So begins UFO: Aftermath. Many will remember the original UFO/X-Com series that was in part a homage to the UFO TV series. The premise of the original game was that Earth was under attack from an unknown UFO force. Through various missions with a small squad of troops you gradually pieced together the story on what was going on and finally researched enough of the Alien technology to take the battle to their home planet. For the time it was released, it was a ground breaking game, with players fighting battles against unknown odds with a small squad of soldiers. The more they fought the better your troops got and also the more alien tech you acquired for research. Throw in an economic model that saw income related to how successful you were in your missions and it was no wonder this game spawned additional titles, however none held the same intrigue and challenge as the first in the series.

Starting with a couple of likely lads (actually looking at some of the starting stats of some of the characters you wonder how they passed their medical) you begin the game with one military base and one research/development base and a very small armory. Ok we know the devastation of the earth has been pretty bad but the best they could come up with as starting weapons are pistols, a shotgun and a couple of sub machine guns. Given you start in the heartland of America is that really the best they could have scrounged together? If American TV has taught us anything you'd at least expect every household to have a couple of M60 machine guns, and a LAW missile launcher. Grumble over you tool your team up as best you can and go out and take it to the bugs.

The 3D Globe that you can rotate through makes a welcome return. Through this screen you access your bases and also access your squad and R&D menus. The Globe is divided up into a jig saw puzzle of zones. You begin with one and through eliminating aliens and taking over bases you gain more zones. In so doing you get more bases and weapon caches. Sorry folks, no base building. What you take over is what you get. It's logical when you consider most of the population has been wiped out.

Very quickly into the game you get down and dirty with the Aliens. Mission after mission pops up and you can either elect to respond with your team or to delegate it to other teams (virtual teams that you never see but just receive reports on whether they were successful or not). Once accepted your teams board their chopper and you're off on the mission. These can vary from elimination where you have to waste a certain amount of bugs, scouting where you have to identify differing bugs, rescue missions, demolition of critical buildings and base infiltration missions.

Your team is dumped on site and you're off and hunting. The pilots knack of placing you right in the midst of the alien horde often leaves you wondering if he is on their side. Combat is real time with the option to pause to give orders. Orders are the basic shoot, kneel run etc and these are given through a very straight forward interface that owes a lot to the original X-Com game. The combat environment is in 3d however you have limited ability to zoom in and out, and the viewing aspect changes automatically as you move about the terrain. The graphics are functional and although quite a bit of detail is included only a few of the items can be destroyed. There was one school of player of the original game who was not satisfied until every building, crop, hedge and UFO was blown up and left a smoking ruin. Alas in this incarnation of the game you can only blow up vehicle wrecks (sigh).

Another let down is the inability to enter any of the urban buildings. Effectively the game is fought on one plain. You cannot climb onto a roof and snipe the bugs. You are basically restricted to walking the streets, the buildings being reduced to eye candy alone. This is a shame, as the appeal for the X-Com games was the building assaults, missiles up stairwells and combat entry through the use of big explosions. Technically it may have been easier for the game designer to relegate buildings to big cubes of cover but they have also sacrificed a lot of the tactical options for players by doing so.

Once you enter bases and alien ships however room combat is back with all the adrenaline rush of the original. Turning corners you can come face to face with a bug and in the beginning of the game this is usually fatal for the good guys.

Tip: Early on in the game the grenade is your friend. Train a couple of the team members to be grenadiers and load them up with as many as they can carry. They are by far the most effective starting weapon you have.

As you progress you pick up weapons from the bugs (who in the beginning have mostly human weapons) or gather weapon caches to add to your own. There is an incredible array of weapons made available however there is little difference between most of them and you are left wondering why so much detail and statistics have been put into modeling such a bewildering array of modern day weapons. This is particularly true when as soon as you master the bug weapons you will use these in preference to the human kind.

After each battle your team is awarded experience points and gradually your team goes up in levels. You can portion points to some of the attributes and this RPG element means you can get team members to specialize in various weapon classes.

Tip: Although tempting to go for heavy weapon specialization alone some team members with long range rifles pay dividends on some missions.

The aliens you meet are a varied and bizarre lot of bugs. Some can be quite scary and some give a clue to the overall story. We would spoil it if we described it in any detail however without giving too much away our favorite is the Car Crab. 'Look honey the Buick has grown legs!'.

The tech tree you can research is just as comprehensive with some interesting surprises. You will need to balance your bases between research and the development of technologies. Imbedded in the research notes are snippets of the evolving story. Using the tech tree as a vehicle for creating the background story works well and drives you to research that little bit more to find out what is going on.

Air combat (where you chase down the bug ships) is very utilitarian. You can either chase them or not and that is the only choice open to you. You can not operate the combat yourself and more often than not you aircraft comes off worse. They do get better at it as the game progresses however this aspect may as well not have been included.

Music and sound are delivered at just about the right level. They do not intrude into the game but complement the missions to generate just the right amount of tension. Again this was something that made the original such a good game.