Xenowars has turn-based gameplay and quite a lot of exploration on an alien planet. There is also a little bit of base building and even defending. This game can be a little slow to get started but once you are all set up and over the learning curve it’s amazing.

This is one of those games where the starting was quite tough to the point, I even considered not writing any content on this game and just uninstalling it. It’s a good thing I did not give up on this game. Once I got over the learning curve at the start and got to a point in the game where I could learn from my mistake. It was amazing.

This game also has many different stages were during each one the games open more and more up to the player. You go from struggling just to getting started. Then you have a base that is up and running while you run around a limited area of the plant. After that, you have a satellite and a vehicle you use to move around in.

Rought Start

After the game shows you some basics to combat you find yourself in the middle of chaos on Earth. Some humans and mutants are not getting along. Many deadly combat situations on Earth will simply end your playthrough.

You are tasked with filling a spaceship with people and heading to an alien planet. I lost count of how many times I either died on Earth or shortly after landing on the alien planet.

This is also quite a critical part of setting yourself up. As you have a limited amount of space on your ship you can only bring so many with you. Many different people offer all kinds of different advantages for taking you along.

This game tutorial system is also just a pop-up window with some images and text that explains things for the most part. If you need more than that this game is going to be a bit rough for you.

I did not care to read much of what was included in the tutorial. I however did read enough to get an understanding of what everything was bout.

The game has a decent amount of dialogue and story going on as well. I felt it added to the mysteries of what was going on. It often gave some needed context clues to make decisions down the road. I also learned if you are just not in the mood to read it and skip text things could become a bit confusing but not impossible to work out why things were going, the way they were.

Once you leave Earth and arrive on the alien planet you are not out of the woods yet. Till you are at the point of having buildings where you can create new units. I felt there was still quite a high risk of failure. That gives you that feeling of having to play far more carefully than you would otherwise like to be playing as there is not a lot of breathing room.

The Base

Once you have some basic building down and a bit of an economy going it feels like the game gives you a lot of breathing room. There will be somewhat a while from the early stages till you meet what I consider to be a mission failure checkpoint.

The buildings inside your base produce many of the resources you need to expand and build units. Things like energy, minerals, food, and water. All of these buildings also have some kind of upgrade path to increase production one way or another way.

Most of the production buildings can be a set and forget about for the most part unless there is a random event affecting it. The crop research center produces quite a small amount of food on its own.

This is where going out and killing aliens comes into handy. As you explore and loot things you can find seeds. These seeds then can be planted in the crop research center. After so many turns you then can collect plants that yield food and other materials.

The nice thing about this system is the plants can’t die. You also don’t need to water them. If you are out for long amounts of exploration time you don’t get to worry about the plants which I found to be enjoyable. This just means if you are not collecting them when they are ready you are not planting new stuff and thus your optimization of this building will be a bit lacking for harvest output.

As the story unfolds you slowly unlock more and more buildings. Depending on what building upgrades you make along with skill tree choices. Buildings like the Army Preparation Facility where you produce alien and human troops become quite vital to your survival.

The base is also where critical fail checks occur. Once every so often you will get informed that a hared of aliens is migrating and your base is in their path. If you fail to defend the base it’s game over.

All a single alien creature has to do is make it into the backline of the battlefield and you lose. They have broken into your base and destroyed everything.

Thankfully you can put up a limited number of turrets, and barriers and deploy your army to defend the base. If, however, you can’t get prepared within the 10-day warning and survive long enough through the waves of enemies. There is no real coming back from this. It’s as I see it a critical check to see if you have made enough progression in the game to stay alive.

There have also been many times when I've come back from long exploration trips to my base to find a random event occurring. Oftentimes, I push my already defeated army to its limits or find out there was some kind of damage in production that will slow down my rebuilding my army.

Exploration

The fun part for me was just going out and exploring. Early game you are doing so on foot. The map is covered in a fog of war and each time you enter into that fog you could end up facing a combat situation or you lucked out and nothing attacks you.

While exploring I ended up finding many dungeons and things like chests. The chests were quite interesting as they required you to work out what item to use if any to safely open them and retrieve some kind of reward.

The early play game map can take a few days to walk across it in either direction depending on if there are any random conditions like rain or mud. It also takes some time to find shortcuts or work out if you have to follow a road.

There are also many creatures guarding certain sections of the map. Sometimes I found I could walk around them. Other times I found them guarding a chokepoint and I had to engage in combat to get into an area I wanted.

There are also quite a few different NPCs, destroyed towns, and even missions to pick up while out exploring. While the map might not look that big. It turns out this is just the early stages.

Much later into the game, you end up unlocking quite a massive map to explore around in a vehicle. Were many of the basics you learned from walking around on foot now applied just at a bigger scale. The map is filled with combat situations, dungeons, and looting opportunities.

Combat

A huge part of this game is the turn-based combat. Early game the fights were rather quick and I was often left with the feeling if only I had a few more units on the battlefield things would be so easy.

The tech tree allows you to expand on how many units you can take in and other restrictions and the number of tiles your army takes up. This I also found starts to add a considerable amount of time to each combat engagement as both you and any enemies you come across slowly increase total units on the battlefield as you progress deeper into the game.

Some units like your own character have special abilities with cooldown times they can use during combat. Units tend to fill different roles from being a tank class to dealing devastating ranged damage on the battlefield under the right conditions.

Your character even has a potion belt where he can carry in a few different items to use on individual targets in combat. For the most part, I found myself saving those for combat with the different bosses in this game where I needed all the help I could get.

With combat being turned base in this game I'm rather glad there is an option to delay using a unit when its time comes. I would often find myself in situations where I would prefer if the enemies were the ones to come into my combat range instead of the other way around.

In most situations you and whoever your enemies are not the only thing to deal with on the battlefield. There are often “neutral” creatures on the map. Sometimes they will randomly attack and many times if I wait out some turns, they end up not getting along with whoever I'm fighting. It’s always nice to have an enemy that has been softened up before I need to send my units into harm's way.

Terrain also plays a huge role in combat. Having to cross water tends to slow you down. Sometimes there are massive holes that enemies can pull my units into killing their entire division. There are also just many random effects like characters not being able to move around correctly for so many moves due to mud.

Often there are one of two types of victory conditions. You either need to kill all of the other side. The other one is needing to reach an end point which is often the case when exploring areas that are covered in fog. Once the right condition is met you have one.

Final Thoughts

This game ended up being far more in-depth than I was expecting. I’m rather glad I ended up checking out quite a few games. This is also one where thankfully I stuck out at the start of the game otherwise, I would have missed just how amazing this game becomes once you are a bit set.

There have also been a few rage-educing deaths and some funny ones along the way. I don’t know how many times I barely escaped death just to make it back to my base to find out there was a situation requiring combat waiting for me.

There are also many elements of this game I have barely scratched the surface of yet. While I chose to have earth force army that also included some mutants in it. There is an entire array of mutants to use for those who want more of an exotic army.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Xenowars (I don’t make anything from this tracking link).