There’s no doubt at this point whether people outside of 2K Games are fans of the original XCOM titles. In addition to 2K funding not one but two games based on the classic PC franchise, a Kickstarter for Xenonauts – an attempt by Goldhawk Interactive to bring back isometric sci-fi strategy – has proven successful enough to reach its funding goal in just over two days. In Goldhawk’s words, “To put things in perspective, that’s roughly half of all the pre-order revenue we’ve taken over the past 18 months of development.”

For now, the studio has 30 days to improve their funding numbers and is kicking in additional bonuses to celebrate the personal milestone. They’ve tentatively announced plans to add additional features if the funding reaches much higher milestones: $100,000 will fetch players a Linux and Mac port, to complement the PC version, and if the project reaches $200,000 players can look forward to having female soldiers help fight off the alien menace. So, ridding the Xenonauts project of sexist 1970s rules-of-engagement is twice as expensive as making the game available for a larger fan base.

Apparently, the loftier goal has everything to do with the game’s sprites being designed for the bulky design of male armor and the additional workload that the game’s artist would have to put it to make twenty to thirty unique female portraits for the soldier screens.

“…Just to explain our reasoning behind the female soldiers being at $200k, as there seems to be some confusion. We think $200k is an ambitious but achievable goal for the Kickstarter, given the response so far, so we put potentially the most interesting feature there to try and galvanise interest,” Goldhawk commented. “That’s not to say if we “only” get $120k-$130k that we would definitely not put female soldiers in the game before release”

The game will also be released DRM free which is something that backers of the project were working for. Goldhawk is in communications with the Humble Store and GamersGate to make that a reality but they haven’t finalized their publishing partners as of this time.

Between this project and République recently reaching their goals, it doesn’t look like the Kickstarter train is slowing down just yet.