UFO: Aftermath

UFO: Aftermath is a turn-based strategy game from 2003 by the Czech studio ALTAR Interactive, which pays homage to the legacy of the classic X-COM and transposes its concept into its own world, whose humanity has been nearly wiped out by an alien invasion and a mutagenic virus. The player commands a group of surviving fighters who, on turn-based maps full of ruined cities and wilderness, fight mutated creatures and alien forces, while at the strategic level building and expanding bases, researching new technologies and weapons, and deciding how to divide noticeably limited resources between defense, research, and saving the remnants of humanity.

The game retains the tense, uncompromising tone of its predecessor – losing a unit is permanent, and a bad decision on the strategic map can mean a slow, hard-to-reverse decline of the entire campaign and the loss of key bases. The graphics were functional and clear for their time, focused mainly on the readability of the battlefield and the individual enemy types, and the music accompanied the rather grim, post-apocalyptic atmosphere of a ravaged, feral Earth without a single safe place.

UFO: Aftermath became the first installment of a loose trilogy continued by UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight, and among fans of turn-based strategy it earned a reputation as a dignified, if less polished and less finely tuned, successor to the X-COM series. To this day it is valued as one of the most ambitious Czech attempts to revive the genre at a time when it was rather marginal in the main gaming market's interest among major publishers. The series also differed from classic X-COM in its emphasis on the story behind the invasion and the gradual revelation of the enemy's origin, which gave players motivation to keep pushing through the campaign despite its difficulty. The game also demanded careful expedition planning from the player, since a shortage of fuel, ammunition, or medicine could easily ruin even a well-progressed campaign. It was precisely this uncompromising resource management that gave the game its tension even outside the turn-based battles themselves and set it apart from simpler strategy games of its time.

Why play it: For fans of turn-based strategy and the X-COM legacy, it offers demanding expedition planning and a compelling story about an invasion, albeit with less polished execution than the legendary original.