heh, its a good thing i have no money, otherwise i might have considered buying it for you for christmas.

What didn't you like about the UFO: Aftermath demo?

I had really high hopes for that one. I am a big XCom fan.

First, the combat felt too simplistic. Wake up monsters. Fight monsters. Defeat the monsters. Repeat. The AI seemed weak in the demo... it charged you. Sometimes it ran if you injured it, but mostly it just charged you. There really didn't seem to be a 'tactical' element.

Also, the fact that you couldn't interact with the environment really weakened the game, I thought. One of the nicer things about XCom was that it succeeded in modelling urban and rural combat, since alien snipers could hide within structures. The flexibility of going through the front door, or blowing a hole in the side of a building, or just nuking the whole damn structure... that was sweet. UFO: Aftermath had none of that.

Finally, they didn't offer the money management, base management and political elements that you could find in the original XCom, which again, made it feel like less of a complete game.

Perhaps I judge it unfairly by comparing it to what I consider one of the better games of all time. But if you want to evoke that, if you want to market yourself as a 'spiritual successor' to XCom, then be prepared to disappoint people like me if you don't deliver the same level of experience.

With all that said, I obviously decided to wait on it and pick it up at a lower price after a few demo sessions. :-\

I understand - the demo doesn't sound much different from the full game. "X-Com without elevation or real terrain effects or an AI capable of doing anything besides inane suicide attacks" was still worth playing all the way through for me, but that says more about my love of X-Com than it does about UFO:A.

I played the first Silent Storm demo, and despite its WWII setting, it had a lot more of what I would have wanted from an X-Com knockoff than UFO:A did. I actually think SS is more like X-Com than it is like Jagged Alliance (which, for some reason, all the (p)reviewers seem compelled to compare it to).

Slient Storm Demo:
http://www.3dgamers.com/games/silentstorm/