OpenXcom: Terror from the Deep

The lore around Terror From the Deep converges on three points. It is very difficult. It is buggy. It is just a re-skin of the first game.

And due to the last two points i decided to give OpenXcom a try. It’ll make the game feel different from UFO, which i’ve just finished, and they promised they’ve fixed the bugs.

Terror from the Deep that is sold on Steam with DosBox and 2K’s config, comes without aspect correction, stretched to widescreen and with a disgusting blur filtre. It’s faster to just nuke this disgusting config and generate a new one, with no soap and with aspect correction. And yes, the game needs aspect correction, even if the developer responsible for geoscape was a lazy arse again. Saying that geoscape proves that the game is widescreen is the same as saying that in-game UFOpaedia proves that this game is wider than ultra-widescreen. All the weapons’ sprites are rotated horizontally and then squished for no reason at extreme ratio. Even in widescreen 16/10 it doesn’t get any better. Battlescape without aspect correction looks like arse.

Meanwhile OpenXcom loonies unironically think that the devs saw the future and made the game to fit 16//10 laptops. No, i’m not joking, that’s their reasoning to not include an aspect correction option, to play this game as it was played in the 90s. The teenage dunces who developed it, are unaware that back then DOS was running at 320×200 internal resolution, but people were using 1024×768 or even 1280×1024 analogue CRT screens. Windows always run everything in exclusive fullscreen (that’s why many 90s games don’t even have resolution options — why bother if you can be lazy). The OpenXcom youngsters could literally look at the back of the box. (The manual on Steam uses 16//10 screenshots. In the 1995. And there can be evidence that originally the designs were supposed to be ugly as hell, as depicted in the UFOpaedia. Unless the packaging materials were created by MICROPROSE drawing from what they saw on the screen. And anyway, then it means the sprites are stretched inside the inventory.) Yes, geoscape bothers the hell out of #metoo, whoever rendered it was a lazy arse. But if OpenXcom kids are so smart that they allowed for a bigger resolution in battlescape (which was a separate sub-program in some releases), why won’t they make geoscape run without aspect correction, and battlescape with? Why not allow for better resolutions? Double is good, but triple could be better. Why not fix all the stretched sprites while they are at it? They are clearly not above altering the vanilla experience, so why not do more? If they can’t program it to render properly, they can use overscan to hide the -boxing options. Or not, pillarboxing have never killed anyone. Right now i can stretch the game to my 4//3 monitor, but i don’t know how to make OpenXcom run on a 16//9 screen with aspect correction. And i sure will never recommend to anyone using something which intentionally runs at a wrong aspect ratio.

This is a finished stable release which i’ve finished. git_master_2023_12_03_0959 But it is a pet tinker project in alpha, that doesn’t even have a stable release. One day it can be entirely different from the next day. There are already two new versions. But if i to believe the ads it is feature complete and working. It’s a free client, relatively easy to install. But it still requires ownership of the original game. At the very least it adds some hotkeys, quicksaves, a proper menu, increased resolution (and therefore FoV) for battlescape.

Mythos Games showed the superiority of UFO over Laser Squad, the way Sega Mega Drive 2 did over Famicom — by using bigger, more detailed sprites, with lower FoV. As if Famicom couldn’t use bigger sprites. But Sega did it in 1988. And UFO is from 1994. Battlescape always looked uncomfortable. It’s chunky, and the claustrophobic FoV just lowers playability. It was not looking good compared to the contemporaries, despite the lighting system.

And now Terror from the Deep, being just a re-skin, with barely any changes, had to compete against the 1995 games. Against the realistic C&C with big FoV, against WC2 with its genre-defining interface, against Jagged Alliance.

But OpenXcom can run double-resolution for the battlescape, doubling the FoV, which was sorely needed. Just going to 640×480 from 320×200, during the times of 1280×1024, and with unified art-style the game looks very good. The cartoony nice palette has nothing on JA2 and C&C realism, which was in fashion at the time, but compared against JA, HoM&M 1–2, Civ 2, and WC2 — this does look nice. Only the smooth scrolling for missed projectiles is lacking. Though, even at 1600×1200 with Vsync enabled i had severe screen-tearing on the OpenXcom render.

I’m too lazy to do a deep research of the original Terror from the Deep to compare it to UFO or OpenXcom, but all my major gripes with the GUI are still present. Yet OpenXcom fixes them. There’s a new [Esc] menu with all the required settings and with a convenient save/load function, and exiting. When the mouse pointer is occupying a wrong storey it is still working, forcing the units to move below it. The game usually properly shows obstacles on the line of fire, especially at the doubled resolution, and you can use force fire. There’s a move confirmation, which was needed in UFO. The options menu in geoscape was also fixed. There’s interception from target’s menu, which is very convenient in the beginning of the game. With multiple bases the original method is better. There’s sorting of aquanauts by skills, and it affects their order in the dropships. There are mouseover tips.

Terror from the Deep is kinda a cheap sequel, which is just a reskin. Mechanically there are barely any differences. I can name the melee weapons, and dry missions which strip you of jetpacks and disable some weapons. 90s had many of such lazy sequels, back then people thought it was okay. Only with L4D2, Overwatch 2, Destiny 2, Titanfall 2, all the CoDs and annual sportsballs games people started to complain about having to buy the same thing twice. Though, maybe it’s because the 90s games were singleplayer, and my examples are multiplayer. New iterations mean that the servers of the original game will become empty.

But where Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gates 2, Allody 2 and the others recycled the assets, and added crucial QoL improvements, while writing an entirely new story, Terror from the Deep is the same game with the same progression, but with all assets replaced. I can’t remember a single asset that was re-used from the original. A very big artistic work was done just to create the same game. I wonder if it would be actually faster to set the sequel on mars’ colony mentioned in the ending of UFO, recycling most of the assets, but designating  avenger, power suit and plasma weapons as the starting set. Mars has different atmosphere and gravity, so you need to research better craft. The amount of new sprites needed would be lower. So that design paradigm would result basically in the same game as Terror from the Deep, but with a new story it would be a proper sequel.

This story instead is not good at all. The original ending doesn’t gel with it. The whole water thing is not explained. And there’s no reason you can’t use old tech overland. The justifications for the loss of the old research are bad, yet they are everywhere, constantly reminding you that this story sucks and you can’t treat it like a separate entity from UFO. It should have actually been just concurrent with UFO. A second organization dealing with water, absent in the original. I literally can’t come up with a game the-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eory to justify the absence of all these things in the first game, if the story says they were there all along. This is a very thorough re-skin but they didn’t even bother to make the writing make any sense.
They have unified all the assets. The original game started with a comic book intro, had Guile hair, yet featured many very detailed pictures and had many morbid scenes and assets in it. This game starts with a new CGI cutscene and all of it adheres to the lovecraftian horrors of the deep theme. The autopsy art is way weaker than the explicit images from UFO, but its dark tone is coherent with the game’s theme. All the equipment has blue tint during the underwater missions. The art-style and the underwater theme are great. I don’t think i saw it anywhere else besides Stirring Abyss.

The levels “look great” they are way more detailed and visually complex. But to see them you have to use that now-less-useless roof button. The hills with nooks and crannies are obscured by fog of war and black voids in a very patchy pattern. It’s very detrimental to readability and the fog of war looks bad on rugged terrain. Enemies which are entirely visible on storey N+1 can be aimed at only at the storey N, where you can’t even see them.

The levels being so complex is detrimental to the gameplay. This is way worse than forests in UFO. So much verticality is bad for lines of fire, but now the enemies have creatures which shoot in an arс. And it makes everything longer, with the last enemy hiding somewhere on the map in some pit between a hill and two trees.

The terror missions are way bigger, with even more rooms and buildings. The ships do look good, even if for some reason it’s very hard to remove the fog of war from the animated maps’ edges. But these are two-stage missions, four storeys each. And the cruise ships have many tens of rooms, each with a dedicated closed bathroom. On artefact sites the doors’ sprites are indistinguishable from the walls.

The colonies also feature two stages. A smaller base above, and a giant sprawling labyrinth below. The animated tiles are alive and pulsating, the walls are decorated with vaginas with balls and clitorises with peeholes. But they are truly giant, separated into small sections with walls and doors everywhere. They are fully perforated with stairs and elevators, any turn a crab can jump out right behind you and pinch your posterior. If your doods stand on one elevator to make it inaccessible there are still 2-3 more nearby. I thought old colonies were big. But these are insane. If they were a rare sight it would be fine. But they appear since the first week and there are a lot of them. And in both phases everyone is using blaster launchers. You dying or not dying this turn is a roll of a dice. The first stage is filled with mind-reading tasoth, the second with pinching crabs.

People say that the research in the vanilla game is bugged, but not in the OpenXcom. To be safe i didn’t risk it and just followed the research tree.People say the second game is very difficult. And it can actually feel difficult if you to try to play it like a separate game. Your starting equipment entirely sucks. Many enemies are plain immune to it. The starting missions are filled with enemies which can tank multiple harpoon shots. Any one can one shot your dood. You suffer from PSI attacks before you even research your first gun. There are terror sites everywhere. All civilians just run towards the mermaids to die, and to send your score into negatives. There’s already an alien colony nearby, and even upgraded guns can barely deal any damage. So you have to play it like a sequel or an add-on pack, and use your knowledge of the first game.

You start with a bigger transport and a bigger team, and the first thing to do is to hire more goons to fill the ship. It is still a turn-based tactical game built around spotters. And this time you can climb your dropship for better sniping positions. In this game you are very likely to knock out an alien for free with your attacking guns. Which speeds things up, especially if you are prepared. But also it means that during the long end-game battles the knocked out enemies will get up and you will have to comb the whole map again. Half the enemies will at least turn into civilians. But the ones with melee attacks will pinch you in the butt when you least expect it. If the enemy doesn’t scream dying it’s not dead.

Early game can be frustrating, so the best idea is to rush the research. Build a prison ASAP, so your free knocked out enemies won’t go bad. You want to try to get a deep one (and a calcinite). The aliens are equipped with heavy plasma sonic cannons from the beginning, so hire more scientists and research a sonic cannon at the first opportunity. Sonic cannons, and their ammo will be dropping on every sortie, so you can easily equip everyone with them. No other gun is even needed in this game, sonic cannons one-shot most of the things. After sonic cannons you need a live terrorist (but not a deep one) to start building a PSI lab. Then continue with PSI research and get a live tasoth. While you are still testing your dunces for the strength of their mind, i think it’s useful to keep feeble-minded ones on the team with no weapons. They will be employed as decoys, attracting all the PSI attacks, which will save the medium-minded goons. Rushing PSI is the best idea for both games, considering how long it takes to get the first test results. I think i also saw an OpenXcom option to disable the start of the month for PSI testing. In this game PSI control also gives full access to the unit’s stats and inventory.

Once you get your sonic cannons you instantly fall back into the UFO late-game routine. Terror from the Deep doesn’t feel like an insane chore anymore, where every enemy takes 15 hits to kill. It’s still a bit annoying though, with just how much RNG matters and with the amount of enemies.It’s a pity it is impossible to just enjoy the game at your own pace. Laser guns were absolutely useful in UFO during the mid-game. And you can have many hours of tactical gameplay, before you are forced to fall into offensive PSI control and commit war crimes against unarmed enemies. In Terror you either go sonic cannons and PSI from the start, or you don’t survive.

The whole research tree being tied to a live deep one is an ass decision. If you didn’t get one (deep) during the early game, now you have to actually feed the humanity to aliens. You have to play badly. You have to intentionally allow all the gill man saucers to flourish and to start terror missions.

After you get your deep one you research things so fast you have no time to use any of it. From the ion armour you instantly go into the magnetic variant. After which without pausing you go Manta-Hammerhead-Leviathan. By the time i’ve finished researching Leviathan, my Manta has barely started being built. At that point i was plain stalling the game, just to build one of everything, to fill the ufopaedia with alien subs and alien missions knowledge, and to have more than five aquanauts who can withstand PSI attacks.

In UFO craft blasters were annihilating enemy crafts, leaving you with no elerium to refuel. In this game “blasters” have only two shots and are incapable of destroying big saucers, while you drown in zrbite. Sonic Oscillators are the only choice. And there’s barely any need for the advanced subs. Only dreadnoughts fight back, your government-issue Barracudas can deal with anything. And the best way to deal with a dreadnought is to just tail it and invade once it has landed.

Calcinite is another enemy that is sometimes present during the early game and disappears later. It unlocks the melee weapons research tree, so if you want them, you have to allow aquatoid saucers to flourish freely. I did find the melee weapons to be useful. Instead of shooting aliens i was PSI controlling them to shove a drill up their holes up close. Even on easy difficulty there’s a ton of combat with barely any down-time for research and manufacture. You get several fights per game’s day while PSI evaluation takes months. The good balance would be something like fight • research • fight for resources • manufacture • fight with new toys • research • fight etc. It will make each fight feel like progression. Constantly cleaning out crash-landed tiny UFOs and dreadnoughts is repetitive. Especially in this game where you must rush the endgame equipment, so your early-game is your end-game.

The final fight was also bloated compared to UFO. That ending used the same colony layout, so it didn’t feel any special the second time in my life i saw it. In my memory it was way more organic and way more epic. So having a proper special mission for a final fight can be an improvement. But i’m not sure that their solution is the right one. Wiki says that vanilla Leviathan has an item limit so you have way less ammo (another reason to research melee). All enemies use only blaster launchers so you can’t pick more ammo from the bodies.

Instead of two phases, this battle has three. First there’s two-storey “artifact” layout. Then a two-storey “colony” layout labyrinth. It is literally designed to take you through the entire map, both storeys, the longest way possible. Hauling all 26 dudes through it in turn-based fashion is an absolute arse. If you think you are very intelligent, and blow up a wall near the elevator down, you discover that it has only 25 slots for your 26 doods. So just from the very beginning pick up the blaster launcher the enemies have dropped on the previous stage, and destroy every wall in your way, until you get every single alien in this phase. Wiki says that you aren’t able to save during the third phase in the vanilla game. Another point goes to OpenXCom. If you want to “roleplay” and engage with the game’s world you would have to move extremely slowly, always covering every direction with overwatch to save your doods. And don’t forget the blaster launchers and enemies pretending to be dead just to jump up and pinch your arse. The level is a giant spiral forcing you to take a super long path to the last boss. Or to the lack of thereof. The last boss is 8 pieces of furniture and about four marauder shields hallucinoids. Stuck in a tiny room. While you still have blaster launchers.

— / • / —

This is not a résumé of Terror from the Deep, it’s a résumé of OpenXcom: Terror from the Deep.

This game is just more of the late-game of UFO. They tried to make the sequel bigger and harder for returning players, but kinda went in a somewhat wrong direction, making it a bit tedious. With my progression of starting with UFO vanilla, and this one through OpenXCom — it felt like i’m playing a sequel. But if someone to play UFO in OpenXcom first, this would feel just like a content drop or an add-on.

Well, all in all, with OpenXcom fixing Terror‘s problems and UFO‘s GUI, and with wikis to guide my research — i enjoyed it. But it actually was a bit tedious. I plain left four alien colonies to be on earth, because i didn’t want to deal with that type of levels again. And the finale was going overboard. Even if it did feel more like a finale compared to a typical colony mission of Cydonia with an additional layer.

If you can force OpenXcom into aspect correction for battlescape, i would strongly recommend using OpenXcom over the original (at least the version git_master_2023_12_03_0959). If UFO works with OpenXcom as good as Terror, i would also strongly recommend OpenXcom over vanilla UFO.