First of all,

I must say that the title of the game is fitting. After Shock. You get the shock afterwards. This rant may provide a spoiler to some, but I feel it hardly matters. So jolly well read on my good friends! Or don't, it's not really that exciting.

Anyway, I've beaten the game. It was - well, let's put it this way, disappointing. To be fair, I was not expecting some grand finale. But, someone did mention this to me a while back and now I've finally seen it for myself. The whole game revolves around sex - on a large scale.

That's putting it crudely, but it does explain the irrational behaviour of the Reticulans in the first game (Oh, hey, I know, let's make this one giant organic computer out of that planet over there! It'll have all these bits in it and these whistle things and - yeah, genius!). Although now I feel dirty.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the final mission.

1. Brilliant! The three missions were so fast loading thanks to not having any exteriors (or complicated exterior for the first one). Why can't all the missions be like this? Anyway, this was more like it.

2. Your soldiers must have gone to the Batman school of space travel. They can all breathe in space.

3. The reticulans are buffed up thanks to them suddenly having their good old warp rifles - they actually put a minor scratch on my soldiers! Well, no worse than what the Star Ghosts or Wargots could do at the best of times. Probably 7 to 12 hour recovery time tops.

4. The thingies that you have to destroy just need to be pummeled until they go splat. At least you're not forced to use some sort of explosive like you were in some Aftermath missions. I still wished there was a bit more positive feedback that what you were doing actually had some effect. Like having the organic bits writhe in pain, some screaming sound, or get a message that you dealt it some damage.

5. The progression between the second mission and the very last mission (which had pathetic resistance, by the way) didn't make much sense. But I guess they needed something to add a bit of drama to the end-game movie. Would've preferred the escape to be an actual mission that you had to play rather just watch.

After colonising the globe and blowing up the big potential suitor, all the missions leading up to the final mission were monotonous. They ALL involved the same strategy. Which went as follows for almost EVERY mission:

1. Map starts - I look at the minimap to see which side I'm on. I'm on this side, so they're most definitely on that side!

2. What bright spark designed the deployment bit for your soldiers? I dislodge my troops by moving them all out to some wider area. Kind of miss the drop pod by this point in the game.

3. I select my three main androids, consisting of a machine gunner (lvl 24. +2 mechanical skill with PK machine gun), my sub-machinegunner (lv 24. +4 short range skill with colts) and my energy weapons expert (lvl 20 +2 short range skill with sonic gun and plasma shotgun - for SG Clouds) and head towards the most likely location the enemies will come from. Can't say I used the rest all that much.

4. Wipe enemies out.

5. Assuming it was an escort civilian mission, I just have the pointman run to the target area and be done with it. If it's an obelisk mission, I just have one of my heavy hitters run around until I find it (or bang my head against the wall if the mission is bugged).

That's it. Missions generally ended in half the time it took for the whole danged thing to load.

Was that a rant? Probably was, but in the end I think it's a real mixed bag for a game. It was a good idea, but they really should've ironed out the late-game gameplay a bit more. Horrible game crippling bugs aside, I did enjoy it, but there's far-far too much room for improvement.

Oh well, I'm uninstalling it. Some day, maybe when I'm 60, I might play it again. For now, there are greener fields to be found, and I need to find that damned fence.

- NKF

The monotonous missions was what bugged me the most. The problem as I see it was that the story was too long while you had too little excitement on the way. Meaning too little scripted critical missions and too much research. Now if there were many critical missions with the same amount of research, I wouldn't mind, nor would I mind the same amount of critical missions with less research. This way, it just gets boring. Granted, I haven't yet finished the game, I have a bit more research/manufacture left, although I did have a test at the last mission, but at the time didn't know how to destroy something in the 2nd part.
I agree with your comments, but if I'm not mistaken, you could take your soldiers on the Cydonia mission in X-COM in Personal Armours also? I never tried it though, for obvious reasons.
In the end, I must say I liked the game, but it is definitely unfinished, which is a shame. I thought that the story was nice, because it was different from all the usual SF stories, so that was refreshing.

Is the final mission too far from the Assault on the WG ship mission? (when you really assault it, after you've stolen the Cultist codes and you're inside the 'asteroid' thingy)

I would say that you roughly have about 1/3 or 1/4 to go. But I haven't played in a while, so I could be wrong.

Technically it's the last leg of the game after the Wargot ship. Right after a long slog through the remainder of the Laputa lab's research. There's a brief mission where you get back on the Laputa and have to quell some mutineers, but apart from that nothing awfully exciting.

- NKF

I don't know, I never get bored of trying new and silly tactics, equipment and just random impulses...though I tend to keep a medic handy and a good defensive position on the map . I enjoy each mission but I honestly don't play this game straight. I mix it up with other games, Oblivion, DOW Dark Crusade, Halflife 2...keep the games mixed up and nothing really gets boring.....

Actually, to break the montony, I was playing this game in between several others to keep it somewhat fresh. I spaced it quite far out too - between games like Fable, the two Halos, Shadow the Hedgehog, the whole Jak and Daxter trilogy, the Ratchet and Clank series, Final Fantasy 7, Kingdom Hearts, La Pucelle, and so on and so forth. It sounds strange now that I say it, but had I not done this, I would've never finished the game. Now if I could only do this with Morrowind and Arcanum...

I had the unfortunate luck that whenever I did try new things to spice things up, they just fell flat in my face. For example, I thought the Wargots were a bit tough, so I decided to try the RPG. Rocket launcher, right? Big bang thingy that was a terror in Aftermath and generally doesn't fail to please? I had a rocket soldier trained up with close to maxing out all the necessary stats. Then the day came when I decided to let this soldier discard the best rifle in the game for the RPG. One mission later I'd sacked this soldier and was on the lookout for another sniper.

I do not ever want to speak of the incident with the knife thrower. Ever.

Rotating troops and trying different combinations of roles and races was interesting, but didn't really change the actual progression of the battles too much and sometimes felt counterproductive. I guess I just wasn't that lucky in that respect. Oh well.

- NKF