Xenonauts
Worth it · Strategy · 2014
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $24.99.
- Length
- 33.2h
- Value
- $0.75/hr
- Reviews
- 87% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, Integrated Graphics, 3 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $4.99. That was December 2018. 61 discounts in the 13 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 12 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 2 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 95 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 91 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Into the Breach ($14.99, scores 86) beats it on value, while it beats Xenonauts 2 ($39.99, scores 38).
Critics scored it 77. Players sit 10 points higher at 87 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 557 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 50 percent of the 156 reviews written there were positive, against 87 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 33.2 hours; clearing it takes 94, which is 2.8 times the campaign.
Players
53 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
All my hours on one run using the X-Division Mod. Could have sworn I wrote a review but didn't see it. If you liked the older XCOMs and didn't like the reduced-squad sizes in the remakes- this game (and remember- didn't play vanilla- only with the X-Division mod) might be your jam. It's very difficult- i built a bunch of skeleton bases early on and went all-in on Air-Assets early on and it turns out that I might...
Its a bit like the original XCOM except you have the investors shouting at you demanding better results, and you have NATO shouting at you demanding better results, and you have the Warsaw pact shouting at you demanding better results, and you have your mum shouting at you demanding better results... Honestly its a peak game. They somehow took X-COM ufo defence and made it better. And i don't say that lightly.
I once instantly killed my best soldier because I thought putting C4 back into your soldiers inventory would turn it off. It did not, in fact, turn off.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Xenonauts scores 75/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/223830/xenonautsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.