I know that the majority of people who are looking at this game in 2026 and beyond are likely vets who are revisiting a game they played in years past, so I wanted to give a new player's perspective to anyone who might be curious about that point of view. Simply put, as someone who is nearly a decade younger than the game, has never played it before, and has no emotional attachment to it, I was really impressed with how well it holds up.
I was kind of intimidated at first, with all the various menus and tons of buttons on the battle ui and such, but it turns out its much simpler than it looks. Just start up the game, plop down your base, build some facilities, start your research and manufacturing, load up your soldiers and weapons onto your ship, and get to throwing smokes and shootin aliens. That's the core gameplay loop in a nutshell. You will want to cover more of the globe with radar and capture various aliens (build an alien containment facility!) for research projects as the game goes on. You can build more bases to focus on research or manufacturing (you can sell the stuff you manufacture or transfer it to other bases) if you would like. The tactical gameplay is surprisingly solid for a decades old game, different alien types do a good job actually feeling different to fight and not just like different stat blocks, the ufopedia entries are fun, and I honestly like the dated graphics. It's a very good game, and incredibly impressive for when it was made. The game comes with a manual, so if you wanna learn it the old fashioned way, feel free to do that, but I personally just played the game for a few hours and pulled up the wiki any time I was curious about how something works (for example, the accuracy system is a good thing to read about, as once you understand how it works, your soldiers hitting every shot in a point blank burst despite having only 30% accuracy makes a lot more sense).
Can't really go wrong for five dollars, even better if you grab it on sale for around a buck fifty. If you do pick it up, make sure to install openxcom (I recommend openxcom extended, but the nightly version is also fine) for better compatibility with modern systems, bugfixes, and quality of life changes. I learned after playing it for a while that you can get openxcom to work with steam by downloading the zip version instead of the installer, dropping the files into your steam game directory, renaming the old dosbox.exe to something else, renaming the openxcom executable to dosbox.exe, then pulling all the files from the "XCom UFO Defense\XCOM" folder (it will have GEODATA, GEOGRAPH, etc) into the new "XCom UFO Defense\UFO" folder you just created, and it will launch openxcom when you start the game through steam. If you go into video settings and turn on one of the display filters with a star next to the name (the star means it is using opengl) the shift+tab menu and stuff will start working. I like the Raw (not really a filter, its just the raw pixels but rendered in opengl), Pixellate, and Scale2X filters myself. I wish I had known this earlier because I have like 20 hours of untracked time :( There are also additional settings in the options menu and plenty of mods available that are super easy to install (just drag em into "Documents\OpenXcom\mods" and enable them in the game) so if you are looking to spice things up that's an option. I like a lot of the toggles, as well as the amiga font mod, statstrings mod, and final mod pack, but I would probably not mess with mods or advanced settings too much at least for your first couple hours playing the game.
My final few pieces of advice to anyone who is trying this game for the first time is that, first, if you are afraid you are doing something wrong because a lot of your soldiers are dying, you are probably not doing as poorly as you think. The early game is kinda like that, so don't sweat it. Use smoke grenades, overwatch fire, and accept that you are going to be taking casualties pretty regularly until you start getting more upgrades and such. Secondly, don't be afraid to pack your soldiers up on the dropship and abort a mission, especially an early terror mission. And finally, make sure to buy flares and put them in your dropship!!!
If you decide to play this game for the first time so many years after its release, I hope you have as much fun as I did :)
