- Anti-Climax Boss: The High Praetor isn't particularly difficult to actually kill once your Xenonauts are actually in range. Even the tricky issue of his psionics can be circumvented if you bring along the Hyperion hover tank, especially if you have a magnetic cannon mounted on it. The hard part is a) getting to him in the first place and b) escaping afterwards once the Reapers start swarming in.
- Broken Base:
- Are the graphics unacceptably bland for a 2010s game, or is their plainness and simplicity the very thing that makes them appealing compared to the flash of XCOM: Enemy Unknown?
- Was it right to leave out psionics and the Blaster Launcher?
- Blaster Launcher still exists, albeit weighing a whooping 50kg, using an incredibly rare alien engine, and 500000$, making it unable to be used by anyone except soldiers in power armor with a huge bank account. And is Awesome, but Impractical. Psionics, however, is a complete Red Herring that feels almost like a middle finger to people expecting it from X-COM.
- Mechanical fidelity to the original is one of the selling points, but some think it's too faithful, With This Herring and all.
- Demonic Spiders: Reapers. They can move absurdly far, have a One-Hit Kill attack that creates another Reaper from its victim, and almost always come in large numbers. If you don't run them down quick on terror missions, you'll be facing a Zombie Apocalypse in no time flat.
- Goddamned Bats: Light Drones don't do much damage with their plasma guns, but they are very good at suppressing your troops.
- Good Bad Bugs: If you leave an injured soldier in your base to recuperate, it will take many days. However, sending him or her into battle again and using a simple medikit fixes the problem instantly.
- Now no longer in play as of v22 Experimental 5, as sending troops out wounded now caps their maximum HP during the fight.
- It used to be possible to have soldiers Dual Wield...shields, who could still throw grenades and smash aliens with kicks while doing so. Not a Stone Wall to be laughed at.
- Low-Tier Letdown: The Corsair fighter is widely considered this. While it's faster than the Condor and carries two cannons, it can't carry missiles or torpedoes and pales in effectiveness compared to the Marauder, which is almost unconditionally superior and doesn't require that much more research to obtain once you can research the Corsair. As such, the Corsair is often skipped in favor of getting to the Marauder since the latter renders the former quickly obsolete.
- Memetic Badass: Josh Eales. Because of an RNG bug, this name was always in the starting party of every new game. Now he even has his own Steam card.
- Nintendo Hard: The original X-Com was a brutal game if you didn't know what you were doing, and Xenonauts is just as tough, if not harder:
- You have very little potential to sequence break.
- Interceptors have a realistic number of missiles, and UFOs can dodge them.
- New gear takes months to develop, you need to develop a strong understanding of alien technology - averting Possession Implies Mastery - before you can even develop a human-material body armor to defend against the alien weaponry.
- Alien weaponry plucked out of their users' cold dead hands is useless to the human soldiers, being made of materials too strong to be made ergonomic to human hands, unchangeable by human science, and totally lacking optics. Basic laser weaponry might take till December to finish.
- Forget manufacturing items for profit: all items now sell for half their manufacturing costs, not counting engineering salary. The sale prices of all alien artifacts have been significantly lowered, and are sold automatically at the end of the mission, as you cannot use them later. Also, corpses now have no value now - no more sectoid sushi for you.
- The psionics research tree turns out to be a dead end: Humanity has no psionic potential. Around the time you discover this, alien units which are extremely resistant to energy weapons have become common. If your researchers didn't take a different path at this point, all would be lost.
- Remember how X-Com Ethereals and Sectiods needed to have a line of sight on you before using psionic powers? Not here. Once the aliens are aware of your presence (i.e., any of them see a human Xenonaut), all the Cesan Psions and Praetors can start unleashing mind attacks on everybody in your squad.
- And as an added treat: The presence of a live Praetor randomly generates dread within various squad members during his turn, as a free action. Note that your Bravery (the stat that resists psionics) is maxxed, it doesn't matter. Whomever is chosen (and it's usually 3-5) loses 30 Action Points for that round.
- In the original X-COM, Chrysallids were a terror unit that mostly accompanied Snakemen on terror missions and base assaults. Their equivalent here, Reapers, can turn up anywhere. This makes assaulting Battleships particularly difficult, especially if trying to capture a Praetor alive, as there will be a couple of them on the bridge.
- Scrappy Mechanic: Without mods, Mind Control has no cooldown and works instantly, meaning high-level Psionic aliens can just keep taking over your soldiers.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The decision to tie the game's backstory into the Cold War was an inspired design choice, and one that could have provided a justification for giving the player a more in-depth and nuanced "diplomacy" system where the player would have to tread carefully between two superpowers who, despite the imminent threat of alien invasion, are almost more paranoid of one another than they are of the aliens and would undoubtedly see the Xenonaut program as yet another prize to fight over for global prestige. Exactly none of this ends up being relevant to the game itself, however, which generally plays like a standard X-COM clone with a grim 1970's-era makeover. The sequel looks to be doing this, but time will tell how well it actually works.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/Xenonauts
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