The best games like XCOM

25/06/2024: Timothy Linward updated this guide to include some superb new games, including Marvel’s Midnight Suns.

If you only got into gaming after 2012, it can be hard to believe that XCOM-like turn based strategy games were once few and far between. Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and the sequel XCOM 2, popularised a special blend of tough turn-based battles, global threat management, and persistent heroes who die all too easily. This guide introduces the ten best games like XCOM, explaining what makes each one stand out in the genre.

If you prefer your turn based games to be a little less intense, check out our guides to the best grand strategy games and the best 4X games on PC.

The best games like XCOM are:

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Controlling a team of superheroes in Marvel’s Midnight Suns is very different from managing your squaddies in XCOM. Each supe’ has a deck of powers that you’ll draw from each turn. These powers never miss, and can make a real mess of the game’s destructible scenery, but you never know quite what you’ll have in hand, so you need to think on the fly.

The RPG elements of Midnight Suns are stronger than in most other XCOM-likes. With the exception of your custom superhero, The Hunter, all the supes who join your team are real Marvel characters, with their own personalities, histories, and conflicts. It’s up to you to help them bond into an unstoppable fighting force.

Check out our sister site PCGamesN’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns review to see why they called it 2022’s “sleeper hit of the year”.

Battletech

The game has quite a lot of crunch, though it’s all presented in a fairly easy to handle format. You’ll need to monitor your mechs ammo supply and engine temperature. Each section of the mech has its own supply of HP, protected by a layer of ablative armor, so you need to maneuver to protect damaged sections. Refit and repair costs will eat away at your profits after every mission.

The game looks great, and mechs are animated with a sense of weight – unloading a full payload of LRMs into an enemy’s unprotected flank is as brutal as it should be. Unfortunately these luxurious animations are the game’s biggest flaw, as they add considerably to already long-winded battles. Don’t let that stop you though – mods are available to speed right through and get back to the mech stomping.

King Arthur: Knight’s Tale

King Arthur: Knight’s Tale has a premise straight out of a heavy metal album. After his fatal duel with Sir Mordred, King Athur is resuscitated by the Lady of the Lake – but something goes wrong, and his return heralds a plague of corruption and undeath across the land. Now Mordred is her champion, and he must battle across Albion to slay the king a second time.

Knight’s Tale leans a little bit closer to the RPG side than most XCOM-likes, with each knight who might join your party a unique character who cannot be replaced. As you strike out to conquer the land you’ll have the choice to be a tyrant or a generous ruler, and your decisions will shape both how your fortress and your relationships with other Knights develop.

OpenXcom

OpenXCom is one of several community projects to iron out the problems from the original 1994 game X-COM: UFO Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown). This isn’t just a patch, but a modern rebuild of the original game coded from scratch. To get it to run you’ll need a copy of the original X-COM and the most recent official patch, which provide all the audiovisual assets.

Being open-source means OpenXCom has many excellent community mods. The X-COM Files mod starts well before the actual alien invasion, and lets you grow the X-COM organization from its origins as a pair of FBI agents in a battered car determined to prove that The Truth Is Out There. The 40k total conversion mod brings in Space Marines, Astra Militarum, Genestealer Cults and the 40k Chaos gods.

Warhammer 40k Mechanicus

Mechanicus is an XCOM-like set in the Warhammer 40k universe. You’re in control of a group of Adeptus Mechanicus tech priests exploring an ancient Tomb World, once part of the Necron Empire. As you probe deeper into the underground mysteries in search of ancient technology, the Tomb world will gradually awaken to your presence, and more and more powerful Necron war constructs will rise to fight back.

Mechanicus’ script might be the best of any XCOM-like game, written by professional Warhammer 40k book author Ben Counter and full of personality as the different sects of tech priests in your party squabble with one another. A killer soundtrack and simple but impactful graphics bring the tomb world to life. Though it was a little easy on launch, post-launch tweaks and the Heretek DLC have fixed those issues nicely, and its now a very satisfying challenge.

Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate Daemonhunters

In Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate Daemonhunters, you lead a gang of Grey Knights – the most mysterious and secretive Space Marine chapter of all the Warhammer 40k factions – on an unpleasant stroll through an area of space being infected by the chaos plague god Nurgle.

As games like XCOM go, Chaos Gate Daemonhunters doesn’t stray too far from the tried and tested formula. Combat missions involving elite squads you customise and kit out over time? Check. Tricky choices about which tech to research and which missions to pursue on the management screen? Check.

Where this game diverges slightly from XCOM is the momentum of its battles. Instead of tense battles, creeping from cover to cover, in Chaos Gate Daemonhunters, various mechanics encourage you to get aggressive, keeping your squad members close together and up in the fight.

Read our Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate Daemonhunters review. 

Xenonauts 2

Like its 2014 predecessor, Xenonauts 2 is a spiritual successor to the classic XCOM games of yore; it shares their slower pace, higher density of mechanics, and steep difficulty curve compared to Firaxis’ new-fangled offerings.

If you’d rather modern XCOM-like games were a bit steadier-paced and more detailed – but developed with 2020s technology instead of potatoes – Xenonauts 2 is the title for you. Like the first game, it’s super granular, putting you in charge of everything from inventory management, to building bases, to manually shooting down alien craft. If you like your strategy games like you like your cornflakes – crunchy – there’s a lot of depth to enjoy here.

Unlike the first Xenonauts, however, Goldhawk Interactive’s 2023 sequel has full 3D graphics instead of old-school isometric visuals, as well as huge quality of life improvements, including a solid tutorial; extensive accessibility and difficulty options; and the welcome ability to check what your attack hit chances will be after a given movement, before you make that move.

Because of the sheer variety of pre-game customisation settings that allow you to shape your challenge, Xenonauts is one of the more accessible XCOM-likes out there – but it ain’t easy by a long shot. You have been warned.

Read our Xenonauts 2 review. 

Phoenix Point

The premise of Phoenix Point: XCOM, but with Lovecraftian horrors, sounds pretty heavenly. Combat is shaken up with an action point system, along with will points measuring sanity, and both the fishy mutant threat and the three factions you’ll encounter as you play are interesting.

Phoenix Point is very like XCOM, but in fact it isn’t quite so easy to firmly recommend as some of the titles on our list. Some will fall in love with it, others may bounce off its slightly fiddly gameplay, which includes a couple of systems that feel a touch underbaked.

Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics was a surprise hit of 2020, a spinoff that was a swift departure from the third-person cover shooter gameplay of previous Gears of War games.

You build up a squad of ‘Gears’ and then take them chewing through a series of XCOM-style battles in the course of a campaign. From the cover system to overwatch, the gameplay will be familiar to all fans of the XCOM series.

If you ever wished you could have the battles of XCOM, but without all the downtime and stress-inducing decision-making between battles, Gears Tactics is an excellent, highly-polished title to try out.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden has the turn-based combat of XCOM, but what surrounds it is an entirely different beast. Your squad of humans and animal mutants must carefully pick through apocalyptic environments before you can risk joining battle – there’s an exploration focus to the whole thing.

Rather than rocking up to battles in a cushy flying craft, you’ll engage your foes out in the wilds, using stealth to set up battles to your advantage, ensuring you kick things off with a bang. Appearances can be deceiving, and neither the story nor gameplay of Mutant Road Zero is as cute and forgiving as its animal stars might suggest.