14 DAY TRIAL // The first few battles in Xenonauts were not too different from those I experienced in the last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown: tense affairs in which the underpowered weaponry and armor of my human soldiers was no match for the plasma and physical strength of the aliens.
I managed to get out of the first one with no losses, while the second one cost me the life of just one of my own soldiers, and the battle ended with five dead enemies and a couple of promotions for my force.
I was feeling confident, building up my base, trying to race to discover plasma weapons as fast as possible and trying to decide whether I was interested in researching a vehicle that could augment the combat power of my forces.
Then Xenonauts, which was created by Goldhawk Interactive, decided to throw me a curveball, which took the form of a mission that I needed to play at night.
My first thought was to abandon it completely and simply launch an airstrike, which would have given me some money but no alien alloys and corpses, but I decided to try and win the classical way and get a handle on how the new concept introduced by the game works.
Basically, the line of sight of the squad is limited, and flares need to be used to extend it.
Unfortunately, the aliens are not affected and they tend to quickly move to the spots were sources of light suddenly appear.
I managed to deal with the plasma-wielding monster that stood about 10 squares away from my dropship pretty quickly, and then I progressed with my units in a line, sniper at the back, trying to cover as much ground as possible and make sure that I explored all darkened corners.
I found one alien in a house and took him out in two turns, with one of my assault soldiers slightly injured, while another one was spotted moving away.
The area was populated with locals who at times fired at the aliens, which led to a weird incident where my heavy machine gunner was shot in the back and suppressed by them.
And, when I was close to the alien-downed vessel, three aliens managed to ambush me and take out three of my soldiers in two turns without suffering any loss on their own.
I panicked again and ran away, and a mission which seemed difficult but doable became one that forced me to reload in order to avoid night missions for a while.