X-Com: Apocalypse

When this game was first released I was not sure if I was going to like it. From defending the whole planet to just a single city? How can this be any fun? Well...it is. :) The GUI will take a bit to get used to, but it is nothing too bad. The globe has been replaced by a city, the enemies are still aliens but also human factions....yes factions. While the alien invaders in the past (pre this game) were defeated, the Earth was left mostly uninhabitable apart from this city. Or something like that. There are MANY factions (police, government, various companies, alien sympathizers, etc) each with their own agenda. You have to be careful how you deal with them all. Any of them can be infiltrated by aliens and even taken over by them. With a mix of carrot and stick, you have to deal with them. To help you there are military, police and even civilian versions of weapons and vehicles. Plus anything you might capture from the aliens to help you with research for more and better assets. The battles in the global, eh I mean city, map require a more hands on approach. You can give direct orders to any of your units to follow a specific strategy (for example fly as high as possible and use long range attacks only) trying to shoot down enemy vessels. Be it UFOs or enemy faction vehicles. When the game turns into a land battle then you get to choose who (soldiers) to send to deal with the enemy. When they arrive you have two options, one to fight in turn based mode as in the previous games in the series, or two to fight in real time. I do not advice the real time mode, but that is because I prefer the more detailed approach of turn based battles. You have more options this time around (compared to the previous 2 games) but overall the same difficulty remains. If you play stupid, you will lose. There is a very nice variety of vehicles, land battle locations, AI for factions and even city maps. The game is even larger than previous games. It's a great X-Com game.