Recently, the developers had added a few things and put together a new release of the game, so I decided to check it out. I had a good time playing the first mission in the game - lost four soldiers. I couldn't figure how how to hire more, so I took a look at their FAQ.
Well, long story short, you can only hire soldiers at the end of a game month. Coupled with that is the fact that the developers absolutely do not and will not allow you to save in the middle of a mission. They have you locked into "iron man mode."
I imagine that the majority of their forum posts are people asking for that feature, because Jesus Christ, how much of a fucking retard do you have to be to leave it out of your game? Here's one such thread.
Along with some great quotes:
Haha, "there will be no compromises!!!"We don't HAVE in-mission saving. And Zenerka already said nobody on the team is going to code it nor include a patch for it in the official release. It's a design decision that has been made, and there will be no compromises.
The old battle cry used by the MAME developers. "Fix it yourself!!!" I, like most reasonably intelligent adults who can program a computer, could probably figure it out and fix it ourselves. But instead, we'll just refrain from playing your shitty game because we're working on our own projects. And furthermore, we have no interest in fighting with you when someone DOES fix the code, and you make the fixes incompatible in the next version.We do not deny anything. We are just not going to neither code that nor include any patch regarding this into official release. This is open source game, so if anyone wants such feature, he can prepare a patch and use it.
Which is really a tragedy. UFO: Alien Invasion definitely brought back the X-COM vibe. But there are literally hundreds of great freeware games out there, and those that actively rail against saving anywhere as an immutable design decision aren't worth anyone's time.