You’ll receive reports of abductions or UFOs shooting down airliners or blowing up malls from areas that you can’t reach yet. The first few months are always stressful because you simply won’t have the radar coverage and interceptors to respond to every report of alien activity. Once you lose funding from five regions, the Xenonauts will be disbanded and the aliens win.

If you allow too much alien activity to go unchecked in a region, they’ll eventually cut funding and leave the project. The planet is divided into regions, each of which provides you with funding at the end of every month based on your performance within that region. Before long you’ll need to build more to intercept alien activity happening outside of your first base’s sphere of influence. Much like in the original, a single base won’t cut it forever. It’s from here that you’ll track alien activity, deploy fighters to intercept any UFOs detected by your radar arrays, manage your ground troops and their equipment, research captured alien technology, construct new weapons and equipment, and much more. The first thing you’ll see is a world map called the Geoscape, and you’ll be asked to place your first base. Xenonauts will be immediately familiar to anyone who has experience with the original X-COM of the 1990s. As the commander of the Xenonauts, it is your job to monitor extraterrestrial activity, intercept UFOs, study the enemy’s exotic weaponry and technology, and send your ground forces to dispatch any aliens that set foot on Earth while defending the local population.

An international counter-alien task force called the Xenonauts are humanity’s best chance of survival. The year is 1979 and Earth is being invaded by aliens. So, now that we have a true, turn-based strategy reboot of X-COM, how does Xenonauts stack up? Spoiler: X-COM purists now have the X-COM reboot they’ve been waiting for. Since then, 2K and Firaxis brought us the pretty solid XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the even more improved Enemy Within expansion…Oh, and that shooter finally came out as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified after years of delays and development woes. Goldhawk Interactive, a tiny indie studio in the UK, was formed by hardcore X-COM fans with one goal: The creation of a new spiritual successor to the original. Way back in the 2008-2009 timeframe, the only sign fans had of a new title in the X-COM franchise was a troubled squad-based cover-shooter set in the 1960s that was almost universally reviled by X-COM purists.

Xenonauts 2 base defense mission