Afterlight is a good game, though I found it less gripping than Aftershock, IMO the best of the series. Afterlight's special because it mixes a heavier dose of strategy into the gameplay than the previous two UFO:After... games, since you now have to interact with several factions that can be either enemies or allies. You also have to be more careful with your soldiers, since your manpower is very limited. Drones can help you keep losses low, but they're no replacement for a veteran soldier. There are some steps back from Aftershock, though: underbarrel GLs and the like no longer work properly, for instance. I also think the enemy AI was better in Aftershock. The graphical look and feel of human equipment in Afterlight, while perfectly logical, is also quite ugly, and I prefer the Aftershock soundtrack.
BTAxis:Frankly, not to offensive or disparaging towards the UFO:AI team, but I fail to see why one would still stick with turns for a tactical game like this. The pause system makes it quite practical to simultaneously control a small squad, and the coloured paths is something UFO:AI could definately use, although they're ugly. The real-time element actually makes simultaneous control and realistic actions easier and more tactical, rather than making it "FPS-like" as I'm sure most turn-based fans would fear, and eliminates the unreal, "just a game", feeling you get alot of times from turn-based games. Take reaction fire in UFO:AI: looking at these fora and in the Wiki, there seems to be rather a controversy about how to make it more realistic, i.e. more like it was happening in real-time--this kind of problem is nicely avoided in games such as Afterlight.
EDIT: ooops, I seem to have performed Threadcromancy.
