Okay! So you shoot down the UFO and then land and take out the surviving aliens. I think I got thi- HOLYSHIT!!!!
The brainchild of Julian Gollop and other assorted Microprose personnel, UFO: Enemy Unknown was a strategy game produced in 1993 and unleashed upon the European gaming public. A year later, it jumped the pond to grace American players as X-COM: UFO Defense, since there was a naming rights conflict with an obscure 1989 flight sim by subLOGIC called UFO.By either name, X-COM puts the player in command of an eXtraterrestrial COMbat unit charged with protecting Earth from an alien threat, managing resources and researching captured technology in the process. The hybrid of Real Time Strategy (improving X-COM's overall condition and catching UFOs as they land - or crashing them yourself) and Turn Based Tactics (exploring crash sites, stopping terror attacks, and defending and assaulting bases) quickly won the hearts of the gaming public.More than 15 years after its initial release, UFO Defense still attracts players and tops lists of the Best PC Games of All Time. A 2007 assessment by IGN has it edging out fellow Prodigal Son of Microprose Sid Meier's Civilization IV for the Number 1 slot.Not to say the X-COM legacy is a solo act, however. While Gollop's team set to work on X-COM: Apocalypse, an in-house crew at Microprose beat him to the punch with X-COM: Terror From The Deep in 1995, a Mission Pack Sequel created to satiate player demand for more alien-assaulting action. Apocalypse hit the shelves in 1997, to mixed reviews due to its Art Shift into pseudo-3D futuristic graphics and the clunkiness of a newly-introduced real-time option for playing missions. The last days of Microprose (and its acquisition by Hasbro Interactive) saw X-COM trying to get back on its feet with two Genre Shifted offerings: X-COM: Interceptor (1998) kept the base management elements while swapping out the strategy missions for space-bound Flight Simulator action, while X-COM: Enforcer (2001) ditched the strategy part outright to make a First-Person Shooter running parallel to the timeline of UFO Defense. Sadly, neither had the mystique of their ancestors, and are often shunted away from canon due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change.While the possibility of a future X-COM game continued an infinitely long march towards zero due to the license being passed through a variety of incapable hands throughout the 2000s, the earlier games attracted a variety of player-made mods and remake attempts in numerous stages of completion. Various Spiritual Successors also exist, such as UFO: Aftermath and its sequels Aftershock and Afterlight (unrelated to the game UFO listed above), the Game Boy Advance sleeper Rebelstar: Tactical Command, Laser Squad: Nemesis (in and of itself a sequel to X-COM's own predecessor Laser Squad) and UFO: Extraterrestrials which is almost an exact remake of the original game. All have attracted moderate attention from X-COM fans, largely for either the similarity in gameplay (the UFO After Blank series) or the connections to Gollop and other former X-COM staff (Rebelstar and Laser Squad). Fans have also made their own remakes, most notably UFO: Alien Invasion and Xenonauts.Due to the entire series being re-released on SteamX-COM has experienced a resurgence among retro gamers, especially those eager to chronicle their campaigns.An FPS reboot of the serieshas been announced, being developed by 2k Marin, the team behind Bio Shock 2. So far, the fanbase has reacted in a manner predictable to everyone except, apparently, 2K Games, even going so far as to dub it things like "XenoShock" and "XINO" ("X-Com In Name Only"). This seems to be due to a combination of the bitter taste left behind by Enforcer and an understandable lack of enthusiasm for the direction the developers seem to be taking the game (with changes such as the possible wholesale dumping of the previous games' canon, X-COM being a division of the DoD as opposed to a Multinational Team, the focus era being shifted to a "Pleasantville" version of the sixties and the move from cerebral turn-based strategy to the Cover Shooter gameplay seen in the trailer). However, based on recent developments it seems the X-Com reboot has been renamed to The Bureau: X-Com Declassified and is being billed as a prequel to the recent X-COM: Enemy Unknown.That being said, the fandom's response to the reboot was heavy enough that a new game by Firaxis Games (a subsidiary of 2K and the developers of the Civilization series) was produced. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released on October 9th, 2012 in North America and three days later in other regions to generally positive reviews (a fairly vitriolic Broken Base notwithstanding).
Not Enough Trope Units!
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General
Adventure Friendly World: See Crapsack World - This works out fine as the backstory of a hyper-lethal squad combat game: the utter monstrosity of your enemy means that as long as any humans survive, the Non-Entity General can always find vengeance-crazed replacements for troops lost in combat, or at least someone willing to die for a carrot, and there is an unending supply of alien baddies to kill, capture and vivisect. But taken out of context, X-COM is essentially sending unaccountable death squads against an enemy that can never really be beaten without desperate measures.
Airborne Mook: The Floaters, their equivalents in the sequels and various terror monsters.
Alien Autopsy: The player's scientists can perform these.
Aliens Are Bastards: Played straight. Would have been subverted with the canceled Alliance, where the stranded X-COM team form an alliance with the friendly aliens against the hostile ones.
Partially averted in Apocalypse. The new aliens are certainly bastards, but some of the ones we've been previously familiar with now co-exist peacefully with humans.
Aliens and Monsters: Mostly aliens, but their Terror Units are often engineered (genetically or otherwise) to either capitalize on their owner's strengths (Chryssalids having weaponized the Snakemen's rapid asexual reproduction, for example) or cover their weaknesses (Sectopods distracting the enemy with conventional attacks while their Ethereal masters make with the Mind Rape). Except for the Silacoids and Celatids, which (given that their counterparts the Mutons don't really have weaknesses) don't really do anything.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: A major gameplay element; you have to design your hidden underground bases with defense in mind, since aliens will eventually find and attack them. Later in the game, of course, you get to do the same to them. (Or earlier, since unless you're doing a really bad job, you'll find some alien bases before they find yours.)
Alliance Meter: UFO and TFTD has this in form of Funding Nations. Scaled up in Apocalypse with 25 factions waging corporate wars for political and economical power in Mega-Primus during the alien invasion.
Almighty Janitor: Your newly hired and unranked recruits, thanks to their randomly created stats, are potentially capable of being incredible marksmen, Made of Iron or - when you have researched a Psionic Laboratory - mindraping any alien they see into commiting treasonous and suicidal acts of violence against their own side. (But more likely they're completely useless and you'll have to sack 8 out of 10 when you finally get their psi evaluations.)
If you know what the limits are for a fresh recruits stats (for example, they can start with 40 to 70 time units), then you'll quickly realize that most of your recruits literally are cannon fodder, being at the bottom rung of effectiveness.
Anyone Can Die: And anyone WILL die until you've got solid armor research going. Or even afterward (see Armor Is Useless).
Apocalypse How: The result of failing to defeat the aliens (and sometimes even when succeeding). See the more detailed AP examples in each games respective sections.
Appropriated Title: The series started as UFO: Enemy Unknown. It had to relabel itself X-COM when somebody complained there's already a game called UFO.
Armor Is Useless: A soldier with maximum health and the best armor can still be killed in one shot if the damage roll is high enough. Even the best armour has at best a 50/50 chance of stopping a Heavy Plasma shot, though it does make troopers immune to many human weapons and it provides much better protection than most alien units have.
To clarify, X-COM soldiers take 0 to 200% of the listed damage from firearms; 50 to 150% from explosives. Unarmoured troopers can survive several heavy plasma blasts and take absolutely no damage... only to be offed by a single pistol shot the next turn.
Mostly averted in TFTD, the front of the Ion Armor can let soldiers take point blank Sonic Cannon blasts or Lobstermen's claws and take no damage as long as it hits the front armor (unless random chance screws you over). But still played straight with Bio Drone explosions and Tentaculats.
Averted in Apocalypse. Megapol Armour is fairly competent, particularly against light friendly fire and early disruptor weapons, but is terrible against devastators. Marsec's flying armour is weaker but allows flight. On the other hand, X-COM manufactured "Disruptor Armour" transforms soldiers into nigh-unstoppable death machines who can practically waltz through multiple explosions without even taking a mortal injury. The shields certainly help, though.
Artificial Stupidity: The civilians in Terror Sites. They will run through a door, back through it, then back AGAIN. That is if they are not running into the middle of fire fights, because the natural place to stand in a military operation is DIRECTLY IN FRONT of the man with the laser rifle.
This is especially evident when using Auto Fire (which makes soldiers shoot 3 less-accurate shots in rapid succesion). Agents can even be firing an accurate weapon like any of the Rifles at point-blank on full auto and have the shots knock down the walls and trees behind an alien without even grazing it. On the other hand, Aimed Shot (a single more-accurate shot that uses up more of your Time Units for the turn) is actually very effective with enough training in Firing Accuracy.
Auto shot is preferable early on when you know even the soldier's aimed shot will most likely miss. First, it have a chance to hit aliens multiple times, stray bullets will sometimes hit other aliens even those you didn't notice, and if the alien can see you, a single burst will only trigger one reaction fire as opposed to aimed shot or snap shot which triggers reaction on every shot. Once you have laser weapons, you most likely use auto shot at every opportunity.
Experimentation has shown a few oddities with accuracy in the first two games. In particular, the quoted % accuracy is actually understated a majority of the time. The reason for this is that a "miss" is not actually a miss, but rather a random deviation applied to the bullet. If you're lucky (or at point blank range), this deviation will be small enough that the bullet hits anyway.
Not necessarily true with human soldiers, depending on whether the player has the officers on the battlefield getting exercise along with the other soldiers or leaves their muscles to atrophy in the back of the Skyranger.
Awesome, but Impractical: Several weapons and base components, either due to how easily their replacements can be researched or by being Nerfed by the game mechanics.
The Sonic Cannon of TFTD is the biggest offender. It can firing snap shots or aimed shots and inflicts about 15% more damage than the Sonic Blasta-Rifle. However, firing a snap shot will take half of your time units, and an aimed shot requires 75%, meaning you have almost no ability to manuever. In addition, due to the weight it's less accurate the Blasta-Rifle, and has five fewer rounds per clip, and is so heavy you're limited in what else you can carry. The Blasta-Rifle is superior in every way except damage, but since you can fire two snap shots and move with the Rifle, the slight damage increase the Cannon offers is negligible. Fortunately, the computer will use the Cannon, and all it's attendant problems, exclusively about two-thirds of the way into the game.
The Griffon Tank in Apocalypse: Huge, has a BFG. Awesome stats for something you can get at the start... but because of a coding decision, will be destroyed if the road under it gets damaged, no matter what its current health is.
Heavy infantry-carried weapons, at least in the first two games — launchers such as the Auto-Cannon can inflict serious amounts of damage, but their weight means rookies will have problems carrying them. In general, equipping rocket launchers, auto-cannons and the like to inexperienced soldiers (which are all you've got in the early-game!) will mean they may not have enough T Us to actually fire them effectively, not to mention, oh.. move.
Terror from the Deep introduces the Triton, a submarine equivalent of the Skyranger.
The ultimate troop transports (the Avenger, Leviathan, and Annihilator) are also the ultimate fighter craft!
Badass Normal: Any human who lives long enough. Everybody starts out as a Red Shirt, but over time they can become absolutely terrifying, some even capable of single-handedly slaughtering entire alien craft full of enemies in a single mission.
Bee People: The Sectoids and Aquatoids are described as such. The Apocalypse aliens as well.
BFG: The series is full of them, from the Heavy Cannon to the Rocket Launcher to the Heavy Plasma to the Blaster Launchers and their counterparts.
Bizarre Alien Biology: Autopsy results - Some are fairly mundane, some are heavily cybernized, and some who by all means should have been dead when they were alive.
Black Box: Even when research is done, there are still something that bugs the scientists, usually the autopsies of the more exotic aliens and miscellaneous tech. They sensibly ignore it rather than taking the (extra) time to figure it out.
Body Horror: Chryssalids, Bio-Drones, Tentaculats, several of the Apocalypse aliens, and so forth.
Bottomless Magazines: Only for laser weapons in the first game, the major reason they are so good. Hideously averted for everything else (see Easy Logistics below) except for aircraft and HWP energy weapons and even those just have very large magazines (100 or 255).
While the first game went with the "more powerful weapon = more ammo in clip" method (the plasma pistol has 15 rounds, while the heavy plasma has 35), TFTD decided that more powerful weapons need smaller clips (the Sonic Pistol has 20 rounds, the Sonic Cannon has 10).
Brainwashed: The common state of victims of Ethereals, high-ranking Sectoids, and their successors. Often, they're also crazy.
Bullethole Door: Great for reducing the effects of drone blockage during Terror Missions. Busting through the walls of UFOs, however, will take well-placed/lucky plasma holes (interior) or Blaster Launcher shots (exterior).
Charles Atlas Superpower: With sufficient combat experience, a soldier can eventually beat out a tank in health, movement, accuracy, etc. Oh, and tanks can't get those nifty Psi abilities.
XCOMUtil's modified HWPs, on the other hand, are absolutely terrifying, and are capable of reliably hitting an enemy from a considerable distance away. And if they miss, well, that's why you use the Rocket Tanks... until you get the Fusion Ball Tanks. Which can never miss, unless you're bad at setting in the missile course.
Also demonstrated by Commander units on the enemy forces, particularly in X-COM and TFTD. Your average Floater, for example, dies if you so much as glare at it. Floater Commanders can take several rifle rounds to bring down, on the other hand. Rank distinctions were removed in Apocalypse, however, though enemy stats could vary greatly.
The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Most prevalent in UFO Defense, where aliens don't suffer from Fatal Wounds unless they were inflicted under previous mind control, magically know the entire map (and your soldiers' positions) after Turn 20, and can target any of your soldiers as soon as just one is in visual range (particularly rage-inducing with Ethereals' psi-spamming).
Even so, it's possible to fool them by bringing a psi-decoy with low mental defences and no weapons to suck up all their psychic powers, as they are always going to target the people wth the weakest minds.
Combat Medic: Anyone with the medkit, and boy, you're gonna need them.
You can also pick up a downed soldier's own medkit and use it on him, as knocked-out soldiers will instantly drop all their equipment on the ground.
Cool Starship: Completing a game often requires research and construction of an "Ultimate Craft" and interrogation for the whereabouts of an alien stronghold to drive it to.
Cow Tools: Aliens bases and some ships are filled with these. Some you can research, some just look appropriate.
Crapsack World: All but stated. An unknown, but likely large portion of the galaxy is ruled by a Hive Mind. Humans might be able to destroy the local node if they become The Unfettered - abolish every civil liberty and article of war. And there's another, unattached(albeit slightly less advanced) node in the Gulf of Mexico. And its destruction would reduce Earth's biosphere to the algae level. And there's an entire planet of Hive Mind aliens just one dimension over. And the best weapon against all these irredeemably hostile aliens are Half Human Hybrids with Psychic Powers... who will eventually become a permanent underclass treated like parolees from cradle to grave and not allowed to breed without permission(which tends to be withheld between invasions).
Critical Encumbrance Failure: Of the "carry items up to the soldier's Strength in weight, then take Time Unit penalties for going overboard" type.
Critical Existence Failure: Averted - Soldiers lucky enough to survive alien gunfire (and that won't be many of the unarmored ones, mind you) will leak HP from "Fatal Wounds" to their various body parts until they fall unconscious and are either treated with a Medi-Kit or left to die. More often than not, it's the latter. Wounded troopers also suffer an accuracy penalty.
Played straight with Cyberdisks. Due to how 2x2 monsters work, a stunned cyberdisk is effectively a dead cyberdisk. Actually killing it results in a rather impressive boom. Which can also cause chain reactions, if other cyberdisks are close enough.
Played straight in Terror From the Deep with Bio-Drones.
Crouch and Prone: In UFO and TFTD Soldiers can crouch to improve accuracy, become a smaller target, have more cover and to allow the standing soldiers behind the crouching ones to shoot over their shoulders (though be careful, there's still a risk of hitting the guy in front of you). Soldiers automatically stand up straight when moving. Apocalypse also has a prone position.
Death from Above: The Floaters and their equivalents. Players can also do this once they research a means of flying.
Some Enforcer enemies will do this. In parcticular one floating buzz-saw thing likes to reach you and flip up to where you can't possibly get an angle on it, attacking all the while.
Decapitated Army: In most games killing the alien leader and destroying the main base he was in makes you a winner.
Deconstruction: Of children's cartoon series such as G.I. Joe and Transformers. X-COM is a team of elite soldiers who wear cool-looking armor and have a fancy Cool Ship that they travel the world in to save the world from goofy-looking aliens...and then suffer a relentlessly high fatality rate, crippling technological inferiority, and severe funding troubles. Anyone Can Die, often in rather brutal ways, and 50% or higher casualty rates are common in successful missions, with failures usually resulting in no survivors whatsoever. The cool-looking armor is good for little else besides appearance. The Cool Ship costs ludicrous amount of money to lease and is completely unarmed. The goofy-looking aliens outnumber us over a thousand to one and have technology that outstrips ours to such a degree that X-COM might as well be fighting them with sticks. The Man in Washington will happily cut funding at the drop of a hat, even if there's a UFO landing outside the White House. It is not a very pleasant situation. Ironically, after Hasbro acquired the franchise they briefly attempted to make it into a children's cartoon series, which is a rather curious decision considering X-Com's almost insanely high casualty rate.
Destroyable Items: Repeat after me: No grenades or rockets in the alien engine room. Explosions can destroy any object lying on the ground, including corpses, unconscious units, and loot.
Oddly enough, ammunition and other explosives are unaffected by explosions.
Fridge Logic ensues: YOU are THE World Police, so many governments may not be happy about having armed foreign ships, with armor and weapons that make their best special forces seem like they're from the stone age by comparison. Also, the aliens have those nifty Psionic Powers, so they only need to look the person in charge, unleash some Brain Wash, Mind Rape or whatever... and have them as lap dogs. Sadly, the Player Character cannot do anything when a nation resigns: No amount of alienbusting activity may free a nation from alien infiltration!
Dummied Out: One of the many things left unused is the "Alien Reproduction" item and research line in UFO Defense - strange considering the resultant Half Human Hybrids wind up playing a key part in Apocalypse. The sequels also include other things that were ultimately left out due to time and budget constraints.
Apocalypse also contains Procreation Parks, buildings in Megaprimus where couples go to have their children grown in artificial wombs, matching the dummied out research text of the above: "The process could be easily adapted for human reproduction".
Dungeon Bypass: Tired of slogging through Cyberdisks and Sectoids while being panicked and mind-controlled? Breach the hull at the top floor and reach their Leader immediately with a Blaster Bomb! Other weapons can also breach the less-durable inner walls of UFOs, and human buildings are all too easy to destroy. A common early-game tactic is to spam rockets and autocannon grenades on buildings that aliens might be hiding in rather than engage in costly room-to-room or building-to-building combat.
In Apocalypse, collateral destruction is a viable strategy, if you didn't mind getting stuck with the bill. Instead of scattering troops across large, multilevel facilities to hunt down aliens in dark corners, you could set fire to or blow the floors out from under their suspected hiding places and wait for the sound of their screams. Or just level the building with your combat vehicles.
Dynamic Difficulty: Regardless of the difficulty your campaign starts at, most of the games will see fit to ramp up alien activity to correspond with consistent positive performance.
A bug in UFO Defense caused the difficulty to reset to beginner no matter what you actually set it at. Because of this, gamers complained that the game was easy, which made the developers of TFTD increase the difficulty across the board. The result was a ridiculously hard game.
Plus, they fixed the bug that caused the difficulty to reset, as well.
If you don't eventually go for the Big Bad in TFTD, alien bases will start to proliferate faster than you can keep up with them. In other words, you are fighting a losing war against superior technology. If you do not exploit their weak point by finding the Big Bad, the enemy will become stronger and stronger until you have no chance of survival. This is done on purpose.
Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Interceptor's Nova Bomb is designed to take out a star and everything orbiting it (a lower-level Class X-2 on the Apocalypse How scale).
Blaster Bombs could certainly count, as well as Cyberdiscs, particularly when chain reactions are caused. But as we already know, they're Made of Explodium.
Repeated explosions will start to dig a hole in the ground. In UFO Defense this hole is purely a visual artifact as eventually concrete or a road will be destroyed exposing dirt...at the same level. In TFTD, most things take place on ground anyways but it still happens in port terror missions. In Apocalypse, as the Let's Play demonstrates, it's possible to accidentally end up digging an enemy that can withstand multiple missile hits a foxhole.
Easy Logistics: Averted. While ammunition for conventional weapons can be bought as long as you have money, more advanced weapons require manufactured or captured ammunition to work. And then there's allocating a limited stockpile of Elerium between manufacturing and aircraft fuel.
Moreso when XComUtil's "Improved Laser Weapons" fix is implemented. Sure, the Heavy Laser finally gets Auto Shot capability, but must it come at the cost of using Elerium for Laser construction AND not being able to make Plasma weapons (even after taking into consideration that the aliens drop Heavy Plasmas like candy)?
Elaborate Underground Base: A necessity due to X-COM's covert nature, often leading to All Your Base Are Belong to Us should the aliens stumble upon it (hopefully "them" by the time an Alien Retaliation fleet comes calling).
Aliens get these, too. Which you have to break into to kidnap high-ranking officers for interrogation to complete the game.
Enforcer does this in a few levels.
Elite Mooks: Alien Squad Leaders in general. Later-Game Aliens (Mutons, Tasoth, Lobstermen) also may count.
Enforcer bosses, which are usually giant versions of other mooks like Reapers or Chryssalids, with special attacks.
Emotion Bomb: "Panic Unit", the easier use of psi powers.
Enemy Detecting Radar: Motion Trackers, though they can only detect units that moved within the last turn. So always check the corners in case something's lurking.
Exclusive Enemy Equipment: The few thing that your technicians cannot reproduce, including the alien power sources.
Executive Meddling: Showing that Tropes Are Not Bad, the original X-Com actually owes many of the things that make it famous to Executive Meddling. Initially, the game was going to be a pure tactical combat game set in an alien world; executives demanded the addition of the larger strategical game to tie things together and asked that it be set on the more familiar setting of Earth instead.
Exploding Barrels: Fuel drums in your bases, gas pumps in Terror Missions, and certain UFO components all explode when shot. Frustratingly, so do Elerium pods exposed to explosions.
In TFTD, the normal skirmishes (USO Recovery) sometimes have what seems to be oil pumps. Also, apparently sunken aircraft's engines are Made of Explodium.
Chryssalids, oh God, the Chryssalids... Tentaculats and Brainsuckers fill their niche in Terror From The Deep and Apocalypse, respectively.
Brainsuckers represent an absolutely straight case of Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong, no less, attaching onto your head and emptying their innards down your throat.
Brainsuckers cross it with People Puppets. Fortunately, unlike their earlier brethern, Brainsuckers die when taking over their victims, so it's not quite as bad.
Fake Difficulty: TFTD was probably the worst offender, but the game balance would not suffer if the standard rifle from UFO Defence were capable of reliably hitting anything a distance greater than it could be thrown. Lampshaded regularly in the Let's Play.
Friendly Fire Proof: Averted, and with the average accuracy of X-COM soldiers, frequently painful.
Frickin' Laser Beams: The Laser weapons obviously. In the first X-COM, they're extremely useful throughout the early and mid-game and retain effectiveness in the late game, as they use no ammunition. Laser pistols also have the added advantage of an very low TU cost to their autofire, making them ideal for room-to-room combat against anything short of Mutons and Snakemen missions with Chryssalids. Sectopods, the Ethereal's terror units, are more vulnerable to laser beams than plasma.
Gatling Good: The Autocannons and their successors. Regular and incendiary ammo rapidly become obsolete, but high explosive rounds remain viable throughout the game. Being able to saturate an area with high-explosive bullets never ceases being effective or awesome.
Genre Savvy: You're going to need to be in order to win. Just remember; if they don't make the death scream, they aren't dead.
Genre Shift: What happened to every single X-com game after the third one.
Geo Effects: On the Strategic scale, where you land determines what kind of terrain it will be in the battlefield. For example in TFTD landing in seas around Europe makes it very likely that the mission will take place among the Underwater Ruins, and in the very deep areas it's dark as in the night mission even during the day.
Giant Mook: Many terrorist aliens. The Megaspawn from Apocalypse. Enforcer bosses.
UFO Defense gives us the Reapers and Sectopods, the former a glorified alien attack dog and the latter a heavy assault mecha. Terror From the Deep has the Xarquid, a giant nautilus, the Triscene, a dinosaur with Sonic Cannons, and the Hallucinoid, a prehistoric jellyfish with chemical freezing agents.
Giant Enemy Crab: The Chryssalids in UFO Defense and the Lobstermen in Terror From the Deep.
Global Currency: Everything bought and sold in the main games is apparently done so in U.S. dollars.
Glorious Mother Russia: And they're surprisingly badass, too - Russia is the only nation in the game that can never be subjugated by the aliens, no matter how bad things get. They'll fight until the last man falls.
Grenade Hot Potato: With a little coordination and luck, a soldier in the back can prime and pass a grenade to the front.
Grid Inventory: Multiple grids throughout the body and uniform (and multiple Time Unit costs for movement of items from location to location) make a refreshing take on the Inventory Management Puzzle.
The trueInventory Management Puzzle (at least in the first game or two) was deciding what 80 pieces of gear to bring along on a mission. A fully loaded Avenger/Leviathan (holding 26 soldiers) could consume 52 of those slots just giving each soldier a gun and its ammunition. And that's without bringing extra ammo for reloading.
Guns Akimbo: Doing this in UFO and TFTD only gave you another weapon to fire from with penalties. Expended in Apocalypse.
Hive Mind: The aliens in UFO Defense take orders from one, another in Terror From The Deep tries to tell a Cosmic Horror Story while it's at it, and the Biomass in the UFO games is a weapon designed to turn a planet into one.
The true threat in X-Com Apocalypse are actually colonies of microscopic organisms that are sentient in groups. Every alien life form you encounter in that game is merely one they've managed to take control of and manipulate to their own ends; the "brainsucker" life form that turns your comrades against you just injects their brains with an overload of micronoids. Late in the game, some UFOs try to take control of buildings and organizations by directly sprinkling lots of micronoids onto the building in question to influence the minds of those within.
Hold the Line: The objective of any Base Defense mission. Can literally turn into Hold The Line if you choose to adopt such tactics, although in some cases it's not so much line-holding as shooting fish in a barrel with a BFG.
This probably only applies if your base is attacked early in the game where aliens' psi attacks turn it into a nightmare. But, once you screened your recruits (and sack the weak minded ones) and researched alien weapons, even if you have poorly designed base, a defense mission is just a shooting gallery.
One early Enforcer mission. It will make you want to scream and cry at the same time.
Hollywood Healing: Averted, wounded soldiers have to stay on lengthy medical leaves, with the most serious cases taking months.
Hovertank: With your choice of Fusion Bomb launcher or Plasma cannon. Arguably, the Cyberdisc can be considered one of these sans turret.
Immune to Bullets: Because of how armour works and damage is rolled, certain enemies are actually immune to standard rifle or pistol rounds. Some are even highly resistant to otherwise powerful alien weapons (hello, Sectopods and Lobstermen).
Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Best way to describe the accuracy of any Rookie. They can literally open a door, find themselves toe-to-toe with an alien, fire repeatedly at it, and still miss. Bonus points if their Shooting Accuracy is low. More bonus points if attempting to Auto Fire. Jackpot if they're suffering from Fatal Wounds in one or both arms. (The aliens' snap shots tend to be considerably more accurate ...)
In retrospect, it was a mistake to have Jean Michel Jarre conduct laser rifle training.
Ocasionally subverted by the odd rookie trooper who has uncannily high accuracy and can out-shoot some of your crack troopers.
Can be double-subverted as well, as when a rookie used autoshot with laser rifle and failed to hit the sectoid he was aiming at, instead hit a cyberdisk behind it which blows up and kill several other aliens (and an unfortunate civilian) near it.
Imported Alien Phlebotinum: About 75-90% of gameplay revolves around the acquisition, understanding, and implementation of cool alien toys. Or in the RPG terms: Kill them, take their stuff, reverse-egnineer it, Repeat.
Reversed in Apocalypse: when you sell some of your stuff to a Mega Corp that's been infiltrated by aliens, the aliens will import your phlebotinum.
Instant 180 Degree Turn: Averted. Turning costs Time Units, though it will not trigger alien reaction fire. Sometimes, troopers who have to turn to face the enemy wind up without sufficient TUs to take the shot.
It's Up to You: Since all of the world governments have tried and failed to handle the aliens, it's up to X-Com to get things done. Although it wouldn't hurt if the local governments lent a hand during Terror Missions.
Played even straighter in Terror From the Deep. X-Com was disbanded after the end of First Alien War, and the world governments don't have the advanced technologies they developed to confront the new alien threat. Once again, it all comes down to X-Com.
Jet Pack: Your troops get these during the late game (or from the start in case of Apocalypse). The flight-capable aliens (except for the psychic aliens who use their powers to fly) usually have these... builtin.
Kill It with Fire: Burning the zombies (with incendiary ammunition) will also kill the chryssalid\tentaculat without it popping out.
Law Enforcement, Inc.: After the Second Alien War of TFTD X-COM becomes this to avoid underfunding. X-COM's more ambitious cousin Marsec started out as a replacement for the former in guarding the martian colonies so that they could concentrate on potential alien threats, but soon becomes a para-military corporation with a ruthless reputation. Megapol from Apocalypse, in addition to being a police force, also operates other 24 hour services, the fire fighters and the hospitals.
Lensman Arms Race: As X-COM improves their arsenal and knowledge via research and reverse-engineering, the aliens will start sending bigger UFOs with larger groups of better trained soldiers wielding bigger guns with nastier support monsters, after which X-COM will improve their arsenal and knowledge via researching and reverse-engineering of anything this new wave had on their dead bodies. Rinse and repeat.
Les Collaborateurs: Repeated screwups in a particular funding nation or outright political manipulation thereof by the aliens can result in said nation cutting its remaining funding to X-COM and signing a nonaggression pact with the grey bastards.
Most annoyingly, when you spot a UFO or USO on a "diplomatic mission", if they've landed, you're already too late. You can assault the aliens, kill every single one, loot their ship and prevent any further incursions into that particular nation's airspace, and at the end of the month be told that they've signed a non-aggression pact with the aliens. Even if the ship was only on the ground for five minutes.
Made of Explodium: Lots of objects on the battlescape will explode when shot.
Special mention goes to the Cyberdisc and its successor, the Bio-Drone. When they die, they explode with stunning force, causing collateral damage. This can help for better or for worse, depending on who the explosion kills.
Meet the New Boss: Pretty much every knew alien threat faced in the original series, when it comes down to how they act and what they're goals, are essentially same product new packaging of the original aliens.
Mercy Mode: Having a particularly bad month performance-wise or worse, a string of bad months, will make the game take pity on you by making the "X-COM agents discover the Alien Base". Technically possible even if you're doing fine, but much more common when you're doing bad.
Mind Control: the harder, but much more useful, use of psi powers.
Mind Probe: A handy tool for either side to gather information on the other. Best used for determining how close an enemy is to collapsing from stunning, or whether that alien right there is a Soldier/Medic (Mook), Engineer (useful for research), or a Commander (Boss, crucial to capture in the late game).
Becomes obsolete once you get high-psi strength units equipped with psi-amps, which can take total control of an enemy and allow you to see its stats at any time for the remainder of the turn.
Money for Nothing: UFO parts and corpses sell quite well and X-Com itself can self-finance through arms manufacturing.
Morale Mechanic: Casualties and psychic attacks can cause your soldiers to panic, moving and shooting at random. The presence of a high-ranking officer can reduce morale loss from casualties, but an officer's death has a larger effect on morale.
Multinational Team: You recruit from around the world. However, recruit names are exclusively drawn from Russian, French, German, Japanese, and British/American pools (the last two being a little difficult to distinguish).
Ethereals aren't exactly under-endowed in the grey matter department, either. Their design in Interceptor has a brain large enough to apparently need air-cooling.
And of course, the Alien Brain, UFO's equivalent to the Mother Brain.
Mythology Gag: Marsec first appearance was in X-COM's spiritual predecessor Laser Squad.
In Enemy Unknown, the cutscene received when first building a laser rifle shows a scientist firing one at a target that has a picture of a Sectoid from the UFO DefenseUFO Pedia. With a plasma rifle, he shoots at an old-style muton.
Psionic enemies before you get psionic troops (Mind control hell)
Any fight against a battleship when the doors on the bottom are propped open (by a dead body) or destroyed (Blaster bombs will hit you)
Terror From The Deep in general. Because the (then unknown) bug in UFO Defense locking the difficulty to Beginner prompted the fans to complain about it being too easy, the developers made the Beginner setting of Terror from the Deep as hard as the Superhuman of UFO. There's a common rumour that TFTD had the original's bug backwards, locking difficulty to Superhuman. It doesn't; it's just a lot harder.
Nothing Is Scarier: Night missions can be exceptionally creepy, especially in Terror From the Deep. It's pitch dark and there are aliens packing enough firepower to drop soldiers in one hit, and furthermore, since it's so dark, you don't know where they could be hiding.
It can get even worse if you're on a Terror Mission with Snakemen, and you know that there are Chryssalids just waiting for you to screw up.
Omnidisciplinary Scientist: The same staff of scientists does everything from reverse-engineering captured weapons to designing new aircraft to interrogating prisoners. Although considering that you NEED a lot of them to have a decent research progress, it could be handwaved that, say, a research on Plasma Weapons is led by the specialists in the field with everyone else following instructions.
In Apocalypse we got three types of scientists: Engineers, Quantum physics and Biologists.
One Hit Point Wonder: Your units actually have a life bar but, until they gain lots of experience or get some BETTER armor, they might as well have one hit point. This is only averted at the start of the game by the very rare occasion of a soldier surviving a Plasma/Sonic shot in their starting armor due to a low damage roll.
One-Hit KO: Chryssalid melee attack. The same goes for its successors.
Soldiers can be easily killed in one hit from a Plasma gun, even if he is wearing a Power Suit, if the damage roll is high enough.
Vibro Blades in Terror From the Deep are capable of killing most aliens in one or two hits, including the Implacable Lobstermen.
One Stat to Rule Them All: Psionic Strength in the first game (and its cousin MC Strength in the second) is the only stat that cannot be trained and it determines both resistance to alien mind control and the soldier's ability to control aliens. Actively using psionic abilities provides experience for all but three other stats.
Only a Flesh Wound: Averted. Arm and leg wounds will greatly reduce a soldier's fighting ability, just like head and torso wounds. And that's on top of bleeding to death.
Organic Technology: All sorts of purpose-bred aliens in the first two games, and practically every aspect of the alien threat in Apocalypse.
Organization With Unlimited Funding: Averted at first, as the Funding Nations/Senate are huge cheapskates. But once you get enough engineering facilities going and cranking out weapons to sell, X-COM can effectively go rogue.
However, the better you do at protecting a given nation, the more they'll increase your funding. As the game only ends when you're in the red for too long or if all nations sign non-aggression pacts with the aliens, you can keep protecting a few nations at a time and building up their funding over time to replace the nations that drop out. In a sufficiently long game, it's not uncommon to have the US providing 14-20 million dollars a month to X Com...as the only nation still funding you.
Pacifist Run: Not the whole game, but to progress, you need to capture enemy aliens alive to interrogate or inspect them. Cue the player loading up on stun rods and other nonlethal equipment (depending on which installment in the franchise) so they can capture most or all aliens alive in one mission (and then get back to the slaughter once research is complete).
Player Headquarters: Though there is no HQ in the strict sense once you have multiple bases, the cost and time associated with building bases and the subsequent maintenance fees will make the first starter (and already developed) base your main base of operations.
Which is bad, because it's the most likely base to be attacked, and has an extremely difficult-to-defend layout.
Powered Armor: Later armor suits in UFO Defense (and the whole lot of 'em in Apocalypse) use Elerium-115 to power shielding, muscle enhancers, and the occasional flight module. Flight and protection are the only benefits; armour has no bearing on a soldier's strength or other stats (the muscle enhancers are just fluff that indicates a lack of weight-related decrease in soldier performance).
Power Crutch: The PsiAmps and their variations that enable X-COM soldiers to use psychic powers.
Properly Paranoid: Anyone who takes great care while handling Terror Missions. If you aren't covering all the angles, you're just Tempting Fate.
There are only two aliens in Apocalypse that are easily affected by Psionics, them being the Anthropod and Skeletoid. All other creatures are resistant to Psionic attacks because they are either less intelligent (which somehow boosts resistance), in the case of Multiworms or Spitters, or possess Psionic abilities themselves, like the Micronoid Aggregate and Psimorph.
Purely Aesthetic Gender: Recruits can be either male or female. This has absolutely no effect on starting stats or stat growth. All it does is paste a slightly different head on the sprite and give ladies a different scream when they die*
In the second game, at least. In the first game, all aliens and all soldiers sound the same when they die
Not quite a challenge since you can abuse save scumming. Once you have those psi devices, you can make the aliens throw away their guns and turn them into target practice for your new recruits.
The reboot changes recruits for the player's squad into actual people with their own skills and backgrounds. Some prefer the old way.
The Sectoids and their successors could easily be the aliens' redshirts, with the exception of Leaders, who possess psychic powers.
Roboteching: Blaster Launchers and their equivalents with their diabolical waypoint-based targeting system.
Save Scumming: a common strategy, unless you think this is cheating or dishonorable, it is possible to win the game with 0 casualties. The game designers do make a token effort to discourage it; you can't load a saved game during a combat mission, although you can save all you want in the middle of a mission.
Sensor Suspense: Motion detectors: a good way to avoid becoming Cannon Fodder when facing alien weapons, but since you don't know whether the blip is from alien or civilian and on which floor, dealing with the results can be... interesting.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Probably the greatest fan-mod undertaking for UFO Defense is fixing a bug that locked the starting difficulty of the game at "Beginner".
There are a bunch of challenges listed with one of the well-known editing utilities, including things like refusing to research any new tech (thus making the game technically unwinnable, but few get to such a point since it's damn difficult without) and not killing any aliens (winning is still possible since they can be stunned).
Zero loss run: No X-Com agents lost, no civillians lost. Hope you have a few months spare.
One Mission X-Com: It's possible to complete the game after completing only one mission: a well-executed UFO Ground Assault on a battleship can yield all the alien prisoners and raw materials needed to research Cydonia and complete the game. The difficulty is in pleasing the Funding Nations (no terror missions or alien base assaults allowed), and in keeping away from bankruptancy.
Smoke Shield: Caused by specialized smoke grenades and explosive terrain features.
Sorting Algorithm of Evil: In UFO Defense it's Sectoids and Floaters and early Snakemen if you're unlucky > Snakemen if you're lucky > Mutons > Ethereal.
In TFTD it's Aquatoids and Gillmen > Tasoth and Lobstermen.
Springtime for Hitler: It's more or less an Open Secret that Interceptor and definitely Enforcer were this on Hasbro's part, having bought up Microprose simply to eliminate competition and intentionally running the acquired IP into the ground rather than shift focus away from their own core works.
Splash Damage Abuse: The great vulnerability of ground-based vehicles in Apocalypse, including the tank. Also, most units take more damage from explosives that go off at their feet because of lower under armour.
Strong Flesh Weak Steel: Individual soldiers, in the late game, are far stronger than tanks, since soldiers improve their stats and tanks don't.
Inverted in Enforcer, where you will chew through Sectoids, Snakemen, and Chryssalids with one shot each while their feeble attempts to harm you bounce off your armored hull. It will give yourpositronic brain much amusement.
However, a hovertank/launcher can still fire fusion balls without ever needing to reload until they run out of ammo. Although, this is balanced out by having a maximum of 8 fusion balls per mission and doing less damage than blaster bombs. Also, tanks can't be stunned or get fatal wounds. Or Mind Controlled.
Stat Grinding: Psionic actions are a great shortcut for all but a few stats.
Stray Shots Strike Nothing: Averted. With the exception map borders where the shots disappear, all missed projectiles will continue to fly until they hit something, walls, explosive materials, civilians, X-COM operatives, aliens, etc.
Stock Sound Effects: Some of the sounds that occur while navigating the menus of the original X-COM have spread far and wide across various media, recently being used in the title character's HUD in the big budget movie Iron-Man!
Stun Guns: From Stun Rods to Stun Bombs, a variety of nonlethal arms gradually come into X-COM's possession and employ for the capture of necessary live aliens.
Subsystem Damage: Head, Body, Separate Arms and Legs, with penalties one soldier's efficiency depending on injuries. Assuming the soldier in question survived the first shot.
Super Soldier: Mutons and Lobstermen. Your soldiers will become this if they are lucky enough.
Enforcer's protagonist, who racks up over a hundred dead aliens a mission, and sometimes as many as four hundred fifty.
Tactical Withdrawal: When the situation gets hopeless on the battlefield there is a option of retreating. The good side of this is that your soldiers live to see another day, the sponsors will be less angry than with total defeat and thus complete loss of expensive equipment, and that you could yoink some alien artifacts. Just be aware that everything that was outside the X-COM transport will be lost and MIA.
Take Cover: Very important, given the computer's cheating tendencies and the power of alien weapons. Unfortunately, most forms of cover can be destroyed.
Concealment Equals Cover since all objects can stop at least one shot. Shame aliens tend to fire on full auto.
Tank Goodness: HWPs are a refreshing alternative to the hopeless rookies in the early game, at least in Enemy Unknown.
It gets better in TFTD. SWSes do make good scouts if you don't like sacrificing rookies for that. Once you get a Sonic Displacer, you will like it for its ability to float, get 200 shots clip which gets reloaded for free every missions, and ultimately, SWSes can't be harmed by tentaculats. If you already have the bigger ships, you will always want to bring one (or two) on every missions.
Tech Tree: While almost all physical alien artifacts can be researched as soon as you recover them, several conceptual lines of research require either the interrogation of live aliens or a series of prerequisites.
Telepathic Spacemen: Ethereals, experienced Sectoids, their underwater cousins Aquatoids, Gill Men commanders, Tasoths, Psilords in Interceptor, the list goes on...
Terror Hero: Your psionic soldiers can use their psi abilities on the aliens to cause them to panic, making them easier to kill or capture.
Time Keeps On Slipping: The various incarnations of the Geoscape allow you to pass the time by anywhere from 1 second per second (slowest setting in Apocalypse) to 1 day per second (fastest setting in UFO Defense and Terror From The Deep) while you're waiting for the next alien sighting.
Total Squad Kill: Get ready to get used to these because it'll happen a lot throughout your playthrough.
Unfriendly Fire and/or The Uriah Gambit: Note that the post-mission analysis does not have a spot for "X-COM Operatives Killed By X-COM Operatives." Your use of this oversight to justify friendly fire or the immediate court-martial of an alien-controlled operative will practically be a given.
Videogame Caring Potential: Just TRY not to get attatched to your soldiers who got promoted to Sergeant or above rank.
Videogame Cruelty Potential: What happens if you make a bunch of rookies designed explicitly to be cannon fodder and/or scouts (yes, the two jobs overlap frequently). This makes for some delicious Black Comedy as you can name the unfortunate saps such names like "Dead Man Walking" and "Cannon Fodder."
Vendor Trash: All those alien corpses, spare UFO/USO compoments, and ammunition? Yeah, a good deal of that gets sold off to finance the organization. Even a relatively small UFO captured intact can net nearly a million dollars depending on how much loot you hold on to. Alien corpses are often extremely convenient for research, but supply exceeds all possible demand, so selling them is a non-trivial but disturbing source of income. (A strategy guide suggests that they make for excellent sushi. And a certain fan wiki suggests that bases frequently fighting Lobstermen requisition above-average amounts of butter.) Well, they do the same to us in the first place. They deserve every bit of what the scientists and chefs do to them.
Veteran Unit: The Lucky Soldiers who survived enough battles and killed enough aliens.
Vichy Earth: Earth slowly becomes this over the course of the game if you do badly or take too long, as more and more countries submit to the aliens.
Apart from Glorious Mother Russia. Fan studies of long-term games have concluded that out of the Council of Funding Nations, Russia will never be infiltrated by aliens. The newspapers will instead probably show Sectoid ambassadors' corpses nailed to the gates of Kremlin.
The game mechanics actually encourages a We Have Reserves mentality. If you feed TFTD rookies to keep it happy, the game can be quite manageable... but if you've truly mastered your tactics and so almost never lose a man, you're screwed.
This mentality is sort of averted in Apocalypse. If you're good enough to consistently keep your squads alive in the early game, the difficulty will scale up quickly, but the aliens will be getting better weapons before better units (and an Anthropod holding a Devastator Cannon is still just an Anthropod), so if you really are that good, you can stay on top of the game all the time.
The death of a rookie is less damaging to a squad's morale than the death of a higher ranking agent. And if you're feeling particularly cold, the aversion of Easy Logistics makes it a lot easier, and cheaper, to send rookies in to combat with a bare minimum of equipment so that higher ranking and more skilled agents can get the good stuff.
It makes one wonder what the people do with the alien artifacts you sell, especially the corpses.
With This Herring: With this bunch of folks who would have failed the physical for any self-respecting military and have the reflexes of a dead fish, you must save the world...
The standard-issue X-COM rifle is supposedly based on the best traits of a variety of human firearms, combined into one package perfect for your work. Unfortunately, it was built by the lowest possible bidder.
Played even straighter in Terror From The Deep. The standard equipment you get is worse than their UFO counterparts, and about half of them only work underwater.
In this game, it reaches Wallbanger levels: At first you're limited to your subs, darts guns and some harpoon launchers, since nothing you had before would work underwater. Then, you can have to fight the aliens on dry land, due a crash, a landing or a terror mission. Why, oh why you must still carry dart guns, instead of old Earth-made laser weapons, and wear a heavy submariner suit when you could have crates and crates full or armor from the first alien war? Heck, local millitias should be better armed and prepared than you at this point!
Despite that fact that "Starlight" night vision scopes and binoculars have been available since at least the Vietnam War and passive infrared night vision has been around since the 1980s...you're reduced to throwing flares.
Yet Another Stupid Death: Players who are unlucky, forget to take precautions, or just play poorly, will get lots of these. Even a seasoned player will have some of these from time to time.
You All Look Familiar: A good number of soldiers will have similar appearances on the inventory screen. Played Straight in missions. On the map they virtually all look alike. The guys all have Guile haircuts and the women have ponytails. Ditto for civilians.
Zerg Rush: The only way to take a small alien ship in Enemy Unknown is to keep pushing soldiers through the door until you kill everyone inside. This will almost certainly cost you several troops. On a larger scale, X-Com typically has extremely high casualty rates in all three games and Zerg Rushing strategically to replace lost soldiers and interceptors is the only way to keep your head above water.
On the other hand, most of the aliens will leave their ship and actively hunt for you starting with the 21st turn. Camping their ufo doors lets you snipe them as they poke their heads out.
It's also possible, with careful Time Unit management and a sizeable slice of luck, for one or two of your team members to toss in a grenade and get out of the line of fire in a single turn.
One-robot Zerg Rush is probably the best way to play Enforcer, as it lets you get those research points.
You can take down the largest UFOs in Apocalypse using the smallest flyer available, hoverbikes. They're practically impossible to hit with the right settings. Worked for the Rebels.
UFO Defense/Enemy Unknown (1993)
Abusive Precursors: The Alien Brain in UFO Defense claims that the aliens created humanity.
Alien Lunch: The "Alien Food" is a nutrient soup made from body parts extracted from cattle and humans. You can even sell it on the market.
All Deserts Have Cacti: Any desert you visit in UFO Defense has Cacti. Even the deep Sahara or the Rub al Khali. Even the desert in Enforcer has cacti.
Animesque: The intro of the UFO Defense is proto-animesque, and the demo's list of features mentions a "popular "Manga" look and feel to graphics." The background images for base functions and Hidden Movement retain the art style of the intro. Otherwise, the graphics are about as realistic as can be expected from a game of it's age.
Apocalypse How: Class 2: if you fail to stop the aliens, they take over the world, destroy human civilization completely, and humanity ends up as a race of semi-intelligent mutants at best. Also, the sky burns.
Briefcase Full of Money: A picture of a high-ranking XCOM agent with one of these and silhouettes of obviously armed guards behind him is the background on the screens for the buying/selling and hire/sacking of personnel.
Covers Always Lie: The European cover art depicts insect-like aliens which do not appear in the actual game.
Cutscene Power to the Max: Inverted - the opening animation of UFO Defense features troops facing down Mutons with Personal Armor, a couple of the beginning rifles, and an Auto-Cannon. By the time you normally face Mutons, however, you'll be trampling them with Powered and Flying Suit-equipped soldiers packing any combination of Psi-Amps, Laser Rifles, Heavy Plasmas, or Blaster Launchers.
Played straight in that you will get your ass kicked.
Amusingly played straight in that you will never see a red-suited Muton in the game; the Muton Commander seen in the opening does not exist ingame. Mutons have no commanders.
Development Hell: The game was almost killed twice. The first time was the Gollop brothers fault when they submitted a confusing, short design document to Microprose. The second time, Spectrum Holobyte actually cancelled it, but Microprose UK more or less ignored it; when the publisher was looking for a March 1994 release title, Microprose UK stated, "Hey, look what we've got!"
Fantastic Drug: Sort of. Some UF Os have weird rooms with walls that look like their covered by shifting blue or orange clouds and have strange silver orbs with red cores. These rooms are revealed to be a form of alien entertainment that stimulate certain sensory regions of the brain. They are described as being similar to hallucinogenic drugs.
Flying Saucer: One of the smaller alien craft in the first game take this form, as does the first X-Com built craft. The Cyberdisc is essentially a miniaturized flying saucer with a powerful plasma cannon and self-destruct mechanism.
The hovertanks appear to be based off the cyberdisk design. As in, they just look like repainted cyberdisks with a tank cannon mounted on top.
Essentially every UFO is a variation of a Flying Saucer.
Gotta Kill Them All: missions don't end until every martian is on the floor. Annoying when you've stunned one inadvertently: they'll get up and go for a wander after a while, leaving you to wonder why the mission's not ended after clearing out the UFO.
Master of None: The Lightning. It can intercept and carry troops, but is a worse fighter than the Firestorm and a worse troop bus than the Skyranger. Contrast the Avenger, a true Jack of All Stats.
Next Sunday A.D.: The original game was released in 1993 and set in 1999.
Nothing Is Scarier: The combination of Night-time Missions and the Battlescape music is one of the perfect recipes for fear. Simply because the aliens can see clearly in night and the humans can't.
Promoted Fanboy: Otto Zander, the main character behind the XCOM Let's Play trilogy was made into an XCOM hero unit in the remake.
Pyrrhic Victory: Retroactively added in the Apocalypse manual, which stated that soon after the victory on Cydonia, the world goes into the political and economical chaos while X-COM is all but disgracefully disbanded.
Robo Teching: The blaster launcher is a missile launcher that sends it payload to a series of player defined waypoints, making any absurd trajectory possible. However, since the missile can't hit its waypoints with perfect accuracy, the most effective way to use it is to set a waypoint twenty feet above an enemy's head, then another waypoint directly on the enemy, causing the missile to arc over the target, then slam down, ensuring it will explode even if it misses.
The Chryssalids have one permanently. Fitting, really.
Snakemen have a big toothy grin as well, but then again, they don't have any visable lips.
Slippy Slidey Ice World: Arctic and Antarctic missions, thankfully without the slippy slidey part.
Squishy Wizard: Ethereals' bodies have atrophied so much that their self-sustaining functions have to be governed by their immense Psychic Powers. Which does not prevent them from having the best armour values and second best hit point totals among the non-terror unit aliens.
Weaksauce Weakness: Speaking of Sectopods, a misprint in their Encyclopedia Exposita entry means their primary weapon counts as a laser attack (which they're weak to) rather than a plasma attack. Combine that with the fact that 2x2 enemies have to be mind-controlled one block at a time and that blocks controlled by opposing sides can fire on one another...
Controlling part of a Cyberdisk or Sectopod is, in fact, the easiest way to destroy one.
Flying suits will bring aliens with melee only attack, including the fearsome Chryssalids at your mercy.
Zombie Apocalypse: Any Snakeman terror mission can turn into this if nor properly managed, due to those damned Chryssalids. Every civilian or trooper is a potential zombie, and zombies are the larval stage of new Chryssalids.
Terror From The Deep
Achilles Heel: Lobstermen and Triscenes are both hard to destroy and survive several hits from the most powerful weapons. Lobsetermen survive hits due to massive damage reduction despite light armor, and Triscenes rely on their heavy armor. However, they both have a weakness. Lobstermen are vulnerable to stun or melee attacks, and Triscenes have a weak underbelly that won't protect against grenades.
Alien Popsicle: The aliens used cryogenic stasis chambers to remain dormant for thousands of years. You can also sell these chambers as Vendor Trash.
Animal Motifs: The smaller USOs have a manta-like design.
An Ice Person: Hallucinoids are prehistoric jellyfish that were modified to use a powerful chemical freezer. They attack by using a melee attack that literally freezes targets to death.
And I Must Scream: And the sonic screams of the Bio-Drones are very, very painful.
Apocalypse How: Class 3: Failing to stop the aliens means their city-weapon rises from the deeps and kills pretty much everything. When you win, the aliens still have the last laugh, as the destruction of T'leth results in a near Class 4.
Armor Piercing Attack : While there is an "Armour Piercing" damage type, they aren't good at penetrating armor. This job instead applies to Vibro Blades, Thermic Lances, and Heavy Thermic Lances. While you can kill the absurdly heavily armored Lobstermen without them (they take a maximum of 50% damage from most sources), once you realize that they take 200% damage from those weapons, you'll be carrying them with you everywhere.
Artificial Stupidity: Are any of the aliens in a given mission equipped with Sonic Pulsers? They'll also be carrying either a Vibro Blade, Thermic Lance, or Heavy Thermic Lance - and yet they never use them, even if they've run out of Sonic Pulsers.
Bag of Spilling: X-COM was disbanded after the First Alien War thanks to politics of funding nations, reduced to the underwater Elerium salvage team financed by a tycoon, until the arrival of aliens prompts the nations to resume funding.
Blob Monster: The Calcinites, although they were contained in a humanoid diving suit.
Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: The end of Terror From the Deep results in T'leth's destruction spreading chemicals all over the world's oceans and thus snapping a few links off the food chain. Oops.
Cloning Blues: Just about all of the aliens are cloned.
Flying Saucer: What do you get when you take the cyberdisc, miniaturize it, waterproof it, replace the CPU with a still conscious human brain and replace the plasma cannons with a concentrated sound wave generated by said brain's reactions to the inherent agony of the process? The answer is: The Bio-Drones.
There's also the Dreadnought, TFTD's answer to UFO's Battleship, which almost looks exactly like its UFO counterpart, in that it looks like a giant Flying Saucer.
If an explosive object is detonated by a stray shot from a Deep One, the aliens will freeze up and their turn never ends.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: Molecular Control supposedly works through mind control implants, but aliens can control soldiers with no implants just fine.
Glass Cannon: The Tasoths are a varient of this. All Tasoths have potent M.C. abilities, but on lower difficulties, aquanauts with high enough M.C. stats can easily use mind control on them.
Deep Ones possess an attack that can kill an aquanaut in one hit, regardless of armor, but are fairly easy to kill.
Harpoon Gun: Your starting "standard rifle". And it sucks hard.
If It Swims, It Flies: USOs (Unidentified Submersible Objects) and your flying subs that intercept them. Both can fly over land, but your subs cannot fire unless underwater.
It would've been nice to bring in local air forces and then recover the wreck on land with leftover laser weapons.
Not only that, but why can't you use Gauss Cannons or Sonic Oscillators on land either?
Kill It With Ice: Subverted. Freezing weapons, including Thermal Tasers and Thermal-Shok Bombs, are the equivalent of Stun Weapons from Enemy Unknown. Instead of killing targets, they harmlessly freeze them, allowing you to capture aliens.
Lethal Lava Land: Sort of, one of the TFTD combat mission terrains consists of underwater mini-volcanoes leaking cooled lava. They have no effect on your soldiers and enemies, but they do provide illumination in night missions.
Lost Colony: T'Leth is a massive colonizing ship that crashed 65 million years ago.
Make Me Wanna Shout: The Aliens' Sonic Weapons, TFTD's equivalent of UFO's Plasma Weapons. Bonus points for the Bio-Drone, whose sonic beam is based on the original vocal cords of the brain that pilots it, meaning that it literally screams its enemies to death.
No Ontological Inertia: Killing the Big Bad and destroying T'Leth makes all the remaining Zbrite inert, only good enough in large numbers, which is how they managed to send an Avenger to Mars for E-115 prospecting.
Partially justified by the fact that the alien gear needs Elerium, and the rest of the stuff is lasers. Still doesn't explain why they don't keep a few crates of lasers around for land missions, though.
Pyrrhic Victory: Retroactively added in the Apocalypse manual, which states that the Destruction of T'Leth, in addition of killing your elite soldiers, releases the deadly chemicals that instantly kills everything in and around the Gulf of Mexico and turns the rest of the Earth into a toxic wasteland.
Running Gag: A small one amongst veteran Terror players is that bases which see regular combat against the Lobstermen often requisition suspiciously large amounts of butter.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Early versions of the first game had a bug that enforced low difficulty mode. Due to player complaints, the sequel had the challenge rating cranked up - sure the bug was gone, but even "easy" mode was a fair challenge without Save Scumming.
Ship Level: The Cargo/Cruise Ship Terror Mission. They consist of two parts, above deck and below deck, like Cydonia. Plus numerous rooms, narrow corridors and lots of hiding places and you got a recipe for disaster.
Shout Out: The Calcinites in bear a laughable resemblance to the titular antagonist of the B-movie Robot Monster due to them impersonating old-school divers. Enforcer also features a mishmash of resources from two fellow X-COM titles scrapped during its development, Genesis and Alliance.
TFTD is practically made of shout outs, if not direct ripoffs. The Tasoth race are pretty much Lovecraft's Deep Ones (even though there's an entirely different race in the game actually called "Deep Ones"), especially since their original description (which was replaced in the final version of the game) had them being converted humans (much like the aforementioned actual Deep Ones of the final game). The Gill Men are extremely similar visually and thematically to the Gill Man of Creature From The Black Lagoon, as well as being very reminiscent of the Sea Devils and Silurians of Doctor Who. The Great Dreamer, leader of the aliens, who sleeps most of the game away in the sunken spaceship/city called T'leth is, when you finally see him, an expy of Cthulhu, that giant monster/god dude who's slept away most of history in the sunken city called R'lyeh. Oh, and the Tentaculats are, visually, a copy of D'n'D's Grells, but a lot of that sort of thing went on in the early 90's (Doom's cacodemon is almost a direct rip of the artwork for an extraplanar D'n'D monster, for instance, and a good number of landscape tiles from the first two Duke Nukem games are ripped from other platform games from other companies).
Un Winnable: The state of game in which the Tasoth Commander has been researched. Thankfully, patches and mods keep this (and other deadly bugs within the Tech Tree) from happening.
Water Is Air: The Terror from the Deep was directly adapted from the original with no changes, so the characters are able to do ridiculous things like throwing grenades underwater. They also are unable to float or swim (instead just tromping around on the ocean bottom) until you research the equivalent of the flying suit.
On the Geoscape, there are times where your fighter craft/troop transport cannot engage/deliver soldiers due to the (downed/landed) USO being "too deep", presumingly because of water pressure.
Tentaculats: Unlike the UFO Defense counterpart which can damage tanks, Tentaculats can't damage your SWS, and will still stupidly try to attack them anyway to no avail. So always bring one if you are expecting them.
Lobstermen: While even the alien's own Sonic Cannons can barely scratch them, they are surprisingly vulnerable to both melee attack and thermal weapons - if you haven't got the Vibro Blade line of research opened up yet, make sure you pack some Thermal Tazers and/or Thermal Shok Bombs.
Triscenes: They can take some Sonic Cannon punishment, but its non-existent underside armor means a single cheap magna-blast grenade thrown under it will most often kill it.
Abnormal Ammo: Brainsuckers for the... Brainsucker Launcher.
Also, the Entropy Launcher: A bioweapon firing homing missiles which release a compound that will dissolve through armor. It will also dissolve you, should you be unarmored.
The Aesthetics of Technology: The Aliens and their technology are organically ugly. The Mega-Primus city regulations mandates that everything should look retro-futuristic, which is most noticeable on flying cars.
After the End: Thanks to the events of Terror From The Deep, Earth is effectively a wasteland.
Anti Air: Various weapon modules for the ground vehicles.
Cult: The Cult of Sirius, who believe that the Aliens are the saviors of humanity.
Decapitated Army: Averted, you have to destroy the entire alien infrastructure to win.
Deflector Shields: Disruptor Shields, for both individuals and vehicles.
The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Selling a large amount of alien weaponry will result in it showing up in the hands of the various factions in the city, which can be either a very good thing or a very bad thing depending on your relationship with those factions.
Do Well, But Not Perfect: If you're very, very good, the Senate will decide that you're very cost-efficent and will reduce your weekly funding.
Enemy Mine: Factions have a matrix of relationships, and an attack on given faction will cause those who are more hostile to the target to support the attack. If attacking aliens causes relationships to decrease with other corporations, then they like the aliens a bit more than they like X-Com.
Flying Car: Relatively common vehicle type in Apocalypse.
Fun with Acronyms: The fact that a robots' rights group in Apocalypse would call itself the "Sentient Engine Liberation Front" clearly indicates that they deserve more credit than they're given.
Guns Akimbo: The Real Time combat mode allowed this - oddly, turn-based did not; carrying two guns penalized accuracy and only let you fire one at a time. Whilst troopers suffer (sometimes considerable) accuracy penalties for dual-wielding certain large weapons, it's quite feasible to use two autocannons at once if one so chooses. With a bit of tweaking for fully automatic fire and large magazines, you really have to be careful with that Explosive and Incendiary ammo.
Hero Insurance: Averted, you pay for the collateral damage.
Hot Blade: The Power Sword, a powerful blade weapon that is enhanced by a Elerium-powered plasma sheath.
Just Before the End: The aliens invade from a doomed, volcanic planet in another dimension where most other life has been scorched away by the local star's supernova.
Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: You can do this. No, really. Even if every corporation in the city turns against you (either by subversion by the aliens or by hating you for any number of reasons) and the Senate ceases funding and threatens to shut you down, you can keep Fighting For Survival so long as your bank account remains in the positive... and as long as you have a functional base and a steady source of income to sustain your private army, you can go renegade. Want to show the Senate what you think of their threats? Go level half the city.Mwhahahahahahaha!
Sources of said income include: Raiding enemy corporations. Manufacturing and selling alien equipment. Selling captured alien equipment. Acting as a pusher for alien techno-drugs.
It is strongly recommended that you cease employing conventional vehicles as soon as feasibly possible, as alien-derived craft do not require maintenance fees or fuel. Doing so can considerably reduce your maintenance bills.
You cannot make an enemy of Transtellar, however, as they control all public transit. Civilians like your scientists and engineers require public transports to move from base to base, or to bring new hires to your labs. They cannot use your own vehicles for this, which means you can flip off the police, vaporise the assets of the Megacorps and violently depose the government but God help you if you annoy the Taxi drivers.
Another reason for not making enemies out of everyone is that you'll be tormented with frequent base invasions if you annoy someone too much. This invariably results in the death of a few of your unarmed and unarmoured scientists, as well as being extremely irritating.
What this boils down to is: Keep manufacturing equipment with the best profitability margins with your engineers for cash flow; keep raiding companies you don't like for equipment, while making your troops dualwield Devastator cannons and sweeping fire across their maps in real-time combat to make them so poor they cannot afford to raid you.. and keep bribing Transtellar to keep their opinion of you maxed out. You can theoretically level the entire city except for Transtellar.. including the government and the police.
We Sell Everything: Subverted, as it required you to maintain good relations with a variety of Mega Corps to obtain troops, aircraft, weapons, safety from police interference, etc.
Strangely, We Buy Anything is not similarly averted. However, apparently Adam Smith Hates X-COM's Guts, since market prices for player-manufactured items in Apocalypse can only go down.
Weird Trade Union: The various organizations supply their respective goods and personnel to X-COM. Fail to protect them from aliens or just piss them off, and they will stop making business with you.
Interceptor
Apocalypse How: Class 6 and Class X-2: If you fail, the alien superweapon utterly obliterates Earth, leaving a smoldering husk behind. You get to turn the tables on them, though, using the Nova Bomb to cause a supernova in their pocket dimension solar system for an X-2. Technically, you can do it as much as you want, which is a little frightening.
Doomsday Device: The Aliens' Project Doomsday and our own Nova Bombs.
Gone Horribly Right: The cutscene when you complete research on the Nova Bomb, which of course includes a test. The pilot who reports that the test was successful doesn't sound too happy about it. But the player's avatar is.
The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Star system housing the Doomsday project, hidden on the other end of the event horizon of a black hole, not only necessitating your fighter piggybacking on another carrier to get in and out, but justifying the use of the Nova Bomb.
Stop Helping Me!: The scientist in Enforcer will leave you with a pathological need to kill him. Sadly, even at the beginning when you can actually see and shoot him, it has no effect. The Aliens get to him on Medium and Hard difficulties, in the end, but this lacks some satisfaction.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
Alternate Reality Game: Project: Enemy Unknown, also known as "InfiniVac", was started up in 2010 to help draw interest towards the XCOM reboot prior to its official announcement. It was placed on hiatus when 2K began retooling the game, thus delaying its release. Recently, as an attempt to draw much-needed attention to XCOM through a different approach (i.e., average citizens keeping tabs on strange phenomena instead of The Government doing so via the now-defunct InfiniVac Network), 2K started a new ARG called Citizen Skywatch. While news sites and online commentators alike were mostly speculating that the ARG was connected to either GTA 5, Bioshock, or an upcoming game called Agent, despite the heavy implication of UFO-related happenings from the title alone, an explicit link to XCOM was made by the appearance of a Citizen Skywatch section in the XCOM-specific part of 2K's official forums.
Erase The Truth is the latest installment in this particular ARG, coinciding with the reveal that the shooter has been renamed (and retooled) as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
Code Emergency: The InfiniVac Network from Project: Enemy Unknown was on "Code Black Lockdown" for quite some time. This may have been related to a possible alien attack on a Russian defector and an XCOM agent who was escorting him; according to the information that was available on the InfiniVac Network, their remains bore evidence that they might have been killed by the black blobs seen in the 2010 E3 trailer.
Deliberate Values Dissonance: One of your recruiters is a black man, natural during this time period, most of your white american teammates have an issue about that. Likewise, one of the missions involves recruiting a scientist to XCOM who's had his professional career ruined because he's gay.
Development Hell: Delayed to August 2013 as most of the dev team was reassigned to help with Bio Shock Infinite. Even now, it may now be a third-person squad-based downloadable title instead of a physical relase.
It ended up being halfway "undolled", as the official name is now The Bureau, with the only mention of X-Com being relegated to a suffix.
Enemy Mine: Most of your team may not like each other due to very different issues (race, political beliefs, social classes, etc), yet most of them are willing to work together to stop the aliens.
Fan Nickname: Amongst other things, fans of the old games are calling 2K's misuse of the IP "contribution" Xenoshock. It's easier to get your mouth around than Yahtzee Croshaw's suggestion: Custard Pie Fights With Christopher Walken.
Internet Backlash: The official forums for 2K's new "reimagining" are largely filled with fans of the original X-Com series who are hostile to the new game. The rest of the Internet doesn't seem to be much more kindly disposed, including comment threads on review articles and especially commentary at forums like RPG Codex. When the E3 2011 trailer came up, its "like/dislike" meter swiftly shot to being 70% dislikes, and it is currently hovering steadily at that point, with most of the comments on the video being negatively-flavored.
In Name Only: Originally played straight (and accompanied by a significant Internet Backlash); however, recent developments seem to indicate that this particular trope has been averted as - due to the success of XCOM: Enemy Unknown - the game looks to have been changed from a reboot to a pseudo-prequel.
Lost Forever: Choosing one mission over another may cause it to vanish forever.
No True Scotsman: Fans who don't like what they've seen of the shooter are likely to accuse fans who do like what they've seen of not being "true X-Com fans".
Revival: Started out as this, but due to Development Hell and fan backlash, it was pushed back until well after the release of X-COM: Enemy Unknown
Shout Out: According to some of the information received at the beginning of the Erase The Truth ARG, the eponymous Bureau's staff are drawn from both military and civilian agencies, including - amongst others - the Army Rangers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hmm, FBI agents investigating an Alien Invasion of Earth... now why does that sound familiar?
Starfish Aliens: This was one of the central design decisions of the reboot. The team stated that they wanted to create enemies so alien that it was completely impossible to predict their behavior on first encounter. Because of the fan-backlash, this was mostly ditched in favor of humanoid aliens, which itself got a backlash for not bringing back the classic aliens. And now it seems to have come full circle with the newest trailers.
has it edging out fellow Prodigal Son of Microprose Sid Meier's Civilization IV for the Number 1 slot.Not to say the X-COM legacy is a solo act, however. While Gollop's team set to work on X-COM: Apocalypse, an in-house crew at Microprose beat him to the punch with X-COM: Terror From The Deep in 1995, a Mission Pack Sequel created to satiate player demand for more alien-assaulting action. Apocalypse hit the shelves in 1997, to mixed reviews due to its Art Shift into pseudo-3D futuristic graphics and the clunkiness of a newly-introduced real-time option for playing missions. The last days of Microprose (and its acquisition by Hasbro Interactive) saw X-COM trying to get back on its feet with two Genre Shifted offerings: X-COM: Interceptor (1998) kept the base management elements while swapping out the strategy missions for space-bound Flight Simulator action, while X-COM: Enforcer (2001) ditched the strategy part outright to make a First-Person Shooter running parallel to the timeline of UFO Defense. Sadly, neither had the mystique of their ancestors, and are often shunted away from canon due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change.While the possibility of a future X-COM game continued an infinitely long march towards zero due to the license being passed through a variety of incapable hands throughout the 2000s, the earlier games attracted a variety of player-made mods and remake attempts in numerous stages of completion. Various Spiritual Successors also exist, such as UFO: Aftermath and its sequels Aftershock and Afterlight (unrelated to the game UFO listed above), the Game Boy Advance sleeper Rebelstar: Tactical Command, Laser Squad: Nemesis (in and of itself a sequel to X-COM's own predecessor Laser Squad) and UFO: Extraterrestrials
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