X-COM: Apocalypse
Worth it · Strategy · 2008
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $4.99.
- Length
- 32.5h
- Value
- $0.15/hr
- Reviews
- 89% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: Supported 32Mb Graphics Card, 61 MB of storage. Windows only.
There's something evil in the city tonight... Earth has been ravaged by human excess, petty conflict and alien invasion. The world's population has been herded into huge cities, the first of which was Mega Primus. 2084: A Utopia shattered, social collapse and civil unrest reigns in Mega Primus. Fiendish aliens terrorize the city.
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 $1.24. That was October 2013. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 69 in the 14 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 92 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, X-COM: UFO Defense ($4.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel ($9.99, scores 56).
None of the 343 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 72 percent of the 131 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 16 percent of everything written about it.
Players
11 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
One of the best games in the Xcom universe that they never tried to replicate. This game was so much fun and took up so much of my youth and continues to take up peoples times today. I wish the OpenApoc was easier to install but its github looks complicated. Maybe oneday 2k will remake X-com Apoc into X-com 3 or maybe phoenix Point 2 and Phoenix Point 3 will follow the amazing paths.
It was pretty hard to get back into, but once I got used to the tactical map's shortcomings it was a lot of fun to play this again. ~50 hrs to finish the campaign on max difficulty.
Probably the greatest game of all time, though some broken things being from the time was WELL above it's age.
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: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
X-COM: Apocalypse scores 77/100 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/7660/x-com-apocalypseThe 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 Sep 3, 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.