Rally Point: What’s it like to be in charge of the Xenonauts? Um. Two?

Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Commander.

Have you met the head scientist? I hate him.

I… haven’t met him yet. Should I?

Don’t, he’s an arsehole. They call me “Commander” but won’t let me fire him. “He’s a genius”, they keep saying. I don’t believe in geniuses. I believe in good teams. He insults the engineers in every report. It’s not even funny! I want to lock him in the workshop and tell them he’s a strikebreaker.

…Because they’re Soviets? Your organisation is unusual. It’s 2009, the seventh decade of the Cold War, yet you’re working with both powers to stop the alien menace.

Yeah, Xenonauts 2 is a modern UFO.

UFO?

Oh, right, you’re like 9 or whatever. So, in 1994 there was UFO (aka X-COM). Build bases, shoot down UFOs, land soldiers to shoot them and reverse engineer their stuff. In 2009, Goldhawk started on Xenonauts, a modern interpretation of that idea. But Firaxis beat them to the post with XCOM, a remake that was… different.

I’m confused. You’ve done this before?

Lots of times. Don’t worry about it too much. The first Xenonauts is referenced, but separate. It’s a bit like Mad Max.

Both have foundations closer to the 1994 original. Missions are dynamic, not “pick a card” structure. You can catch a landed UFO early, for example, if an interceptor happens to fly over one, and find alien bases by tailing supply ships.

It’s less dramatised and spectacular, more granular and simulationist. But it does its own thing too. Take suppression: that wasn’t in UFO. It was in Firaxcom as a magic trick – “my Heavy plays a Suppressing Fire card”, like. In Xenonauts 2, bullets hit things around or behind your target, and can suppress aliens so they’re easier to bash with a stick.

Your soldiers fight in melee? That’s a bit archaic.

Some are better at it! They’re just guys, not chunky supermen with classes or perks. They don’t come up all “I am an Assault now. I use Assault Weapon. Here are my Assault upgrades”. Everyone can try everything. It makes more room for playstyles and ideas. Choosing tactics, not puzzling out the optimal powers. This guy has high reflexes, making him good in melee. But I could give him a grenade launcher. This one’s bravery is awful, so she gets a pistol and club until she grows a spine. Their stats improve over time, but everyone’s another soldier. You can take more risks. Especially since – thank christ – the starting team size is eight. Losing three people won’t render a mission hopeless. Oh, and time units-

Time… you mean seconds?

No, no. Instead of two actions, each individual has dozens of Time Units. Moving costs three, kneeling four. Even turning burns some. It adds granularity and differentiates weapons. A pistol is weaker than a rifle, but takes fewer TUs to fire, so you can do more on your turn. Or reserve more for the aliens’ turn, because instead of overwatch, we get reaction fire. That’s where “Time Units” is somewhat literal; the more you spend where an enemy can see you, the more chance they’ll shoot back, if they have leftover TUs. Several stats and gambles are involved. It’s an approach most games ignore to copy Firaxis’s homework again.

Commander, I must confess I’m having a hard time understanding anything you’re saying.

It’s easier than it seems. There’s streamlining, like one-off engineering projects that unlock bottomless supplies of an item instead of micromanaging. Once you’ve recovered a UFO type twice, future ones cost Operations Points to attempt. That limits repetition, and signals “that’s enough”. It’s artifice, sure, but you can disable it if you want. Most missions have alternative win conditions, to prevent combing the map while the last secton giggles in someone’s wardrobe.

There are concessions, too. Aircraft aren’t destroyed, but grounded for ages. Downed soldiers sometimes survive. Wounds sometimes stop bleeding on their own. One custom difficulty option removes the TU cost for turning to shoot: exactly the kind of edge case to make optional. Xenonauts 2 doesn’t think pedantry makes a player superior, y’know?

That’s all still rather unclear to me, a journalist or auditor or something.

Yeah I didn’t really think this format through, sorry. I’ll tell you about Operations Points.

Okay. You have operatives around the six regions of the globe, as I understand it?

Yes. Like XCOM, you’re monitoring “panic” levels. Every day accrues Operations Points, which can buy a regional operative, reducing panic. Buying four in a region grants bonuses like reduced costs or better recruits. Some operatives are compromised, causing penalties until you spend OP to remove them. It’s a bit dry, but random factors, and options competing for OP (notably, new bases), create variety and room for strategising and preference.

Your concern is that a panicked region would surrender to the aliens, since they announced themselves to the world last year?

Yes. That was an interesting development, but nothing really came of it. That was disappointing.

Prior to that, you were operating… unofficially?

Fully illegal, yeah. It conjures ideas of an underground resistance, or slowly building investigators like the X-COM Files. But it didn’t go anywhere. I’m told we knew about mysterious human collaborators for years, but didn’t look into them in case they told Mum or something. They get some scripted missions, mostly blasting into their offices while they run around in white shirts and hide behind 60s tape reels. It’s a fun look, a bit like raiding the CIA.

But it doesn’t come to much. The Cold War feels irrelevant, and operatives a bit self-contained. Story is an underrated part of the subgenre, and Xenonauts 2 has fun ideas it does very little with. There aren’t enough unknowns for me. Take research.

Your head scientist has talked about some incredible breakthroughs…

I hate him so much.

Yes, you’ve mentioned-

I want to strap him to the skyranger.

Could we-

Right, right. Our team only do one project at a time. Changing it bins all progress, so there’s not much thinking about it. You know exactly how long it will take, and what you’ll probably get. The next thing that advances the plot is outright labelled “Plot”. I understand why from a design standpoint, but that tells me too much. It’s exposed system. Stage hands pointing out the traitor. UFO wasn’t just a set of systems. So much of its design was in the title: Enemy Unknown.

Here, you get damage indicators (this time, at least, an independent difficulty toggle). Autopsies are automatic and instant. The period of worrying and field testing between first sighting and total familiarity is one mission. You instantly know which items are “junk” to be sold.

Aliens have professions, but captured commanders are just another alien to sell – which, for the love of god, why – for less than the soldier who died doing it. And you can’t kill them for Comrade Bear-

Comrade Bear?

Chief Engineer. He’s a good lad. Clever, in that unassuming way. Secure in himself. Not like that other one….

Ah, you mean your head scientist?

I want to kill him with a spear.

I… yes.

I’ve had one made. You know he started one report with “although my advanced intellect allow-” no. Fuck off. I’m not reading that.

You were talking about engineering?

Yes. Comrade Bear can experiment on alien corpses. Another fun idea! But the result is a very dull “+10% damage” with no report. The encyclopedia is lacking, too, and there’s no flavour research. I understand not doing hundreds of entries, but Xenonauts 2 simultaneously says too much, and not enough that’s interesting. Half of the flavour is some redditor congratulating himself for being born.

I’m not going to ask about him again.

If I give you my gun, would you…

I – I’ve never-

No, you’re right, I should do it myself. Maybe trick him into a mission and watch a sebillian fold him like a bedsheet.

Tell me about these missions. What’s it like to fight aliens?

Air combat is a decent skill-based minigame where you maneouvre interceptors around firing cones. Co-ordinating them is frustrating, though, especially if you launch from more than one base. And they do the stupid “go to last known UFO position” thing again. OpenXCOM fixed that over a decade ago!

And on the ground?

A tad dry, but grows on you. Weapons are quite generic, upgrades more gradated than the traditional ballistic-laser-plasma. Riot shields are back, flashbangs are the saviour of Earth, explosives either break your rib or sublimate your atoms. It’s more about support gear than outlandish concept weapons. Less exciting, but it builds up, and rewards resourceful, thoughtful play.

It takes some time before that triumph when a new alien type walks out and someone reflexively splats it with a laser shotgun. Panic is, as usual, idiotic, but vastly better than XCOM’s; nobody turns 90 degrees and neatly executes their own backup. Everyone loves crashing through windows like they have multiple weddings to object to, which is great.

So what are the downsides?

I feel like maps were designed to artificially expose every good position to a dangerous angle. Terror missions are tedious and if you go down fighting you get nothing, so I basically skip them all. It spikes panic, but that’s easily managed.

Doors and even soldiers are often invisible unless you rotate the camera. Armed civilians shoot my temporarily mindslaved guys instead of the aliens. Auto-saves happen directly before a loading screen. My controls revert every time I load. Small annoyances like that are patch fodder, but sloppy after several years in early access.

Have you enjoyed your time running the Xenonauts? Uh, two?

There’s missed potential, squandered ideas, and though I’m no purist, I think some of its streamlining sacrifices more in atmosphere than it saves in effort. There’s a better version of it still to be made. But we get very few turn based shooters on the simulationist side of the moon, and this one is still entertaining enough to count as a success. I respect and like it.

Speaking of which… want to go blow up the moon?

Let’s blow up the moon! But let me send Science Jerk there first.

He’s the worst.

He really, really is.