UFO: Afterlight

UFO: Afterlight is the third game in the UFO trilogy, released in 2007. A small group of humans was sent to Mars before the events on Earth, and must now build a colony there. The planet is not empty: there are aliens to fight and to deal with, and the human colony has to grow from almost nothing.

Its key design choice is a limited pool of people. The same handful of colonists must do the fighting, the research, the production and the construction. A colonist sent into battle is a researcher who is not researching. The battles run in real time with a pause, as in the earlier games.

The shared pool of people makes every decision about a soldier a decision about the whole colony. It is a simple rule with deep effects, and few games since have tried it. Mars gives the series a new look, with terraforming as a long goal.

It is the least dark of the three games, and some found it less tense than Aftermath. It is the best of the trilogy for players who like a strategic layer with real constraints.

Afterlight keeps the X-COM structure but replaces its anonymous recruits with a few people who are the whole colony. In X-COM a dead soldier means hiring a new one. In Afterlight there is often no one to hire, which brings it closer to the named, irreplaceable characters of Jagged Alliance 2.