have to (though to be honest I would worry about your soldiers lives and killing aliens) keep civilians alive for a higher score at the end, the more left alive, the higher the score. But the civilians might as well be blindfolded since they have a reckless disregard for keeping themselves alive since they pretty much run wherever they want to, whether that be in front of your soldier, blocking entrance to a house or in the way of a shot, or walking straight into the bad end of an aliens plasma rifle. Doing these missions during night is even worse since there is less viability. I would advise ignoring the civilians and just hoping they won't be completely stupid and get themselves all killed.

Graphics-
Wow I can now talk about the rest of the game, but in all honesty the rest will be much shorter. The graphics I don't feel I can fully judge since I don't exactly know if they look great for the time or not, to me they look about what I would expect for the time but they are not bad in any way. You can tell what everything is and I quite like the images of the aliens once you interrogate them and perform autopsies.

Sound-
The sound in this game is pretty great in my opinion. The sound effects are all fitting, the sounds of guns firing sound great (though it can be a bit loud which game me a bloomin' heart attack first time an alien shot at my soldiers), the sounds of the aliens dying are satisfying (makes me sound like a psychopath but there you go), the soldiers death sounds are well... sometimes a bit silly to me but I'm more focused on the fact I just lost my best soldier than to worry about the fact they sounded like they were pretending to die. The music for the geoscape is just plain awesome (there are two versions though they sound similar they are actually different), the interceptor music gives an awesome feeling of success (although things could of course go horribly wrong, such is the way of X-COM) and the music for battles are creepy, adding to the already tense atmosphere, though not to the level of the sequel, Terror From the Deep, which has a soundtrack you would expect in a horror film or something.

Addictiveness and Depth-
I believe I've have made it very evident that this game has a fair amount of depth and isn't exactly simple. The game can take a while to beat (expect to be beaten multiple times by the game first before you give it a good spanking yourself) just from one successful run. If you have the patience to deal with the games somewhat complicated and at times tedious nature you may find yourself pretty addicted. I found myself playing it pretty much every day during my lunch break at college and at home until I beat the thing, people thought I was weird for playing something so old, I probably am.

Difficulty-
This game can be absolutely relentless. Things can go wrong so easily and so quickly, but recovering from a mess the aliens have made in your plans just makes every success feel like it has meaning. Be prepared to lose, a lot.

Verdict-
Despite the fact that the game isn't the most accessible in the world and that the game can feel like you are just putting yourself through a torture session, the game is just a lot of fun. Take the time to learn what you need to, watch others play it, read that manual and eventually you will get it and then start to enjoy this game. If you enjoy a challenging strategy game that doesn't hold your hand, play this. Then play
Terror From the Deep if you felt this was too easy for some reason, it's pretty much the same game, but harder and unfortunately buggier.

The Good-
Really involved base management, great for the folks who like this
Battles while hard are still very fun
Research gives a real sense of improvement to the team as a whole, it feels great to get better weapons and make the first enemies in the game that gave you so much trouble, feel like a joke.
The music is pretty great overall

The Bad-
Walking out of the skyranger, just being unlucky enough to have an alien shoot before you even take a step outside is infuriating.
This game is hard, sometimes it feels unfair hard.
Not very accessible, try and figure out what all the buttons on the battle screen mean without looking it up.

The Ugly-
The snakemans smile is just creepy, same goes for the chrysallid

Overall-
Despite its age and somewhat inaccessible design, this is still a great game and is truly worth the time of any strategy fan who has the patience.