USC: Counterforce

I've spent enough time with old-school UFO clones to know when a developer is genuinely reaching for that pre-Firaxis density, and USC: Counterforce is doing exactly that, for better and worse. This is a two-person indie project, and that ambition-to-resource tension is visible in almost every layer of the game. At the tactical mission level, though, the bones are genuinely good. The action-point system lets you move, fire, reload, switch weapons, and move again in any order you choose until your AP runs dry, which gives individual turns a satisfying puzzle-like quality that modern XCOM games traded away for accessibility. Maps are procedurally generated, fully destructible, and littered with environmental hazards you can trigger, chain together, or use to seal off corridors. Barricades, airlock controls, darkness mechanics, breakable walls: the toolkit for creative play is real. The class-free skill system is where the build-nerd in me woke up. You allocate points across character attributes and a passive ability tree, then outfit each commando from what sounds like a sizeable arsenal of ranged weapons, melee options, and ammo types. A Bulleteer handles differently from a SquadSeeker at range, and figuring out which weapon fits which role in a given squad composition is the kind of quiet optimization that can eat an afternoon. Single Mission mode and the multi-mission Operations mode are the cleanest ways to experience this: tight, customizable, and honestly quite replayable once you understand the systems. Local co-op and Remote Play Together support means you can drag a friend into the chaos, which helps with the learning curve considerably. The campaign is the complicated part. It adds a hex-based strategic overworld with base-building, planetary mining, faction reputation management, and relay station defense, layered on top of the tactical core. The problem is that the tutorial barely covers the base-building mechanics unless you have prior time in Defend the Base mode, and the difficulty scaling in early campaign missions is erratic: you can face genuinely punishing alien types from mission one with no real escalation arc. Critics have pointed to a lack of QoL automation for repetitive management tasks and underdeveloped faction interactions as the campaign's main friction points. Steam reviews sit in mixed territory around 63 percent positive, which tracks with a game that is clearly loved by a subset of hardcore tactics fans but regularly loses more casual players at the front door. For the right audience, that friction is almost the point. If you came up on Laser Squad, Incubation, or Xenonauts and have been waiting for something that treats the original UFO's density as a feature rather than a flaw, USC: Counterforce will scratch that itch in ways the Firaxis remakes never bothered to. The single-mission mode alone has enough replayability to justify the price of entry for genre veterans, and the campaign, even with its rough edges, offers meaningful strategic decisions once you figure out which systems actually matter. The AI is aggressive and will push through walls and flank you through service tunnels, so passive play gets punished correctly. What the game needs is better onboarding and more QoL work on the management layer, both of which are the kind of things a small passionate developer can still address.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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