X-COM: Apocalypse

About X-COM: Apocalypse

X-COM: Apocalypse (1997) is Mythos Games' tactical strategy game, set in the megacity of Mega-Primus, that added real-time combat and a city of rival corporations to the X-COM formula.

X-COM: Apocalypse in Depth

Fifty years after Terror from the Deep, the battle of T'leth has ravaged Earth's biosphere and humanity lives in sealed megacities, the first being Mega-Primus, built over the ruins of Toronto. Run by 13 elected senators and the corporations that sustain it, the city is home to marginalised Sectoid hybrids and androids. When new organic, extradimensional aliens attack through tetrahedral gates, the government re-forms X-COM, and the player must eventually find a way to send craft and agents through the gates to take the war to the aliens' own dimension, where enslaved Sectoid survivors are discovered.

As before, there is a management layer, the Cityscape, and an isometric combat mode, the Battlescape, but this was the first X-COM to offer real-time combat alongside turns. Funding now depends on more than shooting down UFOs: X-COM must limit collateral damage, stop aliens infiltrating and taking over organisations, and keep good relations with groups that will demand compensation or attack if angered, such as Transtellar, which can stop agents travelling. The alien-worshipping Cult of Sirius is always hostile. X-COM can sell alien artefacts and its own manufactured goods, or raid other organisations. A self-adjusting system makes alien technology advance faster when the player does well and slower when they struggle.

Making X-COM: Apocalypse

Mythos Games created the game while MicroProse wanted to produce the graphics, a relationship series creator Julian Gollop called "disastrous". He compared the experience to Francis Coppola's on Apocalypse Now: "Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong", and it took three years and five different producers, with a design he admitted was too ambitious and complex. Artist Terry Greer recalled a painful mix of rendered and hand-drawn styles, including Tim White's intensely detailed character designs that did not shrink well to isometric scale. It still received favourable reviews; Next Generation called it "a step in the right direction, but a step with a wobble". It debuted at number six on PC Data's chart for July 1997 but sold less than the original.