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X-COM: UFO Defense

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  • Anti-Climax Boss: For all the effort and sacrifices it takes to get there, the confrontation with the Big Bad on Mars is severely underwhelming and barely even qualifies as a Final Boss. The Alien Brain has no way of defending itself, but while it is surrounded by Ethereal Commanders, you don't even need to defeat them. Just launch a single rocket at it and you win.
  • Demonic Spiders: All of the terror units, other than the Reaper and Silacoid, fall under this. Two in particular though stand out:
    • The Chryssalids are without a doubt the most feared aliens in the game, invoking panic in even the most hardened and experienced player. They have only a melee attack, but their fast speed ensures they can easily make it to their target. The bite itself doesn't do much damage, but it is the effect it has on humans that makes the chryssalid so dangerous: it turns them into a zombie. Not only does this equal instant death for the X-Com operative, but when the zombie dies a Chryssalid takes its place! If you aren’t careful, half of your squad may get turned into zombies, each of which will be yet another Chryssalid to deal with. Worse of all is that Chryssalids are a terror alien which means, unless you ambush their ship, they are going to be on a map with civilians which can all be turned into Chryssalids! Thankfully Chryssalids become much more manageable late game after you get flying armor, allowing you to float and completely avoid their biting attack. They are also vulnerable to explosives.
    • While the Chryssalids have the lion’s share of infamy, not even they are the most dangerous terror unit in the game; that would be the Sectopod. These hulking metal monstrosities are armed with a powerful laser that makes short work of even heavily armored units, has incredible reflexes, and are so heavily armored most weapons can’t even hurt it! Thankfully their one weakness is laser weapons, perhaps the most common type of weapon in the game. Plus even they can still be taken over by psionic soldiers and can be affected by low morale.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Powerful and highly skilled psionic troopers take the game balance and blow it to pieces. When you have powerful psionics (>90) with a high skill level, they can mind control pretty much every enemy from anywhere on the map with 100% success. Even a single psi trooper is extremely powerful, as you can use aliens as expendable scouts, and cause havoc by controlling terror units. But the fun doesn't stop there. With a full squad of psi troops you can use aliens as scouts and chain mind control them without risking any of your soldiers. Under certain circumstances you can even manage to mind control every alien on the map on your first turn, without even leaving your ship. High ranking enemy with a Blaster Launcher? Mind control him, and force him to commit suicide while wiping out a bunch of his friends at the same time. Want to scout a load of the map? Mind control a Chryssalid and put his speed to your use. And then mind control an armed alien to shoot him when you've no further use for him. You don't gain any stat increases from shooting mind controlled units, or causing friendly fire, but by this point you won't need them.
    • The Blaster Launcher is the last word in BFGs in this game. Able to fire a Player-Guided Missile, it's entirely possible for this monster of a gun to be fired from within the Skyranger, sent on a path with up to nine waypoints, and into the heart of a UFO. It's capable of blasting holes in UFO hulls and the blast radius is absolutely huge. Plus, it can solve the tricky issue of indoor combat; Why bother clearing out a shack room-to-room when you can just level the whole building?
  • Good Bad Bugs: In the first game an overflow bug in the save files can cause new items to appear in storage. This is notable for being the only way to obtain the "Alien reproduction" item without deliberately modifying the game.
  • Nintendo Hard:
    • X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror From the Deep are infamously difficult even on the beginner difficulty level, as the game system is very complex, and almost every random variable in the game has a high variance in either direction. No punches are pulled early in the game, with almost every enemy type capable of appearing in missions from the get-go, and at no point does a soldier ever become safe from being instantly killed by a stray shot. Even the safest move is a gamble for both sides, although the aliens aren't bothered by losses. In Terror From the Deep, 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.
    • The way the game generates missions is also utterly unforgiving. X-COM has no scruples against sending you on a terror mission with nearly bullet-proof Cyberdisks or Chryssalids in the early game, or positioning aliens in a half-circle around your Skyranger's disembarking ramp, ready to mow down whoever tries to disembark. Know when to fight and when to attempt a frantic Tactical Withdrawal.
    • Since they couldn't replicate the original Alien AI with the modern code, OpenXcom developers had to make it smarter than in the original just so it would not be curbstomped, and there is a Sneaky AI option that makes it even harder.

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