X-COM: Interceptor is a multi-genre spacefighter aerial combat/business simulation shooter-strategy game produced by MicroProse in 1998, the fourth instalment of the classic X-COM series, and the first of multiple oddities in the series — the first to not be a RTS, the first to have voice acting, the first to not be developed with Mythos Games, and the first to feature the player taking direct control of a character rather than being a non-entity commander. It is a Interquel set between the events of X-COM: Terror from the Deep and X-COM: Apocalypse, making it chronologically the third game in the series.
It's the year 2067, and the Earth's natural resources are pretty much all gone. To prevent the utter decay of civilization, the major corporations of Earth venture into space — an area known as "The Frontier" — to find the raw materials required for humans. Unfortunately, some of humanity's old enemies from the first game are already in the neighbourhood when the corporations arrived, and they have plans of their own for the resources of the Frontier. Plans that could very well mean the end of the human race.
The player takes command of an elite force that has been created to fight the aliens in space. Unlike previous games in the series, the game is primarily a space combat simulator, with the player flying starfighters to protect the human corporations set up to gather resources in the Frontier. The player also acts in the role of X-COM commander in the region, managing bases, resources, and the organisation's financial standing. The player also needs to capture and research alien technology in order to improve human technology and discover the reason for the aliens' interest in the region.
X-COM: Interceptor provides examples of:
- Alien Invasion: Averted for the first time in the series. This time, humans are the ones invading the aliens' turf.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The aliens can't actually take over your bases this time, but they can attack them and destroy valuable modules like hangers and storage facilities. If enough damage is sustained, the base will explode and take everything it had to the void. Inversely, you can do this to the aliens as well, and one of your first weapon upgrades, the Fusion Torpedo, is stated to be extremely good at blowing up bases.
- Apocalypse How: If you fail, the alien superweapon utterly obliterates Earth, leaving a smouldering husk behind. You get to turn the tables on them, though, by using the Nova Bomb to cause a supernova in their pocket dimension solar system. Whether or not you've actually found it or are just blowing up every system you come across trying to find.
- Armor Is Useless: Averted: armor is what protects your ship if your shields fail. While the initial armor is lackluster, you can eventually get Tri-Titanium armor, and then further upgrade to Trans-Dermal armor for the best protection with no drawbacks.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: The Permeator Missile's claim to fame is that only half of its damage it expended on the shields of the target; the other half hits the target directly. If the target doesn't have any shields, the Permeator will inflict it's not-inconsiderable damage entirely to the target, making it a powerful anti-shield counter.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Nova Bomb is this trope incarnate. Capable of snuffing out a star and its associated planets with a single shot, and destroying or killing everything in that system. That being said, it's a literal star destroyer in a game where you're supposed to be protecting the Frontier so that Earth can get the resources that are being mined from it. Blowing up those stars and planets doesn't exactly help with that mission. And each Nova Bomb is prohibitively expensive anyway.
- The Heavy Laser is very impractical: it has the highest possible damage per shot in the game, putting it on par with the Phase Cannon in terms of damage, but it has a very slow firing rate, a short range, and it draws more power than any other weapon except the Psi-Beam. Using the Heavy Laser will inflict terrible damage, but you won't get off more than a few shots before you have to wait for your power to recharge.
- Awesome Personnel Carrier: The pinnacle of personnel carriers in the series is the UGS MacArthur, which is the only ship capable of travelling through the black hole that hides the alien systems, and what your fighter craft has to piggyback on to launch the decisive Nova Bomb. On a lesser extent, there's the Patton-Class Research Cruiser.
- BFG: All the craft weapons in the game, by virtue of being mounted on planes rather than carried by soldiers.
- Boring, but Practical: The Gatling Laser does little damage per shot but shoots much faster than any other weapon in the game, which helps with fast moving targets, while the Plasma Cannon drains more energy, but has better range and damage than most of the laser weapons. You can get Plasma Cannons relatively quicklynote and Gatling Lasers are available before you even get into a single firefight if you prioritize the research on it. Both will last you a surprising majority of the game.
- For missiles, the X-Winder Missile is incredibly boring: it's relatively slow and weak, and not very agile. But you can take up to five per weapon mount, while all other offensive missile weapons max out at four or less. Forcing an enemy to behave evasively due to being chased by a missile is almost as valuable as hitting them with the missile, especially during defensive missions, and the X-Winder Missile is very cheap compared to later missile weapons.
- Brain Monster: The Psilords.
- Cool Plane: All the fighter spaceships in the game, from the X-1A Lightning II Interceptor to the Superdynamics S-2 Firestar Interceptor, and then to the Marsec M-3 Super Avenger Interceptor and finally the Cybermove Systems Star Ranger!
- Cutscene Power to the Max: In the introductory cutscene, a battle between XCOM and the aliens is going poorly as the aliens are attacking a starbase. One XCOM fighter hits a UFO with a missile that makes it go out of control and smash into the starbase, causing a massive explosion that's implied to destroy the starbase entirely. In game, smashing a full strength ship into a starbase will barely scratch the paint, and a UFO that's been shot down explodes quickly without actually doing any damage. Finally, destroying a starbase requires concentrated firepower and probably a few torpedoes, so a single UFO crashing into a base would at best damage a module, not blow up the entire ship.
- Deflector Shields: Everyone has them, though the aliens develop new versions quickly. Fortunately, you can reverse engineer their new versions just as quickly.
- Disc-One Nuke: The Gatling Laser, if you're good enough with it. It's not as powerful as the Standard Laser or Heavy Laser, but it shoots so much faster than either that it will chew through standard shields and basic armor plating like nothing else (providing far more damage-per-second, even with a lower damage rating). Even the Plasma Cannon, the first alien weapon you typically get in the game, can't keep up with it. You'll likely be using nothing else until the aliens start using tier 2 shields and armor, and even then, it's still an excellent weapon.
- Doing Research: Averted, for the first time in the series. Research is completed immediately by the Galactic Science Group — what you're doing is downloading the files, the speed of which is determined by your bandwidth and the size of the files you're downloading. For some reason, you still need to have the prerequisite files on hand in order to be able to download the files that use that research (such as requiring a download of the Cold Fusion file before allowing you to download the Fusion Torpedo file).
- Doomsday Device: The aliens' mysterious Doomsday Project. You get to turn the tables on them with your own Doomsday Device, the Nova Bomb.
- Doppleganger Spin: The Doppleganger Missile does no damage, but instead creates a projection that looks like a copy of your ship, to draw fire and let you break away to attack from an unexpected direction.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: What the aliens will do if you don't manage to defeat them. You get to turn the tables on them with a Nova Bomb, which is designed to take out a star and everything orbiting it.
- Easy Logistics: Averted and played straight at the same time.
- It's averted in that you don't have any manufacturing capabilities in your bases. Anything you need is purchased from the corporations that exist in the Frontier; they manufacture it and transport it to your base, and that takes time. In addition, logistics trains can (and will) be attacked by both sides: your freighters are vulnerable (and you can spend money to give them escorts) when in transit, and the corporation processing platforms and bases can be attacked at any time, but you can also find alien freighters and attack them and doing so is required to find out about their Doomsday Device, as well as attacking their processing platforms and bases to slow their expansion.
- But played straight because you never need to worry about fuel, except for actually getting to the location. Once you're there, you can fight and maneuver forever, and never worry about your fuel status.
- Game-Breaking Bug: The game was originally designed to run on Windows 98, and on any version after that, it introduces a bizarre bug. Attempting to destroy an alien data jammer probe will cause you to spawn into a mission where the probe is always directly behind you according to your scanners. You can't actually see it because it doesn't actually spawn into the mission, so you can't destroy it. Leaving the mission is considered a failure, and the probe endures, reducing your research rate. A fan made patch fixes the issue by preventing aliens from launching data jammer probes at all.
- Gaiden Game: The events of Interceptor are completely disconnected from the events of XCOM Apocalypse (unless you lose) and not referenced by it at all.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: The manual for the game states that the First and Second Alien Wars lasted 3 and 6 years, respectively. In-game, you'll likely reach the limit of your research and win or lose within the first year, early second if things drag out.
- Genre Shift: From Turn Based Tactical with a strategic global layer, to a Flight Simulator with a significantly simplified strategic layer. The effectiveness of the shift is widely debated.
- Gravity Sucks: Black holes exist on the strategic map. Their primary purpose is to serve as dangerous obstacles: probes that are too close to black holes will get sucked in and destroyed before they would normally expire, and ships flying too close to them risk getting drawn in if you're not paying attention. The aliens suffer the same weakness, which makes is especially odd when your first hint of the aliens' plot is that they're flying supply fleets into black holes directly. Turns out they're using black holes to access their pocket dimension, in which their super weapon is being created. Getting there and destroying the super weapon becomes your ultimate goal.
- Home Base: The player bases, just like in the previous games, although this time they're space station colonies rather than underground military bases.
- Infinity +1 Sword: In addition to the M-3 Super Avenger being the best interceptor available, some of the weapons are the best you'll want to use, massively outclassing their other counterparts.
- For beam weapons, the most powerful weapon is the Phase Cannon, which in addition to having the longest possible range, does as much damage as a Heavy Laser for a third of the energy cost and at a faster rate of fire to boot.
- For missile weapons, the most powerful weapon is the Fusion Torpedo, but it's too slow for dogfighting (intended for base busting). Instead the most powerful weapon ends up being the Sidestep Missile, which doesn't do the most conventional damage (that would be the Enveloping Fusion Missile), but is so agile that it simply cannot be dodged: a Sidestep Missile that's fired is all but guaranteed to hit its target eventually. Other missiles are stronger, have better range, or do something mechanically unusual, but the Sidestep Missile's unerring accuracy makes it much better than all of them.
- Interquel: Interceptor takes place just before the events of XCOM Apocalypse, as indicated in the news reports you get every week.
- Lured into a Trap: The aliens will send probes just like you do, and it is generally in your interest to shoot them down. Most of the time, a probe destruction mission only requires that you get in range of the probe, blow it up, and go home. As the game progresses, however, it becomes increasingly likely that the aliens will use the probe as a trap: after destroying it, three to seven UFOs will spawn in an start attacking immediately. The mission is still considered a victory for accomplishing the objective, but you might not make it back if you don't jump to hyperspace immediately.
- Trap Is the Only Option: Because the aliens can use Data Jammer Probes, which slows your research download speed, whether or not it's a trap, you have to go blow it up.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Invoked by the Parallax Torpedo: when it gets within 250 meter of the target, it seemingly splits into three warheads. However, two of the warheads are fake, decoys to draw fire so that the real missile can hit the target.
- Mind Control: The specialty of the Psi-Beam weapon: when fired at a target, it has a chance to cause the target's loyalties to shift to the opposite side for a limited time. The chance of success depends on both the attacker and the defender's psionic strength, and the effect is relatively limited in duration. PsiLords absolutely love to spam it against your fighters. When you use it, however, the power drain is immense, so spamming is out of the question.
- Multiple Endings: There are three possible endings in the game.
- Failure: either XCOM gets decommissioned for failing to protect the Frontier (having a negative score) for too many months in a row, or all the corporations pull out of the Frontier (all outposts are destroyed). The aliens, no longer opposed, complete their superweapon and unleash it on Earth, killing humanity.
- Bad End Victory: You succeed in destroying the alien pocket dimension with the Nova Bomb, but you don't get back to the UGS MacArthur in time, or it gets destroyed before you get back to it. Humanity celebrates their victory, but it's tempered by the loss of the people that made it possible.
- Golden Ending: You succeed in destroying the alien pocket dimension with the Nova Bomb and manage to escape back through the black hole to normal space. Humanity celebrates their overwhelming victory, and the Frontier is secured for future exploitation.
- My Brain Is Big: Sectoids, as per usual. The Ethereals' redesign makes their brain so big it looks like it needs air-cooling. The newly-introduced Psilords are also pretty much all-brain.
- Next Tier Power-Up: Every single item in the game (except weapons) has three tiers:
- Basic armor is weaker than Tri-Titanium armor which is weaker than Trans-Dermal armor.
- Scanners come in three tiers, each tier increasing the lock-on speed and range, as well as the detection radius on the strategic map.
- Basic engines are fine, but the Gravity/Induction Drive increases the range of your interceptors, as well as the speed on the strategic map, and the Graviton Pulse Drive makes you incredibly fast everywhere.
- The interceptors themselves, on both sides, have three tiers:
- The X1-A Lightning II is the basic XCOM fighter and can only mount two beam weapons and two missile weapons, in addition to reaching max speed on the second tier engine and having limited "optional" part attachment points. It's replaced by the S-2 Firestar, which can mount two more beam weapons, one more missile weapon, and twice as many optional parts, while also boasting a big boost to hull strength (from 100 to 250). The best XCOM interceptor is the M-3 Super Avenger, which can mount four beam weapons and four missile weapons, 50% more optional parts than the Firestar, another massive boost to hull strength (400), and it is also the only ship that can use the Nova Bomb.
- For the aliens, the basic ship is the Wraith, which is very fast and nimble, but cannot take damage well: it will dodge missiles with impunity, but if it gets tagged by anything more powerful than a standard laser, it will be hurting. The Spectre is more heavily armored and armed, at the cost of some speed and agility. The Phantasm is (comparatively) very slow, very sturdy, only piloted by the very best (Aereons and Psilords), mounts more weapons than any other fighter in the game, and can attack in any direction, preventing chase tactics.
- Even base modules get in on the act: your downlink modules, which speed your research, have three tiers, with each improvement being slightly better than the last.
- Non-Lethal Warfare: The purpose of the Tachyon Pulser, which disables enemy ships without damaging them, though it still has to penetrate shields first (and doesn't do a lot of damage to shields, just to make things more complicated).
- Old-School Dogfight: The conceit of the game is that, unlike previous games, you're not fighting hand-to-hand, but rather ship-to-ship. Engagement ranges are generally within a few kilometers, with the longest ranged beam weapon has a max range of 5 kilometers, and missiles, while having a long running range, still require that you be within scanner range to lock on, which is generally limited to 10 kilometers at the most. Expect a lot of combat maneuvering.
- Pacifist Run: Averted — unlike in the previous three games, this isn't possible, specifically because you can't disable enemy ships until you get the appropriate weaponry, which requires that you capture it from enemy ships.
- Race Against the Clock: Technically averted: in theory, the aliens are constantly working towards their goal of building the Planet Destroyer to raze Earth. In practice, you can take as much time as you need, as long as you don't go bankrupt. There is a time limit that can be extended by destroying alien Ore Processing Platforms, bases, and supply convoys, but the time limit is so generous as to be functionally meaningless anyway.
- Remember the New Guy?: The game only has five alien races encountered, and two of them are entirely new — the Aereons, a race of green-skinned cyborgs who are the best pilots of the alien forces, and the Psilord, a Brain Monster terror unit who has Psychic Powers far beyond even the Ethereals.
- Settling the Frontier: The region of space in which the game takes place in is explicitly called "The Frontier", and is stated to be a particularly resource-rich area, which is why the humans are trying to set up resource outposts and more permanent installations. Unfortunately, it's also why the aliens are trying to set up resource outposts and more permanent installations, and why X-COM is there to fight them.
- Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Sectoids are the least capable of enemies, followed by Mutons, Psilords, Ethereals and Aereons. Additionally, you start off fighting Wraiths, which are fast but weak, and escalate to Spectres and Phantasms.
- Star Killing: The Nova Bomb.
- Super-Soldier: The Psilords and Aereons.
- Telepathic Spacemen: The Sectoids, Psilords and Ethereals.
- Too Dumb to Live: As you score successes against the aliens, more corporations will establish outposts in the Frontier. However, their main concern is profitability, and they have zero problem building an outpost well outside XCOM's sphere of influence. If and when the aliens attack the outpost, your only choice will be to watch it burn as you're unable to get ships there in time to do anything. And then the corporation blames you for being unable to respond to the alien threat.
- Tractor Beam: Available as mount on your interceptors. The primary use is to tow disabled alien ships back to base for research after combat is concluded, but you can use it to grab any one disabled ship and bring it back without completing the combat if you need to. Any surviving disabled UFO at the end of combat is automatically captured, no Tractor Beam needed.
- 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 a Awesome Personnel Carrier to get in and out, but justifying the use of the Nova Bomb.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Once you have unlocked the Nova Bomb, there is nothing stopping you from using it however you want. In some cases it might even be more advantageous to do so, as alien outposts and ore processing platforms are generally heavily guarded, but stars are easy pickings and wipe out the entire system around them. Though by that point, you're being needlessly cruel as you've already hit the endgame, and you're just wasting time and resources blowing up stars for fun.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Floaters and Snakemen, as well as the terror units used by the Martians, don't appear in the game.
- You Don't Look Like You: The Ethereals
◊. Rather than the cloaked mages with hideously atrophied, unusuable bodies in the first game, now they're capable of sustaining life functions (including sight) without their Psychic Powers, don't cover their faces, and look more like a tall, skeletal Sectoid with Scary Teeth.
