https://milkandhate.wordpress.com/2025/08/22/x-team-2008/
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Do you feel lucky, punk? Like, really, really, very lucky? The game will crash from time to time, but if you are extremely lucky you can beat it. But more likely it will just crash dead with no way out. Entirely blocking any progress and wasting all the hours already invested. It randomly crashes after some time. It starts crashing on saving, it starts crashing on opening the main menu. But since it always saves on mission-end, it dead crashes preventing you from finishing the map. And if you managed to get some saves in-between, it just corrupts them.
[...]
UFO players get triggered every time they see the letter "X", expecting that to be as good as UFO, and in the same style.
Well this game is neither. They did follow the UFOlogy theme, and combined it with post-apocalypse, and partially with the "russian fallout". But the game is simple minimal mission-based small CRPG, with very few quests, and very few stats. Using the Blitzkrieg 2 engine they decided to leave the same familiar real time tactics combat untouched. Even the armour-penetration mechanics, tho, despite the prowess of the engine, they did not use the directional armour values. They also inherited some of the Blitzkrieg bugs and or faults. The play with visibility, the enemies who see and shoot through solid walls, the full plate.
The devs even made they game a bit more uncommon by adding some minimalistic real-time-tactics elements. Several of the missions have rudimentary base-building. There's the central building, and a tiny spot to place barracks, factory, and two types of kinda useless resource generators. Because there are three resources in the game, and you can generate only two of them. So practically, you only have one resource. Or more like a limit. The typical wargame deployment point. If you run out — you run out.
[...]
The game opens with a real CGI cartoon intro, and today the biggest AAA garbage game open with disgusting power-point presentations and photographs of people talking. The character creation is not too informative but it seems there's a lot of options.
Then the game starts. It’s not very attractive and it’s a bug-filled mess. The pathfinding is dead. The characters can get stuck in terrain, they can moonwalk in one place. The objects are poorly placed on the map. Some things are out of bounds. Many solid object don’t have collision. The AI and unit AI are absolutely terrible. The attack move is broken and doesn’t work, it’s not move and not attack. Your dummies only rarely return fire or attack enemies in-range. At the same time your long range soldiers can kill the enemies one by one while they just stand in place or struggle to calculate the path. At the same time the enemies shoot through walls and without a line of sight. My first female character was not voiced, but then after a couple of missions it started using male character voice lines. There’s no keybinding in the options and the hotkeys are not brilliant. The music is really decent, but the game uses a dynamic music engine so it all is ruined. Because dynamic music is a terrible garbage that should be banned. It constantly switches between the combat and the peace themes creating ear hurting mess.
The active or not active skills are all broken. They do not do what they promise. The math is all wrong. When you calculate the penetration it just does not work. Even if you go all-in in penetration and reach 40, that 40 is not real 40. Skills that say they increase penetration actually lower it. The set-up skills are fiddly, not explained and not working properly. If you die with skills active they bug out. The skill that increases fire rate can get stuck, making the character waste ammo like minigun but not desling damage. If it was the main anti-armour character you might as well restart at that point.
Some maps sometimes have a base with a tiny space for a couple buildings. Placing those buildings is as terrible as in Majesty 2. There’s no indication or feedback, and your space is extremely limited.Placing turrets is even worse, and they cost human resources. The enemy planes flying around are fake. So your anti-air turrets don’t shoot them. Why they exist? All those tactical soldiers and tanks do not create XP on kills, and the amount of XP is set. Even when the enemies have a base, they do not produce new units.
So, you reach the second map with your cool character. By the end of it you easily invested 2-3 hours of play. You make your tactical soldiers to fight enemy tanks. You almost finished the map, and then a swarm of hostile armour rolls into your base and you run out of human resource, that you wasted on APCs and soldiers. You have nothing to penetrate the hostile armour. Restart the game. Thanks, i absolutely hate it.
Create a new character. The only choices are an anti-material rifle sniper, a grenade launcher (or a heavy weapons guy, there’s a lootable grenade launcher on the second map) or a wizard. And the first level-up points all go directly into armour penetration. And still since it’s poorly tuned Blitzkrieg engine the armour penetration is randomized for no reason. And makes no sense. Your stats say you have 40 AP, you try to shoot a 37 armour tank and the character refuses to. You activate +20% penetration skill and it’s still not enough. You add another 20% and now the character shoots once and stops. You have to manually click over and over. The skill that promises even more AP lowers it instead. Outside the few times it actually improves it.
Now with the penetrator character you don’t need a base, you don’t even need the other characters, just solo the whole game. Get all the XP, increase armour penetration and damage. If you have 1000HP or 150HP it doesn’t matter you die all the same, faster to eat medkits and have more AP and damage.
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The store page promises: “Completely non-linear narrative. A difficult moral choice awaits you.” Do you see how it says choice singular? Because there’s only one. The difference is two sets of six smaller maps. The final map is the same, but one line of dialogue is different.
So i start a new game, this time the english version with a terrible old-school machine translation. I make a new character to go for the second route. I reach the 7th map and it crashes after one hour. On record. And corrupts the saves. I try again, 23 minutes, crash. I try another time with saves, it crashes on saving. I try a couple more times it crashes and crashes. I try saving every seven minutes, one of the saves crashes the game, and then out of them all only the earliest ones are working. I try loading those and it crashes more. I try to speedrun, the mission-end tries to save, and it crashes. I verify integrity, crashes. I re-install the game, crashes. I try different compatibility options, crashes. I try lowering the graphics to the minimum, crashes. I try new drivers for a 2008 game, crashes. I try installing it on other PCs, crashes. It’s always crashing. The character in which i invested four days, and about 10 in-game hours into is dead. Really, ♥♥♥♥♥? Thank you so much for wasting my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time.
So i reinstall it for the russian language version, load the post-mission-seven save with the first character. Reach the fork, save. And when i finish the final boss, it just returns me to the main menu. I replay the whole thing from the fork until the first ending. And it just kicks me out into the menu too. The ending cutscene got bugged, and didn’t play both times.
This thing is unfinished. It’s critically broken. The crashing needs fixing. The pathfinding needs fixing. It needs the inaccessible parts of the levels fixed. And after everything it still will be sub-mediocre simple small game with more content cut than implemented. But at least it won’t be unplayable.
Do you feel lucky, punk?
