UFO: Aftermath

UFO: Aftermath is a 2003 tactics game from the Czech studio Altar Interactive. Its roots are in The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, an unfinished game by Mythos Games. After Mythos went bankrupt, Altar bought the project and restarted it almost completely, with a new combat system and a largely new story.

Alien spores have killed most of the world's population, and the few survivors fight back from bases on a globe while an alien biomass spreads across the planet. The strategic layer works like X-COM: you take territory, build bases, research and manufacture. The battles run in real time, and you pause to give orders to the squad, then let the action play out.

It is one of the most complete real-time-with-pause versions of the X-COM structure. The survivors' war has a bleak feel, and the spreading biomass gives the campaign a visible clock. If turn-based combat has never suited you but you want the X-COM campaign, this is one of the best places to look.

Its battles are less varied than X-COM's, the maps lack full destructibility, and some players find that the pause loses tension the original's turns had. Two sequels followed, Aftershock in 2005 and Afterlight in 2007.

Aftermath keeps nearly all of X-COM's campaign and changes the clock in the fights. It is also set after the end of the world rather than before it: the invasion has already happened, and the game is about what comes after. That makes it the closest of the X-COM family to a post-apocalyptic squad game.