Rally Point: Unorthodox. Complex. Laborious. Not just XCOM again. Of course I love USC: Counterforce

What did you do while recovering from your big medical thing, Sin? Well. Loath as I am to talk about myself (“lol. lmao.” – Combative New Ed), I… don’t know? There was some Ultima Underworld, some workers, some resources, some Pagonians pioneered. But in the dimensionless vortex of first-time-off-since-2020, I think I did… nothing. The lists barely moved.

Except, finally, for a game I struggled with last year. A strange game, easily punished, as all turn-based games must be for dolt reasons, for not being bloody XCOM. USC Colon Counterforce is more like old XCOM, aka UFO. But it’s not a recreation of that, nor of Aliens, its other obvious inspiration. It diverges as much as it reminds, and makes some mistakes in a way that we all must, when pursuing our own identity instead of an impression of someone else’s.

I wish I’d given it a second chance sooner. I wish I could shake everyone and say “This! This is the way! There is more than one path, if you just look for it! Yes, the one before you stumbled. But look at it it. See the admittedly weakly-named USC, and its bruises. It is beautiful. It is itself”.

Aliens are doing an Aliens on a mining and not evil science planet. You lead a team of soldiers to stop them. Scanning the hexy surface reveals hordes, nests, occasional installations, and pink spacerocks to kill, salvage, and mine, zooming in to the pinkest hexes to build mining installations square by square, with walls and generators and machinery to boost efficient or refresh your soldiers, should the aliens visit to bite everything.

You’ll need supplies. No, more than that. Your first mission will be a disaster (within the campaign, or one-off missions), most likely because you ran out of ammo. This aggravated me. It surprised me. It exhausted what I had. It did an Aliens. USC is not sadistic or (ugh) “hardcore”, but it wants to feel like throwing soldiers into a horde, not level 1 avatars bullying four bronchitic trainees armed with plasma tweezers. Every confrontation teems with claws and teeth, and they will all come at once. Even the smallest could survive several hits, and the biggest take entire magazines like an insult. Some deal acid or poison damage and there’s a fire one now and everyone’s bleeding and the meds cause paralysis if you overdo them and what the hell how many more are there?

But I’ve loved it since I came back. You’re the first team, see. That one-off mission was the prologue; the squad that disappeared so my campaign one would know better. They’d need more supplies, and to build mines for precious spacerocks. I’d have to learn all seven damage types, which instead of boring HP damage, cause “buildup” of different problems. Each behaves differently, and is washed away with different items.

USC: Counterforce, see, is not about levelling supermen to get the best perks. It’s about preparing. Your team improve with experience, but they start out with good skills, your commander already maxed out. Moreover, skills are pure bonus. A guy with 5/5 in Heavy weapons will be dramatically better, but everyone can use them. Even perks are modest passive bonuses chosen once and early. Marksmanship girls reload faster and score more critical hits with small arms, Agility guys move faster diagonally (which adds up when Action Points are in the 30-60s). It’s not hard to max out several skills, and 2/5 in melee is a decent backup.

Just about everything is granular, including equipment. 10 inventory slots offer ample possibilities, but many things might be useful. A chestplate, gas mask, two ammo types, a backup weapon, scanner, pills that swap 1AP for a drop of morale, one million types of medkit. The “Field Expertise” skill is about moving items quickly: a godsend when it’s mission phase 2 of 3 and everyone’s desperately handing meds and knives and twelve bullets back and forth like every trans person you know. You’ll want room for loot too, since nothing else is free.

Spacerocks can convert into cash, but that only funds building. Equipment is bought with credit, which depends on your boss’s approval. It won’t stretch forever, so spacerocks also fit into a web of conversions and trades between eight materials for crafting instead. You start with access to miniguns, grenade launchers, and refreshingly odd guns like the bio-rifle, which poisons aliens and heals humans, or the quadseeker, which hits four targets and can shoot around cover. But it all costs.

That adds another dimension to preparation: tactically, USC is about balancing swarms and high-threat target prioritisation, but strategically, it’s about doing that when every bullet, every bandage has a budgetary opportunity cost. So you learn to carry pistols, hack doors and move barrels to slow enemies so poison and fire can do their grisly work. Sniper rifles are excellent value per shot, but overwhelmed without backup from launchers and SMGs. Blades obviously need no ammunition, but their real power is raising defence, saving lives and medkits. Everything works best in tandem. You must learn how to use every skill and tool as supplies fluctuate between unpredictable fights.

Soldier skills are capped hard, and there’s no traditional research, no unlocks, and nothing becomes obsolete. As the locals get narkier, your counter is upgrades and prototypes. Every individual weapon can be upgraded with materials (and downgraded for a full refund), and five factions can, for enough spacerocks, replace your upgrades with better versions. Prototypes add another magic hole to gamble spacerocks in: a novel variant of a weapon, with randomised bonuses. A bit like Borderlands, this could provide a paralysing pistol or a super fast cryoblaster, or useless junk. But you must manufacture these blueprints, draining yet more materials. Their quality depends on faction reputation, too, and your bosses dislike everything they like, especially giving spacerocks to the smugglers, the only reliable source of some materials.

Little in USC works quite like its peers. Combat is asymmetrical, unpredictable, attritional. Aliens are hardy, but big weapons are costly to run, so you’ll learn where to put your shield guy and when his AP should go on blocking vs stabbing. The incredible utility of welding torches (until you hit a floor with no power), when you should just let a wound bleed, and especially, positioning. A quirk reminiscent of Odium means some weapons can only aim at targets within a “star” shape, others only in eight or four cardinal directions. Unrealistic, sure, but so what? It’s an interesting wrinkle, and forces you to actively arm and position everyone to support each other, not just use Optimal Loadout. Opportunity fire is less restricted, but weak aliens move first, so that requires thoughtful positioning and range-setting too.

That’s the main thing, aside from the tough, swarming enemies, that makes USC genuinely great. All that granularity, all those possibilities, creating room for chaos and desperation while ensuring that teamwork is vital and good preparation pays off. High AP range tempts you to sprint recklessly across an unexplored room to help some soldiers in trouble. Beagle hacks the door, and through it lie multiple aliens… and the generator. Hambo chucks some grenades in, obliterating the room, allowing two other soldiers to run through and distract the alphas about to finish off poor Gremlin… and plunging the facility into darkness, unleashing god knows what as all the doors on the level automatically open. And yet, sometimes the handiest thing a soldier can do with her AP is run in close so her headlamp will face a Crawler that someone’s struggling to hit.

Aliens don’t use opportunity fire, but some will find flanking routes, seek out the wounded, claw through doors and walls. Some flee when wounded, others will kill other aliens if it’s the fastest way to get to you. Their turns are unfortunately slow, and there’s too little information about missions or game systems. Some of this I consider a Good Thing – questions to answer through initiative instead of a wiki reducing everything to boring nerd calculation. But they put far too much work and frustration upfront, which exacerbates USC’s biggest problem by far: the sheer time and work it takes to prepare everyone, every time.

Jagged Alliance fans rejoice, for USC is all about gearing everyone up for every mission. The high Action Points, fast shooting, 18 soldiers per fight, and all those weapons, ammunition types, upgrades, prototypes, tools, possible problems (Flamethrower good! Flooded installation bad), cost/benefit analyses, mission return times requiring you to pencil in the next mission’s supplies… even this sentence kind of reflects how playing Soldier Mum can make a brain buzz. But it’s also s l o w. The prep screen is awkwardly laid out, and lacks timesaving functions like drag and drop, saved loadouts or replenish buttons. You can instantly store a soldier’s gear, but then have to retrieve 17 grenades in turn to see their price. It’s far from the worst I’ve seen, but it’s unintuitive, and never becomes as smooth as it should considering the time you’ll spend there.

Preparation is half the game, and the weighing of options and potential tactics makes it rewarding. I love that USC is like this instead of “give M4 to Assault class, press Best Perk”. There’s something great here, and wonderfully unusual despite its very popular influences. But its friction burns too much to deny that it’s fallen short of its potential. I wish it had found the audience who’d appreciate what it does, the support that carried it a little further.