Ultimate Space Commando

Demanding and full of tactical options! The top down view is clean and allows to make informed decisions, while the AP system provides actual freedom compared to the "move-shoot" standard of many other games. Don't expect to save the world though. The game is tough and unforgiving, x-com of old type of punishment, but it does it well. I had fun getting eaten by aliens, burnt by friendlies or even blown up by what used to be my cover ^^ I also enjoyed Unit progression and skills, when i was able to keep my crew alive :)

Having tried a few games like this (steam marines, space hulk, templar battleforce) I feel safe in saying if you're looking for a turn-based space marines vs aliens game this is the best available on steam. The UI looks a little amateur but there is a very solid game underneath. The game sells its theme through its gameplay very effectively, with every fight a battle for position to avoid getting surrounded, opening and closing doors to move through cramped corridors safely, enemies breaking down walls and doors to reach you, there is a lot of tension and uncertainty. Your guys have a lot of health and relatively high % chance to hit compared to similar games, which I find helps keep things focused on the tactics and does a pretty good job of avoiding those all too frequent XCOM moments where the success of a mission ultimately comes down to a single dice roll. Game rules are consistent, and with plenty of actions per turn it always feels like each turn represents a significant change in the state of the game. Enemy AI is pretty good and at its best feels very human-like, attempting to surround you, negate chokepoints and pick off your weakest squadmates. Graphically the game is a bit of a mixed bag, I love the way the map tiles look like they came straight from a Fantasy Flight board game (as do the procedural map layouts), but on the other hand the marines are servicable but obvious knock-off 40K marines, and I find a few of the alien designs a bit samey. This is really a non-issue for me, but then I play a fair few ASCII games so clearly graphical fidelity is not high on my priority list. Ultimately, if the theme or genre of this game interest you at all you will almost certainly get a lot of fun out of it, and considering the depth and robustness of the underlying ruleset, at £6.99 its an absolute steal.

Yep love it. Replaying because of sequel incoming this year :D

Constant freezes, crashes and black screens means this gets a negitive review.

I usually wait until I've got at least 30 hours or so on something to review it, but in this case, I think I'm safe writing one earlier. TL;DR = A tactical combat game very similar to the tac games of the 1990s. Quite a bit of micro, and lots of freedom to do what you want. It's a yes. Review Proper: Ultimate Space Commando is a bit deceiving. The name sounds like a weird Japanime crossover thing that's gotta be horribly translated, and the graphics are kinda ugly, even for a retro-esque game like this. That said, the gameplay itself is great, the freedom the mechanics offer is pretty hard to match, and it's certainly addictive. The concept is pretty simple - you've crashlanded on a far away planet, and need to escape. To do this, you need to fight through enemies, collect materials, and maybe uncover some answers as to what's been happening. You'll upgrade your gear on the way, meet increasingly scary [s]sprites[/s] monsters matched only in their deadly-ness by their ugliness, and uncover little bits of a surprisingly well translated story on the way. As many have mentioned, it plays a lot like older X-Com, Jagged Alliance, Silent Storm, etc. etc. As of such, there's some great stuff, some stuff you might love or might hate, and some meh stuff. The Good: First off, this is currently about the same price of a pack of smokes. That's never bad, particularly when the game is actually good, like this one is. The combat is interesting, and the "18 distinct weapons" are actually pretty distinct. Even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ starting guns can be upgraded to respectable death machines with their own advantages. That's kinda cool. The story is good for this kind of game - for one, it actually exists, and for two, it's reasonably coherent. Dev support is great. Think I waited something like 3 hours to have my question answered. Given that you'll often only hear the words "there's only one dev" followed by some excuse as to why it shouldn't matter that a game sucks, is broken, or what have you, it's actually pretty mindblowing when you consider that this lady has managed to make a game that suffers from none of the above, is more indepth and packed with features than most multi-dev projects in the same genre, and is just genuinely good, while still having time to reply directly to the fanbase in a prompt manner. It's [b]HOTSEAT MULTIPLAYER[/b]. Seriously, why the ♥♥♥♥ are all games like this, not to mention turn based 4x games, not hotseat multiplayer anymore? The mechanics run deep. You generally don't die because something utterly unfair has happened. Sometimes you get unlucky, but usually, you just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. There's really alot of good to say about this game, but the store page itself lays most of it out very well, so there's no need for me to do it again. The Mixed: You need to buy and manually equip every bullet you fire, every healthpack you use, and literally anything else you might expend in a mission. I don't mind this, because I grew up when games were like this, but some people might. You have a very limited inventory. Your guys can only carry what they can carry in nine inventory slots, and you can only store nine things at your base. There are some good mechanics to help you not lose out on potential loot during a mission - namely that materials are automatically picked up at the end of most missions, and you can "field salvage" weapons and stuff for a percentage of their value if you don't have room to pack them back - but if you like to hoard stuff, you might find this irritating. It's a little punishing. The mechanics run deep, but aren't usually very evident. Part of the fun of these kinds of games can come from figuring stuff out, but there's just some things you can't know until something goes wrong, or unless you ask the devs directly. Or read the manual, but who does that? Similarly, the UI is oldschool. It's not as incomprehensible as some of the games it imitates, but it's not incredibly intuitive either. On the flip side of this, it's actually pretty simple once you get the basics down, and thus the learning curve isn't so bad. The translation is surprisingly good, but it still seems fairly evident that the writing is either done by a complete amateur, or a non-native english speaker. That really doesn't matter at all to me, since it's still effective in getting the story across, and you're supposed to build your own attachments to your troops in these kinds of games, not have them thrust on you. But it might matter to someone. The only real complaint this causes is that sometimes, instructions are a little unclear. The Bad: There's not a lot to say here, but a two things do come to mind. The fields of fire are messed up. You can only shoot straight, like a rook in chess, unless you're in defensive mode. Then you get a much larger field of fire. I'm guessing there is some reason behind this, but I haven't encountered it yet. It's ugly. I couldn't design something prettier, but it's basically animation free, overly sterile, and just not pretty. This usually doesn't matter to me in games, and likely wouldn't here if the graphics style was something else, but I just don't like it much. Conclusion: All in all, this is really a hidden gem. It's cheap, has hotseat and online multiplayer, great gameplay, and tons of replayability. It's a really good game that catches the feel and style of 1990s turn based games very well, without descending into mediocre mechanics and design flaws. I should also mention that there's a ton of other features such as an annual tournament, a series of challenge and other game modes, and a bunch of other neat crap I didn't touch on in the review because I haven't played around with them yet. There's a good bit of content I don't even know about, personally. If this is your type of game, then you may find this is the best ten bucks or so you'll ever spend on Steam.

Remember the Space Crusade game for DOS and Amiga in the 90's? This is as close as we are going to get to a new one of those. Basically the same kind of turn based strategy game with some more RPG stats thrown in. Graphics are simplistic, not a good looking game, and the interface is confusing at first; but it is a very tense and challenging game.

A Jagged Alliance/XCom-style tactical turn-based strategy game which requires a lot of patience to fight thru the cumbersome text instructions, poor controls and the messy tutorial. 6/10 Pros: - it's a tactical TBS, a genre which I'm a lifetime fan of - there are lots of features in the game, so overall it's more complex than JA2 or XCom So-so: - to crack locked doors, there is a puzzle minigame which has too complicated rules. They could seem logical to an electronics engineer but very counter-intuitive to everyone else. E.g. a normal person would expect "true" to be the presense of electric current and "false" the absence of current. Instead, "true" is some strong current, and "false" is weak current, and there is a third state which is the absense of current. In this 3-state space you get "AND", "OR" and "XOR" operators which work in strange ways. For some weird reason, 2 "true"s together lead to failure. I guess this minigame is even weirder to programmers (like me) who are used to the boolean logic but not to its physical implementation in curcuits. - controls barely make use of mouse over. You can't drag things (instead just click on stuff). The merc's inventory is hidden by default and comes sliding from the side of the screen, hiding the "End Turn" button. There is artificial clutter which probably comes from the desire to make the game play both on very small screens (a mobile port?) and very large monitors. In my case (1920x1080 monitor, and I chose "x1" GUI scale) I ended up with much unused space in some places and clutter in other places. - the top-down perspective makes the game look amateurish. The sprites of soldiers are all alike and feel generic and anonymous. An isometric perspective (like in JA2 or XCom or Xenonauts) would have worked much better and give this game 10x sales. The GUI has poorly chosen colors which add to the amateurish feel. But well, it's indie game made on a shoestring budget. - the music is space-y but too simplistic. Sounds almost like it's MIDI. Again, it's an indie game Cons: - instructions are very wordy (like, "walls of text") and presented as modal dialogs. Usually you'd have already forgotten what was in the first 2/3 of the text when you press OK to close the dialog and be able to try out in the game what the tutorial wants you to do. Sometimes there are even 2 or 3 such dialogs going in succession, so you surely would have forgotten most of it when you finally close the last dialog. Instead, the instructions should have been been split into much shorter sections, and made non-modal (you just see a single instructions paragraph all the time in some corner of the screen while you do what you're told). Also, the game tells you to press buttons by describing their position on the screen instead of simply highlighting them or pointing at them with arrows. Oh btw English isn't perfect in places, so even more confusion is added by minor nuances in the meaning of words or typos - the tutorial is pretty buggy and hard to follow. I got stuck in the very first room at the step where the Alvarez merc must close the door (as it turned out in my later restarts, he needs to OPEN a door in the western wall, NOT close the one in the south wall). Btw if you do something in a slightly different order than the tutorial expects you to, the popups may start coming at wrong moments, won't make much sense and confuse you even more. Since the game is so complex, the tutorial should have made only the exact required spots on the screen clickable and lock out everything else - that way it would be easy to follow and avoid ambiguities. The tutorial ends abruptly without letting you loot any dropped items or crates, and you can't reload from the previous save. In short, this game lacks "accessibility". The walls of text should go into "civilopedia" or something. Before buying this game, I was wondering why it isn't more popular but now I know. The main 2 reasons are: 1) poor presentation (top-down view, dark blurred sprites, even the banner on Steam looks like a stub) and 2) lack of accessibility (poor controls, messy untested tutorial). Btw I visited the dev's website and was (positively) surprised to learn that the game was made amost entirely by a single woman programmer. I'm happy that there are women out there who would not only play a TBS game but even make one! For a single dev, this game is an achievement! I hope that she makes a sequel to this game with accessibilty as the main priority. I'm pretty split whether to recommend it or not. If you're a very patient, old-school hardcore player, sure give it a try. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]

One of the best hardcore tactical games I've ever played, hands down. I'm only a couple missions into the campaign and don't plan on stopping, even with the logic puzzles for doorlocks. I also don't really mind the unique firing lanes for each weapon/firing mode. I thought that would bother me but it really doesn't. Nothing much else to say, other than it's actually pretty insane that USC and USC: Counterforce aren't more widely known and covered/appreciated in the turn based tactical gaming scene. Amazing levels of detail and overall balance curve, especially for a solo developer. Thanks to the dev for these 2 games because usually, to get this kind of experience you have to play really old school titles that were refined for years. If you see this review, absolutely do not sleep on these games.

Old school feel like X-Com only wayyy more tactical depth and a steeper difficulty which I enjoy thoroughly. Picked it up on sale during Xmas vacation, don't regret it at all and I will be playing it well beyond the point when Santa squeezes his fat a** down the chimney.

If you are someone who values gameplay over graphics and loves challenging turn-based tactics games, I cannot recommend this highly enough, especially with it being so very cheap in the sale at the moment. I haven't gone too far into the campaign as yet, but I'm liking what I've played of it so far. Although the game isn't set in the Alien franchise universe, it is clear that the game takes its inspiration from it. And nails the atmosphere and experience, imho. Some minor quibbles are that turns can take quite a while to resolve if there are many aliens on the map (and I've a powerful rig), plus your commandos cannot switch positions with each other if adjacent, something I'd have expected to be possible. The graphics and ui are functional, old-school style. Sound and music do the job. Gameplay is tough as nails on the hard difficulty, exactly how I like it. Thumbs up! Hint for new players : you'll actually need those rubber duckies ;p