UFO Extraterrestrials, a blatant clone of the seminal 1993 turn-based strategy game X-COM, isn’t a bad throwback game; it also doesn’t try anything particularly new. What you get is a game released in 2007 that looks shockingly old and plays like classic DOS games of yesteryear; it also comes with a plodding, methodical pace that makes even hard-core turn-based fans eager for something – anything – to speed up the proceedings.

What saves UFO from “direct to bargain bin” status is the fact that the core design idea of the original X-COM is still as strong as ever. There is still something compelling about decking out individual soldiers with unique weapons, upgrading their gear and personal stats, and sending them off on missions that revolve around shooting bizarre looking aliens. As the game progresses, your scientists back at the base research bigger and better alien techs, and your soldiers become elite killing machines – but the aliens get a lot tougher as well so there is a simple, yet extremely effective dynamic going on between the good guys and the bad guys. It worked with the original game 14 years ago and it still works today.

The truth of the matter is that UFO is too much of an X-COM clone. The genre of the tactical squad based strategy game took off in the mid to late 1990s and when you compare UFO to other games like Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate, Jagged Alliance, and especially the immensely underrated alien killing game Incubation, this knock-off just doesn’t stack up too well. In fact, Incubation, a game released back in 1998, even looks better than UFO Extraterrestrials. The sound is equally bad with rudimentary effects that add absolutely nothing to the atmosphere. It also wins the award for the worst intro-movie of all time. You simply need to see it to believe just how cornball it is. Even when the goal is to emulate X-COM, there’s just no excuse for these types of things when you want to charge $40. Playing old games of systems gone by is all the rage nowadays…but rarely are you asked to pony up full price.

The game is a bit different than the MicroProse classic in that you aren’t saving Earth, but rather the fictional world of Esperanza in the year 2025. The rest of the game follows the same pattern of building bases, tracking enemy UFOs and shooting them down and sending a team to investigate the crash site. Your squad of bug hunters start off painfully inept, able to miss an alien that is standing literally right in front of them. After a few missions your troops become more reliable, accurate, and durable. They also obtain more action points which allow them to do more things during their turn such as move, shoot, crouch, lob grenades and so on. You also end up wasting a lot of action points by simply turning your soldiers around. There is a crazy lack of peripheral vision which leads to spinning in place to just see what is literally right next to you.

The missions remain the lifeblood of the game, even though there is another portion that involves managing your bases, assigning scientists research tasks, and building new equipment, etc. It’s the missions that make the game go. It’s also where you end up having the most fun and suffering from high levels of frustration. First off, there are a limited number of maps available so you end up repeating the same areas over and over again. A random map generator would be nice, but honestly just more maps in general would serve the game much better.

The maps are also too big, filled with dead space which makes each mission last a lot longer than it should. After a while it becomes second nature to ignore the large buildings and just hunt for the crashed alien ship because there is always a few aliens inside and the ones on the outside simply bull rush you; this strips the necessary surprise factor out of the missions, especially after you have played a map a few times.

You can’t help but get attached to your squad, though. In an odd twist, your soldiers cannot die but rather when they lose all health they’re simply “in the hospital” for a set number of days. This does remove the fear of losing your top shooter, but it’s also a pretty good way to make sure you have a team capable to beating the tougher aliens as the game continues—and in order to get the most out of UFO you need to give it a chance. It starts off excruciatingly slow but when it throws the more advanced aliens at you and your troopers are able to fight back effectively the flow picks up quite a bit.