Never heard of it? Well, it was worked on by a bunch of guys who worked on the original, oldschool XCOM. Now I'm a huge XCOM fan, both old and new, so I had moderately high hopes for this one. Oh, how foolish I was.
The first bad sign was when it was announced as an Epic exclusive, AFTER people had paid into a Kickstarter for it. But whatever, I'm a man of the world. I'll pirate it and then buy it on Steam if it's any good. Fine. Pirated it a while after it game out with some of the DLC. Surely they've had time to get the kinks ironed out.
HAHAHA FUCK NO
First, let's talk about enemy design. Hey Julian, what's a good idea for some enemies? Well... grenades are pretty powerful in this game. So let's make sure basic enemy grunts have a grenade launcher with no ammo limit, that can fire twice per turn compared to the player's limited ammo once per turn! That's a fair challenge!
Also, let's make giant walking artillery that's insanely fast, insanely durable, spawns on the other side of the map, and fires at you every turn as soon as any enemy spots you, Let's also give it a pretty good chance of one shotting/stun locking you, and no defense against it except hoping you can break through enemy lines and kill it before it's too late!
Gee Julian! That's a great idea! Oh, but what if the players spread their soldiers out to avoid the splash damage? No problem, Julian says! Just make it so every level has multiple tight corridors you have to squeeze through to get to the main part of the map. Then they'll all get hit at once! Awesome, our hypothetical yes-man says. But won't that make it harder for the other enemies to get to the players? No problem, we can fix that too! Just make sure to design the levels so enemies have easy access to high elevation and the player doesn't! Trebles all around!
And now let's talk about lairs. Lairs are enemy bases that pop up fairly frequently. They gain in level over time, so it makes sense to blow them up as soon as you find them, right?
HAHAHA FUCK NO AGAIN
Level 1 lairs are a tolerable but extremely tedious slog through tight tunnels to blow up a few objectives. They're survivable if you're careful, but still dangerous, and can go wrong VERY fast if you get sloppy or just unlucky. Level 2 lairs are the most dangerous missions in the entire game by several orders of magnitude. They're the most common places to meet artillery + tight corridors as mentioned above. It's not uncommon to get a soldier one shotted with LITERALLY NOTHING you can do about it, because you CANNOT reach the enemy fast enough. And even if you do, you're usually putting yourself in a very vulnerable position to do so. You're looking for a semi-hidden alien nest at the end of what's usually a series of, yes, long narrow corridors. Blow it up and the mission is over. The least-awful strategy is to just rush the nest as fast as possible and hope your heavy survives long enough to finish it off and end the mission. Level 3 lairs... are hilariously easy. Rush the alien queen over open ground with your heavy, unload your LMG into her face. Can be finished on the same turn you spot the queen, which won't take long.
Now, I'm trusting patch notes for this next part, as I haven't played since it was updated, but... In response to players complaints about the rampant, unchecked retardation of lair missions, the developers proved quite responsive. They updated level 1 and 2 to be less tedious, but made level 3 harder to encourage you to take them out early.
HAHAHA FUCK NO THEY DIDN'T, THEY LEFT LEVEL 1 UNCHANGED AND MADE LEVEL 2 AND 3 EVEN HARDER WITHOUT ADDRESSING ANY OF THE ACTUAL PROBLEMS
Now assuming you survive/save scum your way through that, what can we do for a finale? I know! Let's make it require 3 times as much ammo as any other mission, while providing absolutely no indication that will be the case! Take THAT, people who packed extra medkits! Fucking nerds! Hope you like running out of bullets and having to start over on the longest mission in the game!
It's pretty telling that there's no actual Iron Man option in this game the way there is in XCOM.
The only way to counter all this cheese is with EVEN MORE CHEESE. We're talking fancy French cheese here. All those hard earned special faction soldiers you've been building up over dozens of missions? Pointless. There are literally only two actions that matter in the late game: Dash + Rapid Clearance (run in and murder large numbers of small enemies with a shotgun at point blank range) and Dash + Rage Burst (run in and murder a small number of large enemies with an LMG at point blank range). And maybe toss a medkit when you inevitably get tagged by unavoidable damage because every single enemy in the game is a bullet sponge. Literally ANYTHING else is a waste of a turn. No, snipers are not a good class. Yes, taking out enemy weapons is useful early on, but it doesn't matter when an assault with a shotgun can just one shot the same enemy.
There's much, MUCH more bullshit, but this is way too long already.
The worst thing is, the game had some LEGITIMATELY GOOD FEATURES. Fighting other human factions is awesome. Multiclassing, although more interesting in theory than in practice, was still pretty cool. The tactical layer was much better and more engaging than nu-COM, forcing you to use actual strategy and make hard choices rather than being branching but basically linear paths. The research system that allows you to either befriend or raid NPC factions for new toys is fucking brilliant. The action point system is quite good and I much prefer it over either old-COM's convoluted point system or nu-COM's inflexible "move, then shoot".
