Games like X-COM: the 1994 original and what came after

X-COM was a turn-based squad fight inside a global campaign. The fight was played on small, destructible maps. The campaign was a planet to watch, bases to build, research to fund and aircraft to send out. The X-COM page in our influences section covers what the original was. This page is about what to play when you want more of it.

When someone asks for a game like X-COM, they usually mean one of two things. Some want the fight: a squad, a budget of actions, cover, darkness, and the risk that a soldier you have grown attached to dies on a bad turn. Others want the war: the research, the money, and the sense that every mission feeds the next. Few games have done both well, so the picks below are grouped by which half they give you.

Firaxis released XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2012, published by 2K. It rebuilt the original rather than copying it. Time units are gone, the squad is capped at six, and the base is drawn as a side-on cutaway. Both layers survive.

XCOM 2 followed in 2016 and turned the premise over: the aliens have won, and you run a resistance from a mobile base, with missions that carry timers. Its War of the Chosen expansion in 2017 added the Chosen and several resistance factions.

Both games have a modding scene that answers the usual complaint that the campaign is short. The Long War mod for the 2012 game first appeared in 2013 and doubled the soldier classes from four to eight. Its team later made Long War 2 for XCOM 2, released in January 2017, which adds infiltration and the management of resistance havens.

Xenonauts, by Goldhawk Interactive, came out in 2014 after a Kickstarter and a spell in Steam Early Access. It is set in an alternate 1979 and keeps the original's shape: air interception, strategic management and research, then turn-based ground combat on destructible terrain. Where Firaxis simplified, Goldhawk restated. Xenonauts 2 uses 3D graphics and a new alternate timeline rather than continuing the first game's story. It was announced in 2016, entered early access in July 2023 and reached version 1.0 in April 2026, published by Hooded Horse.

Phoenix Point, by Snapshot Games, came out in December 2019. Snapshot was founded by Julian Gollop, who designed the original X-COM, and the game is the most direct attempt on this list to build both layers again from scratch. It adds enemies that mutate in response to your tactics, rival human factions with their own agendas, and aiming at individual body parts.

Its release history is messy. Snapshot funded it on Fig, then sold a one-year Epic Games Store exclusivity in March 2019, and offered backers a refund or a year of free DLC. The PC game launched on Epic only. It reached Steam on 3 December 2020, in a Year One Edition.

Silent Storm, by Nival in 2003, is the strongest pick for the tactics layer alone. It is turn-based on action points, set in an alternate Second World War, and nearly every structure in it can be destroyed, so shooting through a wall is an ordinary move. Between missions you have a base and a pool of twenty soldiers to choose six from. That is a thin campaign, and the fight carries the game.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, by The Bearded Ladies and Funcom in 2018, explores in real time and switches to turns when a fight starts. Its combat is openly modelled on Firaxis's reboot. It has no permadeath, which removes the loss that makes X-COM hurt.

Gears Tactics, by Splash Damage and The Coalition in 2020, gives each soldier three action points where XCOM gives two. The developers said this was to make play faster. It is a run of missions, with no strategic layer to speak of. Marvel's Midnight Suns, Firaxis's 2022 game, replaces action points with a hand of cards and puts the base in a hub where you build friendships. It is the Firaxis game that walks furthest from X-COM.

Jagged Alliance 2 (1999, Sir-Tech Canada) is the best of the late-nineties rivals, and its strength is the campaign: named mercenaries with fees and tempers, an island taken sector by sector, and mines that pay for it all. Our page on it goes into detail.

Battle Brothers, by Overhype Studios, left early access in March 2017. You run a mercenary company in a setting inspired by medieval Germany and take contracts across an overworld map. Combat is turn-based on hexes, and mercenaries are lost for good or maimed. It has no research tree and no base, only the company and its money.

Invisible, Inc., by Klei Entertainment (2015), takes the pressure of the campaign and puts it inside a stealth game. A 72-hour clock runs across the campaign, security alarm levels climb during a mission, and agents who die stay dead.

Phantom Doctrine, by CreativeForge Games in 2018, is the modern game with a campaign layer of the right shape: a hideout, agents to recruit, a world map to send them across, and an investigation board built like a pinboard with string. Reviewers at release found the missions repetitive and the tutorial weak.

X-COM: Apocalypse (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1997) is the original series' own attempt. It offers real-time combat alongside the turn-based mode, with the option to pause, and it moves the whole campaign into one city, Mega-Primus, built over the ruins of Toronto. The enemy is as much corporations and senators as aliens.

UFO: Aftermath, by Altar in 2003, is the real-time-with-pause treatment of the same invasion. Everyone moves at once, you pause to give orders, and a strategic layer of bases and resources sits behind it. Aftershock followed in 2005 and UFO: Afterlight in 2007, which moves to Mars and limits you to a limited pool of people shared between combat, research, production and construction.

The original is sold on Steam and on GOG as X-COM: UFO Defense, and the GOG listing says it runs on DOSBox. The sequel set underwater, X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995), is sold alongside it.

Most people play it through OpenXcom, an open-source rewrite of the engine, released under the GPL-3.0, that supports both games. It does not include the game's data. You need your own copy of the original, and the installation instructions have you copy specific folders out of it. It accepts the Steam, GOG, DOS 1.4 and Windows collector's releases, and it does not accept copies modified by tools such as XcomUtil. The project now points new users to OpenXcom Extended, which has more modding features.

A short version of the above, by what you are missing.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for PC and Windows, in development and made in Unity. It is real time with pause and set in a post-apocalyptic world with zombie and faction combat. On this page it belongs with Apocalypse and UFO: Aftermath, not with the turn-based games. Nothing more about its design is announced yet.