X-COM: Terror from the Deep

About X-COM: Terror from the Deep

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995) is MicroProse's sequel to UFO: Enemy Unknown, taking the alien war into Earth's oceans with underwater bases and battles, and a notoriously brutal difficulty.

X-COM: Terror from the Deep in Depth

In 2040, four decades after the first game, a transmitter left active on Cydonia wakes aliens that have lain dormant beneath Earth's seas for millions of years. They terrorise ships and port cities and kidnap people for genetic experiments, so the world's governments revive the disbanded X-COM. The aliens, cousins of the Sectoids, turn out to have arrived 65 million years ago in a vast ship, T'Leth, whose crash in what is now the Gulf of Mexico wiped out the dinosaurs, and they want to wake their unstoppable leader. Destroying T'Leth wins the war but triggers a worldwide environmental catastrophe, setting up X-COM: Apocalypse.

As before, the game has two parts: the real-time GeoScape, a global view where the player tracks craft, hires staff, trades equipment and builds bases, and the turn-based, isometric BattleScape. Almost everything now happens underwater, and since the first game's alien technology does not work in salt water, new technology must be captured and developed. Some weapons cannot be used on land, maps are more complex, magazines hold fewer rounds, and some missions, such as terror attacks on shipping routes, come in several parts where soldiers lost early do not return. Melee weapons were added at players' suggestion.

Making X-COM: Terror from the Deep

MicroProse UK reused the original engine, reskinned the graphics and wrote a new story, and released it for DOS on 1 June 1995, followed by a PlayStation version in 1996 and a Windows port in the 1998 Collector's Edition. Together with UFO: Enemy Unknown, it had sold over a million copies by March 1997. Critics mostly received it very well: PC Gamer UK called it "not only a great sequel to UFO but a superb game in its own right", and Computer Game Review gave it a Platinum Triad. Others felt it changed too little: GameSpot said that "apart from new art and a handful of new combat options, this is exactly the same game as UFO Defense, only much more difficult", and Next Generation called it "a carbon copy" of an old game, though still phenomenal. Gollop criticised its excessive difficulty and long, tedious levels. It came to Steam in 2007 under 2K Games, and the fan project OpenXCom added support for it, fixing bugs and improving the AI.