X-COM: UFO Defense
BANGER · Strategy · 2008
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $4.99.
- Length
- 38.7h
- Value
- $0.13/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when X-COM: UFO Defense is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Windows only.
You are in control of X-COM: an organization formed by the world's governments to fight the ever-increasing alien menace.
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
The lowest price on record is $1.24, set in October 2013. 70 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 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.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is better reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. It outscores the games it most resembles, including XCOM: Enemy Unknown ($14.99, scores 86) and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel ($9.99, scores 56).
The math says it holds its tier up to $45.23, and you are being asked for $4.99.
This site sampled 338 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 1 was written by a buyer who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 91 percent of the 623 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 19 percent of everything written about it.
Players
49 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
I bought this game on FLOPPY disk back in the mid-1990's to play on my Amiga A1200 back in the day... multiple disk swaps even with 2 floppy drives (I think it came on 6 or 7 disks... plus your save disk). It was awesome then, and it is JUST as awesome now... BUT... I can't get this to work on my Win11 PC at all... it just crashes or works briefly and dies... so... I actually play this on my Mint Linux desktop... in...
This was one of the first games I bought as a kid. It game on a dvd and had big fat awesome manual. It was awesome and I played it for hours and hours on an old 486 with like 4 megs of ram. I'm happy to say this is the same gamne.
Still holds up incredibly well. Tactical action, save frequently, the game is punishingly unfair at times. Ahhhh just like you remembered in the 90s.
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: UFO Defense scores 93/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/7760/x-com-ufo-defenseThe 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 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.