I remember the first time I played X-Com. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I opened my ship's doors, brought my first soldier out, and the next thing I knew a laser beam came screeching across the screen to send my guy to an early grave. I brought out more soldiers, and like clockwork the aliens picked them off with everything from hand lasers to high explosives. Put simply, I got my ass smeared. And I had fun. That's not normal for me. Usually if a new game shrugs me off so flippantly the first time I play, that ends up being the last time I play, but not with X-Com. There was something about the lethal violence I walked into that made me break out in an evil grin. You see, I knew that if I learned how to play the game better, it wouldn't be long before I had those same big deadly toys the aliens had, and I liked that idea. A lot of other people did too. X-Com came out of nowhere to become one of the hottest strategy games of 1994. No one expected this of the humble British game - not even Microprose - but before long thousands of fans across the US were losing promising soldiers by the handful to alien technology.
Naturally, there had to be a sequel. Less than a year after X-Com hit American stores we have a new threat to contend with. X-Com: Terror From the Deep will challenge anyone who had the intestinal fortitude to see the original through to the climactic destruction of the aliens' Martian base. In the new game, an energy wave was sent out from the fallen base, striking earth's oceans and awakening long-dormant sea dwelling aliens. Once again, it's up to you to defend the entire globe from the alien menace.
X-Com veterans will immediately find themselves in familiar territory. Terror From the Deep doesn't make any dramatic changes or improvements over X-Com's engine. Its purpose is to give the X-Com graduate somewhere else to go. There's an increased amount of animation on the battlefield, but the gameplay has remained the same.
You start the game in the Geoscape screen. This is a zoomable, rotatable view of the earth. From here you will select the site of your first floating base. When alien activity is reported, this is the screen you initially respond on. In the beginning of the game, this usually means sending out intercept ships to force alien flying subs to land. Once you bring one down, you send a squadron of your top soldiers to the crash site, and the game switches to the tactical display screen.
The combat scenarios are where the action lies. When responding to a downed sub, your squad is dropped into the middle of the ocean floor. Equipped with diving suits and whatever weaponry you happen to have on hand, your eight soldiers must locate the alien ship and neutralize any surviving aliens in the immediate area. Sounds easy, right? Not quite. At the start of the game, the aliens are notably ahead of you on the technology tree, and they're clever. The aliens rarely wait in their sub for you to show up. One or two of them may hold the fort, but most of them take to the hills for a better chance of surprising you. Combat in Terror From the Deep is turn-based, with each soldier having an allotment of movement and action points that determine what can be done in one turn. Like before, a common practice will be to reserve time units for opportunity shots, giving your aquanauts the ability to get a shot (or three) off should a bad guy cross their field of vision during the aliens' turn.
As in the original X-Com, some of the hardest battles you will fight will be terror sites - areas where the aliens have attacked civilians. Since not too many people live on the ocean floor, these missions will take place above the waves in towns, ports, and on the occasional ship. These missions pose an additional threat this time, because not all your equipment will work on land. For some reason, gas-propelled harpoons and ink grenades aren't very useful above sea level. In Terror From the Deep you must plan your equipment purchases even more carefully, allowing for every situation you may find yourself in.
Although I'm not a big fan of sequels that run on the same engine as the original and offer no real enhancements (a couple years ago they were called "mission disks" and sold at half the cost of a new game), there's no denying that Terror From the Deep is an excellent game. X-Com graduates now have a place to go to continue their exploits, and I'm sure they'll find it to their liking. Since Terror From the Deep plays identically to X-Com, I recommend that people who haven't yet played the original game start there first, mostly because they'll want to continue playing well past the end of a single installment. Terror From the Deep is a worthy successor to the Cinderella story of 1994. Of course, now our appetites are whetted for X-Com 3 . . .
