I've been watching Let's Play videos of the original X-com for years. I bought the game years ago on the thought that I might one day play it myself, although I was a bit too intimidated to ever give it a real try. However, my confidence increased when I started watching another series a few weeks ago and started getting so frustrated at their misplays that I thought "Surely I can do better than these idiots" x3. They were playing The Final Modpack, to be fair, which make the game WAY harder. I tried that at first, but deduced after some more reading that it was way too hard for me. Already having Openxcom installed to play that mod-pack, I used it to play through the vanilla game mostly in tact, with most of alterations just being quality of life things.

Elkin gave me the idea to name all the soldiers after Racketboy peeps, so I did! Much hilarity was displayed in the RPG Progress Thread and the Slack chat about it over the past week or so. The mods I started the game with were very simple quality of life things like zooming out the camera for more visibility and letting you position all the buildings in your first base when you start the game. I made the mistake of playing the game with Openxcom's ironman mode enabled, so even though I did ironman this, I did end up turning on a mod near the end that forced a line-of-sight to do PSI-attacks, just because I REALLY wanted to finish the game and not have to totally restart. In the end, it took from the start of 1999 to September 23rd when we finally blew up the final alien stronghold.

The final "RPG Progress"-style report follows:
I fucked up BAD. I had a harrowing assault on a snakeman base, taking everyone alive I possibly could looking for a commander and finally got one! However, I wasn't aware that you needed to interrogate him AFTER you were near the end of the "where be the aliens" tech tree, so I wasted his interrogation and had to get ANOTHER one. After a horribly failed assault on a Sectoid base, it was only a week or two before a Sectoid battleship assaulted OUR base. However, using the stun grenades we had left, we took as many alive as we could and got a commander out of it! Noise, who was now the rank of commander and had been with us since the beginning, was finally getting his ass to Mars!

In the end, I fucked up bad AGAIN and forgot to take plasma ammo to Mars, meaning my only guns at the starts were two blaster bomb-tanks and 6 guys with BB launchers. Noise and CasterofDreams2 were the two casualties on the surface, with Noise sadly being the first man down :cry: . However, that was enough to get us past the surface to take all those dead aliens' guns. We then got pretty lucky again in the actual Martian base, only ever running into one Ethereal, two Chryssilids, and two of the floaty blobs and two crawly blobs. We ran into a Sectopod, which was terrifying, but it never saw us! Prfsnl_Gamer5 blew it to pieces with a BB-launcher before it could even think. Finally, Ma3un and Keyglyfive cleared the way with plasma bolts through the Ethereals guarding the Brain chamber before Fourck (Ack 4) got the honors of blaster bombing the brain back to hell.


X-com is a bit of a grand SRPG. Managing bases all over the world, designing them, telling them what to manufacture and research, all on top of launching fighters to take down alien ships and ground teams to assault the survivors is a LOT to take on and it can be really intimidating. That said, it's not the most complex game out there in that space, and is far more easily taken on with the help of a wiki or some quality of life stuff like Openxcom's launcher provides (both of which I used extensively).

Verdict: Recommended. I'd definitely say that Openxcom makes it far more playable for modern tastes, if only because of that option to zoom out the camera on missions. Then using Openxcom's built in options and mods to make the game just as hard or easy as you want is a very nice way to ease into it for players of any seriousness. Xcom is definitely a game that rewards already knowing its systems going in, so going in blind isn't super recommended, but it will certainly give you some crazy war stories if that's the route you go x3

This is a program that is used much like GZ Doom, to modify X-COM and allow the use of various mods from simple QOL mods, ones that add new enemies and research to megamods that rewrite the entire game in a impressive way that almost makes it a whole new game like xpirates or The X-COM files.

Their forum is found here for anyone interested in checking it out: OpenXcom Forums

Even more mods organised with images for you to make your own decision and even add "sub mods" to the other megamods that are available and enhancing your experience Mod.io link

I rated this high because anything that allows you to modify games should be top tier. Especially the kind of amazing work that can be produced from modders out there. Amateur and professional alike.