Target Earth Review

I’ve been playing video games for 34 years, if you can imagine that, and my all-time favorite game is X-Com: Enemy Unknown (or UFO: Enemy Unknown, as it is known in some markets). The reason I mention this is because I am not alone in this sentiment and Target Earth from Gen-X Games is an unabashed and totally faithful knock-off that game. If you like X-Com: Enemy Unknown, you’ll very likely dig Target Earth. If you like the relatively recent remake, XCOM you’ll probably like Target Earth.

For the uninitiated, this game is essentially an alien invasion doomsday simulator. Malicious aliens have decided killing is their business, and on this planet, business is good. They have come to dominate and destroy, and while their invasion begins slowly with small scout ships, as the game progresses players will face more and more ships loaded with invaders and they will begin their assault in earnest. The goals of the players are to shoot down as many as possible, develop bases to produce materiel for the war, and keep as many nations’ governments as possible from realizing the futility of resistance and defecting. This last bit is important because countries fund your defense force and thus the fewer countries that are in the coalition, the less money is available.

Money really is the key to success, as it’s used to build facilities at your base, build fighters to kill enemy ships, draft troops to kill aliens that landed, and most importantly, to increase your technology using the tech tree. Technology is essential to improve your fighting ability because the aliens get tougher to beat and more plentiful throughout the game. It’s as if the aliens are looking at Earth like you might look at the salad bar at Sizzler, mouths watering at the sight of such a smorgasbord. Every round has aliens appearing, and if they appear in an area covered by enough radar installations players must assign fighters to try to shoot them down. All combat is dice-based so the more (or better equipped) fighters you devote toward a battle, the better off your odds.

If you fail to shoot down an alien ship, they land, and you can then send shuttles loaded with tanks and soldiers to battle with the alien forces. These can be upgraded and made more effective but at the end of the day the dice decide your fate. The aliens will often land in farmlands with the intent to disembowel livestock, but they will sometimes attack one of the players’ bases. This is the worst, because they can devastate your ability to make war against them. Unfortunately, you need to either reserve troops to defend your base, spend resources on more barracks, or risk an attack by sending your troops to other trouble spots; there is no happy medium. That’s probably the thing I like the most about this game, though; nothing is given to players, and every decision feels like the most important of the game.

The goal of the game is simply to attain enough victory points to win over seven rounds, but the aliens are doing the same against you, despite being AI driven. There are several paths to victory, but players will invariably find themselves doing whatever makes the most sense at the time, versus trying to develop and execute a grand strategy primarily because you can’t really predict what will happen next turn. One of the slickest design features of the game is in how well it scales; the more players there are, the more money that needs to be divvied up, and the more specialized each player ends up having to become. You can play this game solo as well, and not as a bolted-on feature, although the individual goal mode cannot be played solo.

If I have any criticisms of the game as a whole it’s probably that it feels a bit too procedural. I can’t imagine how they could’ve made it work any other way to be fair, but because each turn is broken down into nine distinct sub-sections I found that the game is made up of moments of white-knuckled tactical tension punctuated by longer dry stretches where you’re calmly making strategic decisions based upon the current game state. Analysis paralysis can be a problem for some players, which can make those dry stretches feel longer.

There’s no tactical map to play out the battles on, which is a signature feature in X-Com. I miss that. But nonetheless I like this unique and fun game. It truly captures the feeling of the video game it emulates.