XCOM: Terror From the Deep: COVID Edition

Let's have a look at XCOM: Terror From the Deep, a turn-based tactical wargame from 1995. Sequel to the classic UFO: Enemy Unknown, which was sold in the USA as XCOM: UFO Defense.

I'm old enough to remember when Terror From the Deep was new. I remember ignoring it, because the reviewers were unimpressed. The major criticisms were that it was UFO with minor cosmetic tweaks and a much higher difficulty level. I continued to ignore it for the next twenty-five years.

But now the world is under lockdown from COVID, and there is time enough at last. What better way to distract myself from a global plague than by ordering a bunch of little soldiers to die horrible gruesome deaths at the bottom of the ocean. Was Terror From the Deep a hidden gem, or not?

I don't want to spoil things, dear reader, but the answer is no, it was not a hidden gem. It's not very good. It feels like an under-developed prototype of UFO, which is odd given that it came out a year later. It has a number of misguided changes that make me appreciate how many things the original developers got right.

For all its problems, some of the game's artwork is good.

Nowadays Deep is generally regarded as an aberration in the XCOM canon, although some people have a soft spot for it. This chap makes a valiant attempt to put a positive spin on the game. I admire that. I disagree with him, but I admire his guts.

But first, what is XCOM?

A Brief Pictorial History of the XCOM Games

XCOM's predecessors were developed here in Britain by Julian Gollop and his brother Nick, plus a bunch of their friends. They cut their teeth with Rebelstar Raiders (1984) (top left, top right), Rebelstar (1986) (bottom left), and Rebelstar 2 (1988) (bottom right).
The Gollops were inspired by 1970s tabletop wargames such as Commando and StarSoldier, where the player controlled individual soldiers rather than large military formations. This carried through to the Rebelstar games and made them stand out.

Their first masterpiece was Laser Squad (1988), which is often cited as one of the best games of the 8-bit years.
UFO: Enemy Unknown was originally going to be a direct sequel, but the publishers wanted something more epic, so the Gollops got to work and added a planetary map and basebuilding.

The end result was UFO: Enemy Unknown. It made wargames hip for a while. It was difficult but accessible, with enough action and explosions to amuse fans of Doom. Also, check out that "next turn" screen. Isn't it awesome?

How did Terror From the Deep come about? UFO: Enemy Unknown was a surprising commercial success. Publishers Microprose wanted a new XCOM game in the shops as soon as possible, but official sequel XCOM: Apocalypse was nowhere near ready, so as a compromise the Gollops handed over the original game's code to Microprose's team of in-house programmers.

The Microprose team tweaked some of the numbers, changed the graphics, replaced the music, but otherwise left the underlying game engine more-or-less untouched. They had a few original ideas, which are detailed in a fascinating draft publishing document, but sadly they didn't have time to implement them. The publishing document also implies that the game was going to be called UFO: Terror From the Deep in Europe - that part of the document is mangled, but I think that's the implication - until they decided on the XCOM name as an international standard.

And that was how Terror from the Deep came to be.

Terror From the Deep is also a text adventure for the ZX Spectrum, released in 1983 by Kayde Software. It's written in BASIC and has very little to do with tactical wargaming.

Nonetheless there are surprising parallels. The game's protagonist is a much better shot than the people XCOM seems to pull off the street. If you want to play it nowadays bear in mind that you have to enter commands in capital letters.

Mission pack sequels are not unusual in the world of wargames. In the 1980s the likes of PSS and CCS churned out essentially the same game every few months, with different stats and slightly different graphics, and in the 1990s and 2000s the Close Combat and Combat Mission games took an incremental approach to progress. In the wider gaming world 1994's Doom II was essentially Doom with some new maps, a new weapon, and some new monsters. Publishers ran riot with the concept in the 2000s, leading to endless and more-or-less identical Guitar Hero and FIFA games.

But Terror From the Deep was particularly controversial. The major bone of contention was the decision to opt for a radically different environment - the bottom of the sea - without actually doing much with it. The underwater setting felt like an afterthought. The game's soldiers walked on the sea floor as if they were on dry land, the water was for the most part crystal-clear, grenades flew in a ballistic arc, only a handful of units could "swim", the list goes on.

Meanwhile the baddies felt like redrawn copies of the original game's aliens, with a few attribute tweaks, and the overall visual design was busier and harder to read. At the time it felt like the worst of two worlds. If it had been a simple mission pack sold at a budget price it might be more fondly-remembered, or perhaps it could have been bundled with a re-release of the original game, as per Laser Squad. However the decision to sell it as a standalone game at full price felt underhand.

The publishing document even reveals that there were plans to sell it at a higher price than the original - Microprose wanted to raise its A-list price point to £49.99, from £44.99 - but "the title really is more of the same and other than graphic changes, there is little (to) justify increasing the price above that of Enemy Unknown".

The game was also criticised for being unfairly hard, a design decision that apparently stemmed from a bug in the original game's code. It was popular enough to be ported to the PlayStation a short while later, although unlike its predecessor it was never released for the Commodore Amiga or CD32.

The overall design tries to strike a balance between futuristic tech and Captain Nemo-style brass machinery, but it just looks clumsy.Furthermore the "next turn" screen isn't in the same league. The sequel has a moustachioed corporal with a silly helmet who looks bored.I think the moustache is actually shading, but he still looks bored.

Incidentally the actual proper sequel, XCOM: Apocalypse, was also a big disappointment, although for a completely different reason. It was too ambitious. After several delays Apocalypse was released in a semi-completed state in 1997. It eschewed the charming pixel graphics of its predecessors for a mixture of scanned physical models and state-of-the-art pre-rendered CGI, but the results were hideous.

I haven't played it, so I can't comment on the gameplay, but from what I've seen on Youtube it looks like a messy fusion of real-time and turn-based combat with tiny little soldiers lost against fussy backgrounds. It wasn't a big success, and Julian Gollop and his chums largely lost control of the franchise at that point.

Terror from the Deep's geoscape is an inverted copy of its predecessor. This time the player patrols the seas.

In a neat touch the world map is apparently based on this image by Heinrich Berann.

Despite rumours to the contrary there were no more XCOM games for many years, although there was a happy ending; in 2012 the series was rebooted with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which streamlined the basic gameplay in generally sensible ways. It was a surprise commercial success, despite the fact that turn-based tactical wargames are pretty niche in the modern era.

Modern-day XCOM's major innovations include squad-based enemy AI, context-sensitive cover, an expanded role-playing element, and a generally faster-paced, more compact tactical game.
In some respects the modern games are less flexible than the originals - XCOM's soldiers can no longer pick things up from the battlefield and there's only has one base - but they also eliminate a lot of pointless busywork.

EU was followed in 2016 by XCOM 2, which sold less well but still well enough, and again in 2017 by War of the Chosen, an extensive expansion pack that transformed XCOM 2 into a substantially different game. I have played XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen and I liked them, although the difficulty level is frustrating until you learn to throw flashbangs at everything.

Chosen is a good example of a mission pack sequel done right. It adds a bunch of new mechanics instead of simply rejigging the numbers, and the production values are on a par with the base game. Whether by coincidence or design the developers ended up hiring half of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation to do the voice acting, so if you want to order Marina Sirtis to kill a giant snake by making a car explode - everybody has a fetish - it's the game for you.

XCOM 2 has a sleeker, cleaner look than the chunky cartoonish graphics of EU.

As of this writing the latest XCOM title is Chimera Squad, a budget title that concentrates on tactical combat instead of base management. I haven't played it. It apparently has a lot of bugs, but they'll be ironed out in time. I waited twenty-five years to play Terror From the Deep, I can wait another few months for Chimera Squad to be patched. EDIT: In the end I waited one year and bought it when it was re-released on budget. It's okay! Ragged around the edges, with a much smaller scope than its predecessor, but the characterisation and storytelling was solid and it had a great soundtrack.

As of 2024 the series is dormant. Turn-based tactical wargames are in the same awkward position as flight simulators or strategic space empire simulators - they were very popular, back when the PC was a major force in the gaming word, but in the modern age they are a niche within a niche. The XCOM games sell well, because they're the classic big fish in a small pond, but it would take just one major flop to kill the genre off.

This chap appeared in a pre-release slideshow, but sadly not in the actual game.

Terror from a Deep has a more varied set of environments than Enemy Unknown. The original game was mostly farms and deserts, with the occasional tree, whereas Deep has abandoned ruins and expansive alien colonies.

The levels are procedurally-generated from clip-together map chunks.

I haven't explained what the XCOM games actually are. They're turn-based tactical wargames in which the player controls individual soldiers. Before battle the player equips the squad with weapons and armour, all of which has to be paid for somehow, and if XCOM fails to achieve enough mission objectives the secretive financiers who control the organisation cut a deal with the aliens and pull the plug.

In the original games XCOM could generate cash by selling alien artefacts. In fact it was surprisingly easy to become totally self-sufficient, which eventually broke the game, because after a while the baddies stopped scaling up in power while the player's soldiers became battlefield-conquering demigods.

This was one of the few new mechanics introduced in Terror From the Deep. Some alien submarines patrol too deeply to intercept, so the player either has to wait for them to surface, or alternatively build a better interceptor. I can't say it makes the gameplay any more entertaining.

The strategic level - managing a base and researching alien technology - is the thing that separated UFO: Enemy Unknown from Laser Squad. It's divisive. Some people can't stand it. In XCOM 2 in particular it's possible to win every mission and still lose the game because XCOM's forces didn't make contact with resistance regions quickly enough. Conversely, without the strategic element XCOM would be just a series of individual battles without any purpose or meaning. It would get boring.

The XCOM games have a number of shared elements. The games take place over a number of months, with the aliens gradually introducing more powerful units as the campaign goes on. On a tactical level the engine uses probability to determine whether shots connect, which is jarring if you've come to think of 80% as a sure thing. In reality 80% means that one in five shots will miss.

45% is almost half, isn't it? Fifty-fifty odds aren't that bad. And it feels like a waste if I don't shoot.

Across the course of an entire game even a few 99% shots are likely to miss, but nonetheless there's a stereotype that XCOM's dice are rigged against the player. The XCOM games try to force the rough-and-tumble of real combat into the genteel context of turn-based tabletop warfare, which leads to odd situations where XCOM's soldiers miss enemies standing right next to them. It's supposed to represent the fact that the soldier has just dashed into cover while under pressure, but it looks odd.

Furthermore there's a stereotype that XCOM's aliens almost never miss, which is fair criticism; they start off with better stats than XCOM's soldiers and they're coded to shoot at easy targets. Even in the modern games the AI is very simple, attacking the soldier with the weakest defence, while manoeuvring to maximise their squad's hit potential. In the original games the baddies were essentially mobile turrets that had a very simple decision loop, whereas in the modern games the enemy soldiers operate in three-unit pods that have a basic understanding of cover.

Enemy Unknown and Terror From the Deep give the soldiers a pool of time units that can be freely spent on any combination of actions, whereas the modern reboots abandon this in favour of a simpler two-stage move-and-shoot / move-and-move / shoot-and-not-move mechanic.

The XCOM games are also famous for their inverse difficulty curve. At the beginning of the game XCOM's soldiers are weak and poorly-equipped. They die like flies, and in the early titles the rookies are treated as a disposable resource, because it was the 1990s and everything was dark and edgy and cynical back then.

The games tend to reach a peak of difficulty when the aliens introduce psionic enemies. In UFO: Enemy Unknown the aliens could conceivably mind control and destroy an entire XCOM squad on turn two of the second mission. However once XCOM's own soldiers gain some experience and master psionics the missions become easier, and the final battle is usually a cakewalk.

On a personal level I don't mind the inverse difficulty curve. By the end of the game it's cathartic to finally have the upper hand. In every one of the XCOM games the alien invaders fundamentally misunderestimate humanity, and it's nice to prove them wrong.

Is it time to finally talk about Terror From the Deep? Yes, I believe it is. If this was 1995 I might have enjoyed Terror from the Deep more. If I had an ageing 486DX2/66, and I didn't have the internet, and I could only afford one brand-new game every few months, and perhaps my home life was rotten and it was cold etc, I could see why I might have enjoyed Terror From the Deep. Or at least spent hours of my life playing it. Things were different back then. Life was bleak. There was nothing to do. People were desperate for entertainment.

In those days a lot of PC games were filled with masses of busywork so that they felt substantial, and Deep has that in spades. The aliens establish colonies much faster than in Enemy Unknown, which results in a flurry of alien submarine activity, too many to shoot down, although alternatively you can wait for them to land and capture their loot intact. If you just want to play endless tactical missions Deep is great. But the missions quickly become boring, because the maps are too large, or too maze-like, or both at the same time.

Two examples of Terror From the Deep's mazey, time-consuming maps. Notice in the top screenshot how I had to clear a series of nondescript rooms until I found the last alien. That happens a lot. The soldiers only have a 45 degree field of view, so they have to turn left and right after they enter a room just in case there's an alien hiding right next to them.

If you want to have fun, natural fun, Deep is a disaster. There are essentially four problems.

The Maps
Terror From the Deep's maps are generally one-third larger than those of Enemy Unknown, and the alien bases are four levels deep, two more than EU. Clearing the outdoors maps swiftly becomes a chore, but that's nothing compared to the alien bases and terror missions. EU had a problem whereby occasionally the last enemy on the map got stuck, and you had to waste time hunting it down, but the maps were much smaller and easier to flatten with explosives so it wasn't a huge problem.

UFO's final level took place over two separate maps. The developers of Deep ran with this and made all of the terror missions and colony assaults two-map affairs. Each map has four layers, so that's eight layers of maze-like action. The final battle takes place over the course of three maps. The multi-map battles are dull slogs, the final battle especially so.

The design document reveals that there was a rationale behind this. The team wanted to exploit the verticality of water by extending the maps upwards, but in the game very few units can swim, so the extra height feels pointless. Furthermore there was a plan to make the player raid a series of artefact sites before embarking on the final mission, but in the finished game the artefact site missions are just variations of regular colony assaults that appear in place of periodic terror missions.

The first part of the final level is at least a little bit spooky.

The second much less so. This is the only time in the entire campaign I saw that particular alien.

The final, final map is a giant maze that resembles Wolfenstein 3D. It only has a handful of enemies, so most of the gameplay consists of walking along empty corridors, pausing occasionally so that your soldiers can recover their stamina. The original plan was to extent it over six(!) separate maps, but in the final game it was cut down to just three.

The ultimate suit of armour makes XCOM's soldiers look like turtles. Which makes sense given the aquatic environment, so I don't know what to think.

Gerard Dujardin, pictured here, has a psi-skill of 86. It's the single most crucial soldier attribute - anything below about 75 makes the soldier vulnerable to mind control and thus a liability in battle. The other attributes can be trained, but psi-skill is fixed, so there comes a point when you have to sack two-thirds of your soldiers.

UFO had a similarly straightforward final level, but it was concise and felt like a proper battle, with lots of the game's toughest enemies packed into one place. It ended with a fun albeit cheesy semi-animated cutscene, whereas Terror From the Deep has charmless mid-1990s CGI instead.

I include this screenshot as evidence that, in the year of Our Lord 2020, I finally finished Terror From the Deep, without cheating or using exploits.

I can't re-iterate how much of a slog Terror From the Deep is to play. Clearing a pair of four-level terror maps is torture, and the alien colony assaults are just as bad; if you try to wipe out all the aliens it takes an hour or more. It's far easier to land, clear out the landing zone, and immediately take off again (in the case of the terror missions) or just blow up the alien control centre and run away (in the colony assaults), which raises the question of what was the point making the maps so big.

My hunch is that the developers played through each of the large-scale maps once, but didn't account for the fact that the player would have to complete them several times. The idea of UFO on a larger scale is appealing, but the actualité is dreadful because the game does nothing to make the larger maps interesting.

The Numbers
At heart wargames are a bunch of numbers and mathematical equations. Combat is a series of dice rolls, and enemy units are just a collection of attributes. A long time ago actual real-life soldiers learned to transform battle into a series of abstract equations, and thus wargames were born. They can generally be boiled down into numbers and mathematical equations. The graphics, animations, music etc is just sauce.

Enemy Unknown generally got the numbers right. It had pleasing numbers. But it suffered from a problem whereby one of the alien weapons - the heavy plasma rifle - had much better numbers than any other weapon, so there was no point using anything else.

The developers of Terror From the Deep tackled this in two ways. Firstly they made XCom's weapons less powerful across the board. Deep's heavy plasma rifle carries ten rounds instead of thirty-five, and it can't fire on full-auto. It also eats up more time units, so XCOM's finest can only squeeze off two shots per turn rather than six.

The developers also made the most common enemy unit, the Lobster Man, much tougher than the first game's Muton, but unfortunately the two changes work against each other. There's still no point using anything except the heavy plasma analogue, because the Lobster Man shrugs off everything else, but XCOM's finest can only squeeze off one or two shots a turn, so the battles involve lining up eight or nine troops and salvo firing at everything, which makes for a slow-paced game.

On the positive side the enemies are vulnerable to melee weapons, and XCOM now has an array of underwater drills, but this isn't much help in the outdoors maps. Lobster Men are also vulnerable to stun weapons, but XCOM's soldiers can only carry a handful of stun rounds into battle, and the baddies have a nasty habit of waking up mid-mission and melee-ing XCOM's soldiers in the back. Or alternatively they wake up mid-mission and run away, at which point the player has to sweep the battlefield all over again, looking for the last enemy hiding in a cupboard somewhere.

Some of the maps take place on dry land. Most of XCOM's weapons work equally well above or below the water, but the rocket launcher and heavy cannon analogue don't work in the open air. Which is unfortunate because the rocket launcher - torpedo launcher, whatever - is the only starting weapon that can reliably take down some of the heavy terror units. It's one of those changes that makes a certain amount of logical sense, but raises a bunch of questions. Why can't XCOM buy regular rocket launchers on the open market and use them instead? The team can buy hand grenades and rifles, why not rocket launchers? Why not use the laser weapons XCOM developed during the first alien war?

How come cat doesn't need a gas mask when he goes outside? Because cats don't breathe, that's why.

The Research Tree
I got lucky. In an early terror mission I captured a Deep One terrorist alive. You need a live Deep One to research advanced armour and advanced submarine construction. Without advanced submarine construction you can't finish the game.

To complicate matters you have to research a dead Deep One first, then a bunch of unrelated technology, then a living Deep One. If you get the order wrong the game becomes unwinnable. But the Deep Ones are removed from the pool of enemies early in the game, so unless you capture one in the first few missions and keep it in reserve you're stuffed. I know about this because I looked at UFOPaedia, but players in 1995 without access to alt.games.xcom must have been baffled.

You can also break the game by researching certain technologies without having a sample of a third technology in your base inventory. If you sell off your captured mind control readers and then research the mind control lab, you can never unlock the mind control disruptor that allows your soldiers to conduct psionic attacks. A similar problem affects the more advanced melee weapons.

Again, it feels as if the developers played through the research tree once, with a guide in front of them, just to see if it worked, but they didn't ask someone outside the team to have a go. In contrast Enemy Unknown had a simple, bug-free research tree that added a bit of strategic depth to the game without getting in the way.

Did I mention a fourth thing? I can't remember now. Terror From the Deep is a frustrating experience. It has a bunch of new aliens that only appear briefly towards the beginning of the game, so you spend most of your time fighting Lobster Men. The terror maps are used too frequently to be entertaining, and the research tree is convoluted. The use of animated textures also makes some of the alien bases resemble early Geocities homepages.

Yes, there was a fourth thing. The terror missions take place on a mixture of cruise liners and beach resorts. Which makes sense, on a logical level - that's where terror attacks happen in real life. But the result is a set of maps where the fighting takes place in tacky casinos and restaurants, with civilians running around in swimwear. It feels like a spoof, but the rest of the game is deadly serious.

Four years after writing the rest of this blog post I finished the game a second time, to see if it was as bad as I remembered, but this time using OpenXCom, a source port. It was no less of a slog, but at least it ran more smoothly.

In the game's defence the music is good. Do I regret avoiding Terror From the Deep for twenty-five years? No, I do not. I shudder to think what might have happened if UFO had never existed, and instead Deep had been the first XCOM game. There might never have been an XCOM franchise, and the world would be a much poorer place.

For example, without XCOM, would snakes be sexy? I mention this because XCOM 2 has sexy snakes. One of the alien races is modelled on snakes, but they have hips and breasts, just like... unlike real snakes. They look like snakes, but they're sexy. It's confusing. Without XCOM, would snakes be sexy? As always, please write your answers on a postcard and send them to Iain Duncan Smith - that's I A I N - courtesy of Number 10 Downing Street, London. Just write "snakes would not be sexy" and don't leave a return address.

If anyone asks you why you did it, say that you are the captain of your own soul, e.g. don't implicate me. Until we meet again.