🚀 go-pugleaf

I got Interceptor just a couple days ago, thinking this must be the latest
and greatest in the series, but have been pretty unimpressed. Does anybody
know the story behind this thing? It almost looks like a sub-group at
Microprose threw this thing together in their spare time, and decided to
release it as some sort of alternate third-game-in-the-trilogy. The
documentation talks about X-Com 1 and 2, but doesn't mention Apocalypse at
all. I should've remembered Microprose's fondness for "hack-job" games.

For those of you who haven't played it, it's a first-person spacecraft
shoot-em-up, mainly. It does have some of the X-Com "strategy" elements of
base-building, technology-researching, radar-watching, etc., but just feels
slapped together. Used to be, when I was running an old turn-based X-Com
mission, I felt like I had lots of options. Capture the aliens? Save the
people? Destroy the houses? Bullets (single, burst, auto), gas, flame,
rockets! With these first-person shoot-em-up missions in Interceptor, I
feel like I basically have to blast everything in sight before they can
blast me, and that's about it.

Mainly what's lacking, I suppose, is the feeling of exploration that really
"makes" an X-Com game. As bad as TFTD was, it was spine-tingling to decend
into the lower levels of a mother ship. Likewise for the alien buildings in
Apocalypse. In Interceptor, there's no exploration -- you can discover
alien space bases, but when you go to destroy them, it's all done in
spaceship dogfight mode -- and one dogfight looks pretty much like any
other. It gets monotonous really fast. Even beefing up your spaceship with
new weapons, etc. doesn't really help or change the appearance of the
fights that much.

I sure hope that the next X-Com game, whatever it is, isn't first person
the way Interceptor is first person. It kills 90% of what made up a good
X-Com game.