Video Game / UFO: After Blank

aka: UFO Aftershock

We're gonna take a wild guess here and say it might be about aliens.

In May 2004, mankind achieved first contact. Or rather, aliens, named Reticulans, strolled over to Earth, ignored all attempts to make contact, and dumped a copious amount of spores into the atmosphere as a means of hello. A week later, the spores, having rapidly multiplied, fell en masse to the surface, choking the life out of the planet. The few survivors of the devastation gathered together with one purpose in mind: to extend a proper thanks to the visitors.

Thus begins the story of UFO: Aftermath, the first game in the UFO: After Blank series by Altar Interactive (officially, it's known as the "UFO" series, but you know the Internet). Considered the Spiritual Successor to the X-Com series, the UFO: After Blank games combine a geoscape-like view of the planet for strategic planning, and tactical squad-based action for missions. Research and development are extremely important for advancement. In many respects, the game is similar to X-COM, but the addition of real-time tactical missions, as well as a unique strategic game focused more on territory than resources and a complex story, sets the game apart from X-COM. Unfortunately, the series does not break from the X-COM tradition of crippling bugs and glitches. This got worse with the sequels, which were often rendered unwinnable.

UFO: Aftermath was followed up by the sequel UFO: Aftershock, which actually continues from the bad ending of the previous game. The sequel then produced a sequel/simultaneous-quel of its own, UFO: Afterlight, set on Mars as brave colonists attempt to terraform the planet into a new Earth while defending against a multitude of aggressors.

Despite the bugs, the games are probably the most dignified competitors for the title of "Spiritual Successor to X-COM", with Afterlight being often praised for approaching X-COM's level of complexity and depth. Note, however, that compared to other strategy games, all three are Nintendo Hard, at least during the first stages.

The whole trilogy can be bought on Steam or without DRM from GOG.com.

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Provides examples of:

• A Commander Is You: Essentially the humans are the brute force faction, especially in the first game. The weapons they have tend to have the highest base damage or greatest rate of fire and their armour is highly protective, but this comes at the cost of being very heavy. That's because humans build their equipment (including their alien-based tech) on a bigger scale to overcome the primitiveness of their tech. The brute force of the humans' oversized tech is one of the big advantages over the other factions^note Reticulans build weapons for sleekness and rapid production (using alien tech), but they are almost always weaker than the more primitive human tech: a Reticulan laser rifle does less damage than a human laser rifle. The Wargots and Beastmen use big, powerful weapons, but have terrible firing rates and poor accuracy, whereas human weapons using similar technology do less damage per shot, but fire faster and/or are more accurate. Even human psionic technology has advantages over alien tech: human tech is designed to either work despite lower aptitude (humans are not as psionically gifted as Reticulans or Starghosts, which means their psi amps have to be more powerful by default), or they're designed to completely nullify psionic abilities, which no other race even attempts.
• Action Bomb: The Ballon Fish and Spore Blower Transgenants in Aftermath can only attack by getting close and exploding. They're especially deadly when indoors.
• After the End: Aftermath begins roughly one year after 70-80% of the life on the planet was killed by the alien bioweapon.
• Alien Autopsy: Alien corpses can be studied to determine the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their species.
• Alien Invasion: Well, yes. Noteworthy for a halfway plausible reason for to make the aliens defeatable, namely that they're a doomsday cult on the run from a benevolent alien empire; they used a stolen ship and fled through the gateway to Earth (blowing it up in the process) in an unprecedented act of insubordonation. As such, they are limited to what they could make off with. In fact, their master plan is in part to put themselves in a position of strength before the authorities can crawl back to Earth at sub-light speeds and install a new portal into the solar system. Their plan was to cover the Earth with a giant mutagenic organism that would become sentient and near-godlike when it covered the whole planet; they intended to use this organism, the Biomass, to gain the upper hand against their pursuers, if they could control it. At least that's what they thought they were doing.
  • Aftershock takes place 50 after humanity had made peace with the Reticulans and given them control of the Earth. In-game, due to a first-unknown catastrophe, the Reticulans are in a feral, animal-like state, while the human refugees from an orbiting space-station (built as part of the peace treaty) try to take back the Earth. All of a sudden, an object shows up at the edge of the Solar System, and you get an ominous timer counting down to the imminent invasion. This new race, The Wargots, are on a sort of religious pilgrimage/crusade to Earth, and ally with a bunch of human cultist nutjobs down on Earth. Later, a second, similar starship shows up, carrying a third race called the Starghosts to Earth, who proceed to attempt to sterilize the planet.
    • After a lot of research, you get to the bottom of the riddle: the "starships" used by the Wargots and Starghosts are actually gigantic asteroid-like interstellar organisms that use their enormous psychic powers to enslave entire civilizations and use them to fight in a cosmic-scale mating ritual. The Wargots and Starghosts came here in a male "Myrmecol" (like the ant-colony plants on Earth), while the Reticulans had a female with them. The female made the Reticulans cover Earth in Biomass, and when it was complete, in "screamed" across the entire universe, bringing the males to Earth to compete for the female. That "scream" was what drove the Reticulans planet-side insane, crippled the ones on Mars, and gave the humans psychic powers and cyber-compatible mutations.
  • Afterlight and Aftershock have those Reticulan authorities show up. In Afterlight you can either kick their heads in or work with them; either way, that portal is not still getting built within the context of the game, and if you kick their heads in, maybe not at all.
  • Also, in Afterlight, the Beastmen look like they were invading at first, using Martian hyperspace portals, while the "Martians" are waking up from stasis because the humans tripped over their defense robots. It turns out that The Beastmen are the original Mars residents; the "Martians" actually came to Mars in a male Myrmecol many millennia before, defeated the Beastmen, and banished to some far-off hellhole using the portals. The Beastmen are now coming back, to brutally reclaim their old home.
• Applied Phlebotinum: inverted - in Afterlight, the humans' Mars base has a super-advanced alien transport ship that has been converted to run on fossil fuels instead of the standard Reticulan energy cells. The characters do wonder about the reason Mars has fossil fuels, but go along with it^note the research project examining the existence of fossil fuel appears to only be for the purposes of upgrading your base power supply from solar energy to a fossil fuel plant, but is required for some research projects much later in the game: the lead scientist at the time just says that it's an interesting bit of information, but draws no conclusions. They have things to do. It's the first of many indications that something else is at work.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Some conventional weapons have Armor Piercing ammunition. The Warp Weapons take this to the extreme, since they are able to completely phase through armor, and in fact do more damage the heavier the armor the target is wearing.
• Art Shift: The artwork and character design became increasingly cartoonish as the series progressed.
• Asshole Victim: The Beastmen were kicked off of Mars and onto a distant planet after the green "Martians" invaded the planet in a Myrmecol mating ritual. When the human explorers accidentally activated the portals to said distant planet, the Beastmen Jumped at the Call to reclaim their old home in a genocidal crusade against everyone on the planet.
• Attack Drone: You can use these in UFO: Aftershock.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Heavy Power Armor in Aftermath. Provides a lot of protection and allows you to use powerful heavy-armor-only weapons, but limits you to a walking speed, and generally is only available after the Reticulans introduce Warp weapons, which cause more damage if the target is wearing more armor. Heavy Armor has a Warp weapon protection level of 0%, and warp weapons almost never miss. However, the armor is required to carry and set up collapsible weapons, which are by far the best guns in the game, with their superb performance outweighting all the downsides of the armor required to use them.
  • The flamethrower in Aftermath does 2400 damage in a game where 70 is pretty decent. However it takes some time to come out in a real-time game, has awful range and it lays down a lingering blaze that can easily cause friendly fire, including to the person who was using the flamer. Another contender in the same game, is the Warp Detonator. Nothing can match the 6000 damage it can dish out, but it's a slow weapon to activate and the range is so low, that you're likely going to be in melee range before you're close enough to use it.
  • Mines and traps for the Technician class in Aftershock and throwing weapons for Rangers, all those mentioned items do heavy damage. But bad enough that they're one-shot use items in a game with limited inventory, they have other limitations. Mines and traps would be great in a turn-based game, but in a RT game (even with pause) it's EXTREMELY time-wasting to have a character lay down a mine or trap, especially since these weapons rely on placement for a charging enemy but so many battles take place at sniper rifle range. Throwing weapons have high base damage, but their type of damage is the one most commonly resisted and the range for all throwing weapons are extremely short. You're better off carrying another clip of ammo or a grenade instead.
  • In Afterlight, Wargot plasma weapons are the earliest plasma weapons you can use. They should be pretty useful for their high base damage, common availability and coming in at time when enemies show up that are resistant to normal bullets. The problem is that they're extremely heavy, and they're both inherently inaccurate and have an accuracy penalty for humans, as they are designed for an entirely different physiology. Ultimately, you're better off sticking with human-made ballistic weapons and using More Dakka, until you can develop your own plasma weaponry.
• Base on Wheels: The Laputa in Aftershock, which overlaps with Flying Fortress.
• Bee-Bee Gun: The Deathbellows. See also Demonic Spiders.
• BFG: The first game is just loaded with them, from guns that are collapsible turrets and arm-mounted miniguns to gigantic missile launchers and sniper rifles. The second game have highly inefficient Wargot weapons and the third has the two warp cannons that your allies from Earth send to you.
• Belated Happy Ending: The good ending for Afterlight. Similar stormy climb as the bad ending... but this time, the clouds part over an intact colony, surrounded by green and water. As the music swells, the armored man hears a beep... which, instead of his oxygen warning, is his environmental scanner notifying him the atmosphere is finally safe. This refugee, who was but a child when Earth was lost to humanity, retracts his visor, takes a moment to breathe in the air. and basks in the rainfall around him as the cinematic zooms out on a terraformed Mars.
• Body Horror: Transgenants, even at their tamest mutations, are pretty hard to look at considering the severity of their physical deformities and alterations. The Morelmen and Cudgels are growing gigantic tumors that are overtaking the rest of their bodies, the entirety of the Danglefly's lower mass has been transformed into an insect-like creature while the human portion atrophies, and the Plectons are an amalgam of multiple humans fused together, kept stable by spiny protrusions acting as legs.
• Boom, Headshot!: Level 3 Sniper Training in Aftershock will let your snipers target the torso, arms, legs, or head of humanoids. The latter has... predictable effects when combined with an M82;
  Boomer critically hit Morelman (14193 damage)
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Regular assault rifles and sniper rifles can serve you very well for the first half of Aftermath and remain viable weapons for fast troops later on, especially once your troops get their rifles/marksmanship up high enough. Even the basic Remington sniper rifle can take down most transgenants and Reticulans quickly at long range, at least until you encounter Deathbellows. However, half-way through assault rifles are hit hard with So Last Season, being both woefully underpowered for encountered enemies and outshined by fancy sci-fi weapons and portable auto-cannons.
    • This is especially notable in case of humble HK G3 assault rifle. It's accessible from the very start and in quantity, but due to combination of various characteristics it remains the best weapon of the first two phases of the game and only becomes underpowered by the time Biomass shows up.
  • In Aftershock, you start with a limited number of energy weapons, and have to build your own ballistic weapons. However, the ballistic weapons are powerful against almost every enemy type, and can be heavily modified with special ammo and modifications that make them even more powerful: a modded XM-8 assault rifle can devastate just about every enemy you come up against. As a result, ballistic weapons remain viable and effective even when you have laser and plasma weaponry.
  • In Afterlight, ballistic weapons again fall into this category. Every enemy type has a weakness and for most of them, it's not ballistic weapons^note Robots are weak to lasers, Beastmen are weak to plasma, Martians are weak to slashing attacks and electricity, for example. However, Ballistic weapons are easy to produce, cheap to maintain, and again can sport a number of relatively-easy-to-produce modifications^note including silencers, which make Beastman and Reticulan base assaults much more tactical, and while no enemies are weak to Ballistic damage, there's also very few enemies that can withstand a concentrated barrage of bullets. Even tough, high HP enemies like the Mech will be taken down very quickly by 7 soldiers setting up a firing line and shooting basic assault rifles in three-round bursts.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Happens in Aftershock and Afterlight, in Aftershock your Laputians are only armed with a couple of so-so Reticulan laser weapons and a bit of ammo for them. You quickly encounter Earth factions carrying far more firepower with their aging AK-47s and M-60s, so you'll want research how to make your own. In Afterlight, your martian colonists are only carrying Scientific Lasers and a couple of old guns like a F2000 and a Desert Eagle. Your scientists will reverse-engineer these guns to get some new generic designs based on them.
• Can't Catch Up: If soldiers can't catch up literally (low speed ratings), they often wind up showing up at firefights too late to kill anything and thus can't catch up figuratively (no kills means no leveling up).
  • Simply participating in a mission does give a small amount of XP in Aftershock and Afterlight. In fact, depending on specialization, you might not want a soldier to have a high agility rating (snipers, for example, have incredibly long ranges, and don't need to get into a firefight in the first place).
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: In the third game, priorities are changing constantly to resolve issues that arise. At the beginning of the game, developing enough weapons to defend yourself is paramount, which requires expanding rapidly to secure the limited resources you need, such as metal, fuel, chemicals and crystals. Environmental hostility then forces research of more protective suits and terraforming to try to counter it, and more advanced technologies then require greater access to resources to develop. During all of this, your main enemies are the Beastmen, which requires you to develop more powerful weapons to defeat them and the skills to raid their territories. Eventually, you'll come into conflict with the Reticulans, who are differently vulnerable, and the Martians, who require entirely different methods and weapons to battle. By the end of the game, your focus shifts back to military weapons and tactics as you attempt to defeat the last of the Beastmen.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Without the HWPs and high casualty rates of X-COM, this tends to happen to every soldier you command as long as their Speed and Capacity ratings aren't already more than two levels behind the squad maximum.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The ZVI OP Falcon sniper rifle, a clunky-looking gun with shotgun power at rifle ranges, a two-bullet magazine, and enough time between shots and/or reloads for a Reticulan to fuck up your vantage point with an incendiary rocket.
  • Laser weaponry in Aftermath sounds good; Frickin' Laser Beams with a very high rate of fire. But its low single-shot damage output tends to let the enemy return fire before they're killed so you'll generally reach for the plasma and gatlings instead.
  • Afterlight tends to avert this: instead of using old-model bullet weapons, you only have a pistol, rifle, sniper, and shotgun model for projectile weapons. After the incredible amount of choices available in Aftershock, this seems like a step back, until you realize that those four models are really all you need (barring laser/plasma/explosive weaponry, of course).
  • Most weapons beyond the slug-throwing kind are this. Warp, Plasma, Laser, Electric, all energy weapons will meet enemies with resistances to that damage type, but bullets are effective against basically everything baring the Martians from Afterlight.
• Copy Protection: Physical copies of Aftershock are protected by StarForce, known for its malware-esque modus operandi. Thankfully, every legitimate digital version (and obviously, most of the illegitimate ones) has shaken this off.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Averted in the "carry up to the limit, then take penalties from the excess" sense. Of course, when you're carrying one of the Heavy Armor-mounted weapons or the 50kg Project Dreamland server, all bets are off anyway.
• Cue the Sun: Used in the intro for Aftershock, just when the Laputa refugees find the second Laputa.
• Damage Typing: In Afterlight, this ranged from stun damage that's quickly recovered, to damage that may only be recovered once the unit returns to the hospital.
• Deflector Shields: Some Reticulan Armor Suits have shields. You can also manufacture shield generators and install them onto armor suits in Aftershock.
• Difficult, but Awesome: In Aftermath, the Heavy Armor starts off as liability. It's extremely heavy which uses up a lot of your max weight capacity and slows down all but the strongest soldiers. Worse yet, it prevents a character from running or crouching and it's poor protection against Reticulan warp weaponry. But when your soldiers have near max stats, the Heavy Armor becomes incredible because it allows you to use collapsible and gatling class weaponry effectively. The Infinity +1 Sword weapon is the Collapsible Machine Gun and with it fully deployed, NO ENEMY can withstand the weapon's incredible range and damage or its rate of fire. With Warp Resonators, Collapsible Plasma Cannon and etc., enemies just don't last long enough to fight back. Even enemies with warp weapons don't provide any threat, as you can gun them down before they can activate their weapons.
  • Grenades and rocket launcher type weapons, unlike the original X-Com, the UFO series is real-time which makes the use of these weapons difficult to coordinate and use effectively. Grenades have a variable detonation time and neither grenades or rockets are hit-scan weapons, so your enemy has a good chance of leaving or getting killed by a shooter before the explosive arrives. Despite that, these weapons are still very useful once you get the hang of them - they have great hitting power and area effect plus grenades are your only weapon able to arc over walls.
• Game Breaking Bugs: If commentary on the Let's Play thereof is to be believed, Aftershock is chock full of these. Known horror stories include saved games corrupted across an entire game profile, destruction of system files, and the uninstallation of anything running in the background, including Steam (currently the best way to get the After Blank games legally). (The Goons seem to applaud Aftershock for getting rid of one user's iTunes processes, though.) To top it off, because the company that made Aftershock went bankrupt and dispersed, no one has the rights to make any more patches after the current latest patch (which barely made a dent), it seems likely that at least some of these issues are due to physical copies of the UFO games often having Starforce DRM, an infamously terrible DRM that bricks modern systems. (Which the digital versions thankfully remove.)
  • The underbarrel grenade/plasma launcher attachments corrupt save data in Aftershock
  • If you're too aggressive against the Cult and wipe out all of their bases before researching their collaboration with the Wargots, you'll never be able to proceed past that point. Speaking of which, if you hold off on researching vital techs, you can quite handily prepare yourself for major upcoming events... though that might be good for for some.
    • This particular bug has been "fixed". If you wipe out the last Cult stronghold before they're supposed to be wiped out, they'll randomly reappear on three base provinces. Any three base provinces. Including yours.
  • Aftermath has a very nasty one, because you might not even know it's a bug, frantically looking for the solution. Namely, after Biomass is introduced, you need to take sample of it and put it into research and in no time you can repell it. If the bug kicks in, you can't take the sample. Never. Meaning you will take all those extra-hard missions in infested locations for nothing, watching in despair as more and more of Earth is covered, finally taking all your bases down.
    • While the Current Steam/GOG versions are pretty patched up, the disc versions of at least Afterlight suffered from save corruptions and multiple broken tech trees.
• Determinator: Humanity's hat in this universe. Every other race in the galaxy is more advanced, or more numerous, or simply more powerful, but humanity wins out every time because they just won't give up.
  • It certainly helps that humanity has the remarkable ability to make use of any new technology in a disturbingly short time. The best advice the aliens could have used would have been to outfit their weapons with self-destruct mechanisms. As it is, they can expect any new-to-humans technology they field to be used against them in as long as two weeks and as short as six hours.
    • Somebody at Firaxis Games read this article; in XCOM: Enemy Unknown (the actual reboot to the game that UFO: After Blank was a spiritual sequel to), the invading Sectoids do fit their technology with self-destruct devices that go off when the user flatlines. Of course, they didn't think to trigger it when the user falls unconscious, which leads to hilarity ensuing.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Myrmecols are ancient, star-faring beings so powerful that they can mind-control entire planets on a regular basis, while the inhabitants don't even notice.
  • Arguably, the Starghosts. These bizarre aliens are extremely psychic, so much so that the " Starghosts" you fight are actually armies of hypnotized animals being led by a single projected illusion of the actual sentient alien. A projection that can kill you, from the other side of the Solar System, no less.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: Each game has a very detailed "Glossary" that details everything from autopsies, to weapons and new scientific principles. Aftermath had by far the most detailed (and, one might even say realistic) descriptions.
  • Perhaps one of the best descriptions in the glossary in Aftermath is for Reticulan lasers. "You put your hand here, and pull the trigger here, and the laser is emitted here." In a text-only description.
• Foreshadowing: There are several minor examples:
  • If you finish Aftermath without accepting the Reticulan Offer, you are told that the liquid that the aliens used to create Biomass was not related to their other technologies. It's only made clear what they meant in the next game.
  • In Afterlight, after you conduct a study on the material you use as "Fuel", Ramirez comes to the conclusion that it's the result of Biomass putrefaction, indicating that the "Martians" covered Mars in Biomass long ago, like the Reticulans did to Earth. The Solar System is just unlucky like that.
• Geo Effects: Aside from the obvious ones of LOS and cover in a tactical game for all of the series, Afterlight's missions have an environmental hostility rating. If one (or all!) of your team member's suit can't handle that level, the suit will break and the wearer will take continous damage until they fall unconcious and eventually die^note This has the possibility of making the game much harder than it should be if don't prioritize research in the right way. Terraforming technology is one of the first research topics you have, but like all XCOM-like games, there are more immediate concerns like weapons to research. However, setting up terraformers by the third week (21 days in) is almost a requirement: if you don't, the environmental hostility rating will start to go up rapidly by the fourth week, eventually getting to the point where no suit can withstand the danger (even the Heavy Life Suit, the strongest environment suit, has a max resistance of 12, and environmental hostility can go up to 14). In addition, relying on Heavy Suits for environment protection drastically limits tactical options, as soldiers in Heavy Suits cannot run or kneel.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Aftermath has Car Crabs which are like hermit crabs except they are big enough to wear cars as shells. .
• The Greys: Strangely, they're often seen wearing armor resembling an extra set of muscle tissue.
  • Your troops will frequently refer to them in-mission in Aftermath as such, with lines like "There's a grey!" and "I see one! A grey!"
  • Aftermath's Glossary entries remark on how everyone thought of the word "Reticulan" as being an invention of UFO nutjobs.
• Hostile Weather: Mars in the third game is not hospitable to human life at all. Every mission has an environmental hostility rating, and if your team's suits don't have ratings equal to or greater than the hostility rating, then it becomes a matter of when, not if, the suit will breach. Lighter armor tends to have a lower hostility rating, while heavier armor protects better but restricts movement significantly, but there's no armor that can protect against the highest rating of 15^note The catch is that robot units and Reticulan units (if you get them) either don't have armor, or their armor is the only kind available to them; in both cases, they have a hostility rating of 15 to reduce frustration. To make matters worse, when the game begins, Mars is relatively tame, with hostility ratings topping out at 3 (the same as your basic spacesuits), but within weeks, the environmental danger will escalate precipitously. There's only one way to lower the hostility rating: terraforming.
• Humans Are Special: In the greater context of the series, Humans are the only ones with an apparent immunity to the Myrmecol influence: while the cult in Aftershock are clearly working with the Wargots, there's no indication that any humans are being affected by the Myrmecol's, despite much more advanced, space-faring civilizations being ripped apart by it. In addition, the psionic "scream" of the Biomass at the canonical end of the first game drives the Reticulans crazy and feral, but instead empowers humans. There does not seem to be any justification for this.
• Humans Are Survivors: Overlapping with Humans Are Warriors; humanity is basically the immovable object to the Reticulans' unstoppable force.
  • Justified. Most of the race died, anyone still around is probaly an Action Survivor.
• Immune to Bullets: Aftershock's Flatsters, which are large, dinner-plate sized crustacean-looking things. They're extremely weak to energy weapons, but essentially immune to non armor piercing bullets, and still highly resistant to those. Fortunately they're little more than an irritation due to their exceptionally weak melee attack and hideously inaccurate ranged attack.
  • Starghosts appear as psychic projections that can only be disrupted by psi and energy attacks.
• Implacable Man: The Wargot Powered Armor in Aftershock, which can take a ton of damage in one sitting. Even after being knocked unconscious, they can take plenty of punishment before going down. Compare them to Terror From the Deep's Lobstermen.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: If you can't wield it, reverse-engineer it. If you can't reverse-engineer it at the miniscule size the Reticulans made it, mount the result on Powered Armor. If you can't make a viable weapon out of it, turn it into a Medikit.
  • Perhaps the best example of this is the Wargot weapons in Aftershock. After researching them, you can make your own plasma weapons, but the description of their plasma launcher indicates that it requires pulling two triggers that are not comfortable for humans to use simultaneously. So scientists rig all captured Wargot weapons with special devices so that humans only have to pull one trigger.
  • The only time that you really can't reverse-engineer a weapon is the time when you receive an aid package from Earth in Afterlight, which contains a pair of megaton-overpowered Warp Cannons. It's stated that the Mars base doesn't have the equipment or resources for that kind of weaponry. Two of them suffice, though, since they're levels of magnitude above anything the other guys have.
  • Beastman equipment (with the exception of their weapons) can't be reverse engineered. Their medkits are based on an entirely different physiology, and their detection equipment is only good for detecting non-Beastmen. However, studying their detection equipment does allow you to develop methods of defeating it.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Psionic Crushers in Aftermath. They show up very early on, do reliable damage that can carry them all the way till late mid-game, don't require any ammo and their stopping power is on par with mid-tier sniper rifles. Their only issue is being based on PSI, rather than any weapon skill, but that's about it.
• Infinity Plus One Gun: Several for Aftermath. The best is probably the Enhanced Plasma Rifle, which will drop most Reticulans in one shot. Other examples include the H&K CAWS shotgun, with over 1000 damage in burst mode, and the M240 flamethrower, which clears rooms in moments. Afterlight, strangely, doesn't have Infinity Plus One Guns despite the presence of huge gatling cannons; the best overall weapons you get in the game are the basic rifles you develop early, but they are upgradeable.
  • In Aftermath, if you build your character to be strong and quick enough, there's no weapon that can match the Collapsible Machine Gun and Collapsible Plasma Cannon. They both have fantastic range, enough ammo to last the longest battles and do so much damage that even highly resistant enemies will go down quickly against them. With enough agility, collapsible weapons become quick to deploy and once deployed - all attacks from the weapons are triggered instantly, so you will always win a quick-draw match against any enemy.
  • Aftershock has the Barrett sniper rifles with attachments, with these you can dead-eye enemies from ludicrous range and long distances. Another contender is the PKM or M60 with attachments, they have a high rate of fire and decent base damage plus enough ammo to last major battles. But the real dinger is the armor-piercing ammo that you can research or loot, this will shred anything other than the Starghost phantom. Even Wargot power armour and Flatsters will come apart after a couple of rounds of armor-piercing bullets.
  • Afterlight has the Annihilator and the Ball-Lightning Generator, as well as a literal Infinity +1 Sword: the Katana can maul a Martian dead in one swing. There's also the Chainsaw Crossbow, for longer-distance mutilation.
  • In the early game in Afterlight, lasers fall by the wayside to rifles. In the late game, laser cannon can rule the world; Martians and Beastmen Matriarchs are very weak to them, and very resistant to projectiles.
  • M82a Barrett .50 calibre sniper rifles, and the katanna when fighting Wargots, are close enough in Aftershock.
• In-Universe Game Clock: X-COM's infamous Geoscape returns, albeit with less versatile settings (10 minutes or 1 or 6 hours per second in Aftermath).
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Bordering on nightmare fuel, the game over cinematic from Afterlight is nothing short of a tearjerker, as the expedition leader limps to watch his beloved colony go up in flames, hear his friends dying over the comms, and he himself run out of oxygen all at the same time. As he dies, the entire colony explodes and he is engulfed in the shockwave, and everything goes dark.
• Jerkass: The Reticulans in Afterlight grab onto this ball hard. Once it becomes clear that you need to expand, you quickly find the Reticulan territory to the south. The Reticulans quickly contact you and offer a peace treaty, stating that they've been attacked by the strange robots as well, and offer to ally against them while also giving you some technology to help you out. Researching the Reticulan technology takes a long time, and also ties up time you could spend researching your own tech, and ultimately comes up with some minor improvements to your gear that aren't nearly worth the cost in time. On top of that, completing the technology research reveals that the Reticulans control resource rich areas of the planet that they have zero intention of sharing (no amount of diplomacy will ever get them to turn over resources), and they constantly request multiple full weapons from you in trade (usually rifles and handguns, your most reliable weapons at this point) in exchange for ammo for their laser weapons, which is not an even trade at all. Little wonder that the real benefit of researching the Reticulan technology is revealing their base, followed by an thinly-veiled directive to go kick their asses.
  • And just in case you didn't get the message: when the Reticulan Expedition shows up (that is, the "good guy" Reticulans), they will contact you immediately, explicitly state that they will ally with you, but insist that you cannot be allied with the other Reticulans. If you are, the (vastly superior) Expedition forces will be at war with you. If you aren't, they will accept an alliance immediately (and they're actually a lot nicer about it).
• The Joys of Torturing Mooks: If they have good medics, allow them to approach an unconscious or dead ally, revive them, then shoot the revived unit in the head. Repeat ad nauseam, at which point the player usually switches to shooting the medic.
• Katanas Are Just Better: For absolutely no logical reason whatsoever, it's a melee weapon in Aftershock. The insane cultists like to charge at you with them, often not wearing any armour. In this case, katanas do not stop bullets. Not even slightly. Pipes and combat knives are available for more practical-minded troopers.
  • In the right hands, Katanas are just better. A level 3 Ranger with Superhuman agility will move insanely fast to close to combat distance, and with sufficient strength (generally Very Good or better), they can kill almost anything in seconds.
  • Katanas return in Afterlight, and at first it's difficult to see why: When you first get the opportunity to use katanas, every enemy you encounter is either equally damaged by other weapons (Reticulans and projectile weapons, Beastmen and laser weapons), resistant to slashing damage (Beastmen, Robots), or both, and even the faster soldier is still going to take time to close the distance to their target, during which they will get injured. Then the Martians enter the fray, with their extremely high dodge rating and resistance to everything but incendiary weapons...and slashing weapons. In fact, the human scientists specifically recommend using the katana, and create an entirely new buzzsaw to take advantage of this crippling weakness.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Laser using Reticulans will melt under the superior firepower of your humans with assault rifles and light machine guns.
• Kill It with Fire: It's a pretty regular recurrence in the series that the most powerful enemies have a weakness to fire. The Plecton Transgenant, which is an acid-spitting tripodal mutant from the early stages of Aftermath, is very weak against incendiaries, as is the Chrysalis, a psionic floating worm that can paralyze your entire squad and leave it at the mercy of other enemies. In Afterlight, the same goes for the Beastmen's Rollers, which are dog-sized balls of death that are nigh-indestructible with your early arsenal (except for maybe the Warp Cannons, which are dreadfully inaccurate) and like to roll up behind your squaddies and sprout 2-meter-long spikes that kill them painfully.
• Mars: Afterlight's setting. Of course, by the end of the game, it's not.
• Mecha-Mooks: A staple of Afterlight's "Martians", though you shouldn't really call the Mechs and Spider-Mechs "mook" to their face. Notably, though, you can make your own Mecha Mooks, and with the small number of people on your team and the possibility of blundering into something very lethal, you may have to rely on them. Fortunately, they can rise from the depths of Mookdom to incredible heights of Badass: be the first on your block star system to own a heavily-armored quad gatling gun-/rocket launcher-/laser cannon-/Annihilator- toting death machine. Just don't use them as an alternative to a human pointman; they don't react fast enough to get off a first shot, and Lightning Guns or Plasma weapons will fuck them up hard.
  • Also a mid/late game option in Aftershock. There are three flavours, and all are useful for spotting, scouting hazardous areas, and generally drawing enemy fire away from your less-expendable troops.
  • The Wargots have one, called the Wargot Scout, which are effectively cannon fodder for your troops.
• More Dakka: The collapsible weapons, enormous gyro-stabilized turreted weapon platforms that can only be carried and used by soldiers wearing Powered Armor. The first one you're likely to come across, the Collapsible 4-Barrel Machinegun, spews out lead at a blistering 37.5 rounds per second in the general direction you're pointing it. They only get more powerful and Dakka-riffic from there.
  • Afterlight's quad heavy weapon drone turrets.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Several types of Transgenant basically consist of alien chunks grafted onto human corpses.
• Multiple Endings: Aftermath is one of the rare cases where the "bad" ending is canon. The Council of Earth gives up the fight against the Reticulans (which one might argue they were winning) and surrenders the planet to them, while in exchange the aliens build a giant space station in orbit to house the Council, and a base on Mars, with 10.000 frozen colonists and a few scientists, as an vanguard to the terraformation of the red planet^note The offer is only made when the Reticulans figure out that the humans have figured out what the Biomass is being used for, and make the offer so that humanity can also see what happens when the Biomass finishes covering the planet.
• Mutants: Occurs in Aftermath and Aftershock.
  • In Aftermath, because of the biological weapons the Reticulans used, many Earth lifeforms had been transformed into horrific monsters. These "transgenants" ranged from mutated animals and humans to creatures that could easily be Starfish Aliens.
  • As well as the transgenants from Aftermath, Aftershock introduces two factions of humans that had developed special abilities from certain mutations caused by the Biomass. The first faction, the Cyborgs, are able to graft cybernetic implants onto themselves without any problems, thanks to a suppression of their immune systems, and are all male. The other faction, the Psionics, developed potent psychic abilities, and are all female.
• Organic Technology: Inverts the curve set by X-COM, as organic armor and weaponry becomes less common as the series progresses. Reticulans are so advanced that almost everything they build is a living organism, much like The Edenists. Of particular note is their ships: they start with a Reticulan "volunteer", inject them with something, and the ship grows from and around the new pilot, who is conscious. There's no one flying Reticulan UFOs because the UFOs are the pilots. Human scientists wisely decide not to copy the tech directly.
  • The technology becomes scarce only because there are fewer Reticulans to build and maintain (feed?) it. It's still vastly more efficient than any other race's weapons. You can have a heavily-armored 7-man Gatling-equipped army fighting for you, but when one Reticulan uses his mind-control projector to make them kill one another, or his brain-exploding psychic missiles, or spacetime-twisting Warp devices to turn your squad into paste, you realize who's really in charge of the Galaxy.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Before you get on to battling the aliens proper, the main enemies of the game are the Transgenants, results of the Reticulans' chemical attack when they first encountered Earth, essentially being a form of bio-weapon pre-programed by the aliens to attack their enemies and spread Biomass. Transgenants even at their basest forms tend to be even more mutated than the average pop culture zombie, and come in a variety of different forms. Some of the formally human Transgenants can still use weapons and utilize rudimentary tactics, but it's implied that this is less a sign of true intelligence so much as Transgenants following ingrained commands like a computer program.
• Out of the Inferno: Between the M240s and the incendiary alien rockets in Aftermath, both sides are unfortunately going to pull this. (Though it is a rare Reticulan indeed who will be able to waltz through an M240 blast.) Your enemies will continue doing so on up to and through Afterlight...mainly because you are the only one with flame-based weapons by then.
• Plant Aliens: The Martians in Afterlight are Little Green Men in the most literal sense: they're plant-like, photosynthetic humanoids. Like plants, they are very difficult to kill with bullets; you need edged weapons to take them down. And again, like real plants, they are very sensitive to electromagnetic fields (which is how they communicate), which explains why their technology is based around computers and robotics, while their weapons are plasma cannons, lightning guns and EMP grenades.
• Powered Armor: The Wargot in Aftershock, and to a lesser extent, the Cyborgs.
  • Also from Aftershock, Heavy Armor.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Averted in Aftershock - cyborgs are Always Male, psionics are Always Female, regular humans either.
  • Also averted in Afterlight where the game actually handles men and women as different 'subraces' internally. Female characters have lower base strength and carry capacity than males, but on the other hand they have higher intuition and slightly smaller body size which makes them harder to hit.
• Psychic Powers: The Reticulans in Aftermath are terrifyingly powerful in the late-game because of this. Psychic Projectors allow mind control of your soldiers, and even the best kind of protection can't make them immune. Of course, once you begin training your own psychics, the tables rapidly turn. One high-grade Psychic and a spotter are all you need to kill a dozen Retties without firing a single bullet.
  • Mind Control weapons are absent in Aftershock, but show up again in Afterlight. The Reticulan Expedition loves them, and use the one-psychic-army strategy to great effect. There's also a device that allows you (or the Martians) to hack and control robots, in a similar manner.
  • The aptly named Psionics in Aftershock, who are a faction of human women that possess psychic powers because of a mutation developed at birth. Because the trait for these powers is fatal to males for some reason, there are only female Psionics.
  • There's also the Starghosts, strange aliens that appear lategame in Aftershock that use intensely powerful psionic powers, and look pretty damn creepy as well. If you fail to defend a province from a Starghost attack, they'll deploy a mind control device that will conquer the entire country, and you can never recolonize them.
• Power Copying: Humanity does this in terms of technology. If an enemy fields a weapon against the humans and they manage to capture it they will figure out how to operate it themselves, likely within the span of a day or less.
  • Then they take this a step further by actually taking the basic idea of the weapon and improving upon it. Aftermath has several good examples such as the Plasma Rifles which are utterly devastating at nearly all ranges. The Gray's mean while only have access to comparatively weak grenade launcher weapons.
  • Warp weapons have an even better example. Reticulans mostly use pistol and rifle model warp based guns. Humans take the technology and make what's describe as a warp gatling gun!
• Road Cone: Aftermath's aforementioned bad ending is canonical in the latter two games.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Reticulans came to Earth to conduct an experiment of epic proportions, and locals be damned.
  • Their buddies back home aren't better. While not exactly a Hive Mind, their sense of unity and loyalty toward their own kind is so strong, that the dissidents who flew away on the Myrmecol are hunted down as an unprecedented abomination.
  • The Wargots combine this with a Blood Knight hat.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Beastmen that came through the reactivated Martian gateways.
• Secondary Fire: There's the standard single shot/burst modes for most guns, and extra fire modes can be added by attachments in Aftershock. Options include underbarrel shotguns, plasmaguns, grenade launchers and single-shot dartguns, for all your quiet takedown needs.
• Shout-Out: The Reticulan's Biomass that they planned to use to turn the whole planet into a massive, nigh-godlike supercomputer with awesome psionic powers is all to similar to the Xenofungus from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
  • There are also power cells called Energons in Aftershock.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Reticulans or rather, the rebellious Reticulans are the first aliens humans encounter, and they succeed in wiping out 80% of humanity. They're the least powerful of humanity's enemies in the series.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Mostly averted, except in Aftermath. Although there are always obscenely powerful weapons, most enemies have varying degrees of resistance to certain types of weaponry (projectile, energy, explosive, plasma, etc). And, as much as you might like outfitting all your soldiers with plasma spewing death blasters, you have to make all your weapons and ammo, and generally speaking, the ammo for advanced weaponry either has a higher cost or a longer production time, meaning you'll want to hang on to those old-fashioned projectile weapons even up to the endgame.
  • Aftermath doesn't have this issue specifically because ballistic weapons are quite simply handed to you. The basic shotgun and pistol have limitless ammunition available, and every time you take over a base (and it's rare that you'll only take 1-2 bases a week), there's a stash of weapons and associated ammunition that you automatically loot and add to your storage. By the midgame, you can choose what weapon you want to use based strictly on how cool it is (why use a basic shotgun when you can use a Neostead!), but that's also the point where you'll start regularly running into enemies that need something other than bullets to take them down. Conveniently, that's about when you'll have a good cache of laser weapons, which require manufacturing ammunition, but tend to be vastly superior to the mountains of ballistic weapons you've stockpiled.
• Space People: The Laputians.
• Starfish Aliens: While most of the sentient aliens are some sort of humanoid biped, there are some weird variations. The Martians are plant-like, the Beastmen look like an unholy cross between a gorilla and a praying mantis, the Starghosts aren't even shown, but appear as ghostly psionic projections, and the Myrmecols are enormous Eldritch Abominations that at first sight look a lot like asteroids.
  • The alien's "pets", on the other hand, are positively bizarre: the Reticulans' Transgenants are hideous mutants made from human corpses and/or animals, the Beastmen's Rollers and Spiders are spike-sprouting footballs and dog-like insectoids respectively, and the Starghosts' battle-beasts don't even look like living beings.
    • Hybrid/parasite/etc. type Transgenant lifeforms are more of an "oops", an example of why exposing things to Reticulan Biotech without being very careful is a bad idea. The Biomass itself has it's own defensive systems that are even more "starfish" like. The Muckstar especially - a spiked ball that attacks with an electrical discharge. In Aftermath, it rolls along on spikes rising out of the Biomass. Why? Nobody really knows. In Aftershock, the Muckstars have adapted to float around on their own (seeing as most of the Biomass is gone) using gas-filled compartments.
• Starfish Language: While most aliens' languages have some sort of vocal component (Reticulans use both sounds and telepathy), the Martians' "spoken" language is extremely hard to decipher (being a complex interface of individual Martians' electromagnetic fields), and the process is portrayed rather realistically: first you raid a ruined underground city for their scientific records (which mostly consist of empirical facts about the universe and mathematics), then you learn how to write their language, and only after that can you nab one of them and communicate with him to learn their "spoken" version. After doing this, you can begin peace talks with them.
• Terraform: Present in all three games to an extent.
  • In the original game, several months after the game begins, you'll get a notice about the appearance of the Biomass, which slowly crawls across the landscape and consumes everything it touches, turning the landscape into a hellish bass of biological material. Finding out why and how to stop or slow it down is your major goal for the game.
  • In the second game, no one is terraforming directly, but any territory controlled by the Cultists will be covered in the remnants of the Biomass, showing that they're trying to grow it (but failing, as it easily disappears when you take control of the territory).
  • In the third game, terraforming is (seemingly) the entire purpose of the game: at the start of the game, the human expedition has been making steady but slow progress towards their terraforming technology, but they've been waiting to deploy it until they're ready. When the Beastmen invade, it becomes clear that it has to be deployed immediately in order to tame the hostile landscape, allowing you to build terraforming stations that will prompt steady progress towards a green Mars landscape. As terraforming progresses, Mars will start to generate water, and eventually the North Mars Sea, which will drown and make inaccessible any resources under the water.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: No they don't.
  • It depends, the flamethrower hits harder than anything other than a Warp Demolition Device, BUT you really need to micromanage that weapon. Its range is quite short, and worst of all its wall of flame effect can spill backwards. So it's quite easy to set yourself and any team-mates around you on fire.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In Aftershock, your Laputans start off with fairly weak laser weapons. In fact the 3 Earth factions - human, cyborg and psionic have better guns than you do. So one way to get the Earthling tech is to join a mission where one of these factions are fighting invaders and after winning, have your troops stab your friendlies until they fall unconscious or die and loot their equipment (works for everything except armour). If you want armour from other factions, then make allies with that faction and hire their people and then fire them after looting their stuff (this will hurt your relations with that faction while stabbing their people to death doesn't).
• Villain Decay: The Reticulans themselves. In the first game, they're extremely deadly due to their advanced technology, incredibly effective shields, and use of explosive weapons. In the second game, they're reduced to cannon fodder. In the third game, they're reasonably deadly, but even your basic armor protects against their laser weapons, and their psionic attacks are relatively weak (unless they get lucky with a critical mind control, which is relatively rare), and they're cripplingly weak to projectile weapons, which are among the first weapons you get, so they're still easy to kill. Then the OTHER Reticulans show up, and you remember that the ones you've been fighting have been operating on a shoestring of supplies for more than 50 years. The Expeditionary Force is better armed, better equipped, highly dangerous, and immediately offers an opportunity for peace with you specifically BECAUSE they could easily kick your ass: the game would be almost impossible if you were forced to fight them the instant they show up.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Warp weaponry is the peak of Reticulan engineering. It uses a method the humans can barely comprehend to tear targets up by warping the space said targets occupy. As such, the Reticulans make them into Rifles and Pistols. The Humans, on the other hand, make Resonators and Demolition Devices, and then later, Warp Medkits.
  • Interestingly, the Warp weapons work on the principle of crushing inorganic objects to injure people. This introduces a crippling weakness to the weapons: targets that don't wear armor. No armor provides a startlingly effective 90% resistance to Warp weapons. Of course, given the fact that not every Reticulan in a mission will carry Warp weapons, it's a brave soldier (or a stupid one) that doesn't wear armor against them. Or a scout.
  • The Alien Microslug Accelerator is the single most horrifyingly powerful gun in the Reticulan Arsenal. If you see one, it's very likely that it's already been fired. If it's been fired... might as well start the mission over.
    • The Collapsible Plasma Gun is more powerful per-se (single-shotting any Green Alien Armor), but the fact that it takes long to deploy and that aliens use them for offense rather than defense really cuts down their effectiveness.
  • Afterlight has the Warp Cannons, shipped straight from Earth via express-spaceship in please-handle-with-care-and-don't-disassemble cases, and the Annihilator plasma beam weapon; the plasma supposedly has antimatter in it.
• Worthy Opponent: What the Reticulans eventually come to regard the humans as in Aftermath, to the point that they actually offer humanity an opportunity to surrender instead of annihilating them. Canonically, humanity accepts.
  • The Reticulans even base one of their late-game weapons designs, the Collapsible Plasma Gun, on human portable turret designs. The Glossary description for the weapon remarks on the irony.
• Zombie Apocalypse: "Nightfall" is essentially this. Any living creature that was killed by the spores was brought back to life as hideously mutated monsters dedicated to attacking the nearest unaffected human.