YMMV / X-COM: Apocalypse

• Broken Base: Is the game a worthy successor to UFO Defense with a well-implemented real-time mechanic, or an unfinished wreck with even more archaic gameplay mechanics?
• Demonic Spiders: As keeping with the XCOM tradition, Apocalypse has several:
  • Poppers are tiny annoying self-propelled bombs that close the distance to your troops in an unfairly short amount of time. If you're playing in turn-based mode, pray harder for reaction fire as they approach.
  • Psimorphs take forever to find, an eternity to kill and all this while easily wreaking havoc upon the fragile minds of your agents. Oh, and they can also fly.
  • Do you remember the tanks from the previous games? This time the aliens have them. Capturing a live Megaspawn and not losing half your force in the process is quite possibly the single most challenging task in the game.
  • Anthropods and Skeletoids are comparatively benign compared to the above examples, until they start carrying advanced equipment like cloaking fields and Entropy guns around just to make sure that you never catch a break.
  • Last but not least, there are Brainsuckers, coming to turn your agents against you and there's not a bloody thing you can do about it (unless you're playing in real-time mode, in which case they are much less of a threat). Unlike Chryssalids, they can also jump.
• Difficulty Spike: When the aliens get personal Disruptor Shields they become much harder to kill until you research Toxiguns (which ignore shields). Even worse when they start combining them with personal cloaking devices, making them difficult to spot and more difficult to hit.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Getting both the Mutant Alliance and S.E.L.F to assist you by proving that you aren't in line with the Fantastic Racism plaguing Mega-Primus.
  • Rescuing the Sectoid survivors, and their subsequent possible Heel–Face Turn. While it's not entirely certain whether they've actually stopped conquering planets or are just going to try it again on another world, at least they're no longer hostile to humanity.
• Narm: The last lines, "We kicked their ass." Not only is this relayed to the HQ by a technician as opposed to, say, the mission commander declaring it jubilantly, but said technician delivers it in the most flippant voice—followed by a limp-wristed "Yes!" by her compatriot. Superb voice acting.
• Nightmare Fuel: See here.
• Obvious Beta:
  • Due to budget and publisher issues, Apoc is a mere shell of what it was going to be.
  • The game is pretty stable... as long as you play it in real-time. Turn-based works, but the game definitely was not balanced around it. And since the missions are often TFTD cruise ship-style Bug Hunts, it becomes tiresome quickly. At times, you will spend an hour finding the last alien in a map, and it will end up being a brainsucker on a roof that you can't get to (say, on top of a skyway between two towers).
  • The game is supposed to have a "learning AI", which is only present in some rare versions of the game, and even in those it will stop functioning as soon as the game is saved.
  • The Alien dimension was supposed to be much more dynamic, with the Aliens being capable of building multiple copies of each building type and rebuilding destroyed ones. In the finished game, the buildings must be destroyed in a strict order and the Aliens never rebuild them; furthermore, destroying most of them has no effect on the Alien forces.
  • The interface is very clunky and soldiers often respond poorly to your commands.
  • Road vehicles, and especially X-COM agents using the people tubes, tend to get stuck when ordered to go to a faraway building (luckily, setting game speed to "skip" instantly moves them to their destination). X-COM scientists and engineers cannot be ordered to move on the main map, which means they will be stuck if taxis are unavailable because Transtellar is hostile to X-COM.
  • Relations don't function as intended: having Friendly or Allied relations with certain organizations was supposed to give you certain bonuses, but they mostly don't work (the only exceptions are the Mutant Alliance and S.E.L.F., which will not offer Hybrid or Android recruits, respectively, unless X-COM has positive relations with them).
  • There are also many, many bugs, some of which have serious effects on gameplay: for example, if you have a a lot of employees at one base, sacking one of them may also sack someone else down the list.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop:
  • In general, your agents have more TUs and consume less, so you should be able to lay down a sheet of continuous fire.◊ Note that the aliens can also do this. Or rather, they could, were their AI not so laughably broken. The aliens will just run around in circles without firing while in plain view of your units.
  • You have access to armor from the get-go, and you start off with a rather large selection compared to original X-COM, much of which will remain useful even late in the game. In fact, it takes the aliens a good bit of effort to damage you, save for things like hyperworms or poppers. The only real threat early on is the brain sucker.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Apoc expanded the geoscape phase of the game, but the 'air war' requires constant micromanagement of a fleet of vehicles. UFO attacks come in waves (5+ UFOs at a time), so ganging up interceptors on your targets is necessary.
  • Your bases can still be raided, and unlike the original X-Com, your scientists and engineers are now targets of opportunity. Also, since your bases are basically built at the basement level of above-ground structures, aliens and enemy factions can simply bomb them into the ground to purge one of your bases (which also results in a score penalty for you thanks to extensive damage done to city property). In Apocalypse, you'll have to consider the above ground structure as well as the basement layout when building new bases.

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