As mentioned in the title, the first thing I did after finishing this game was to google "games like Unavowed". To put things in perspective I'm not the core audience for adventure games. I played the occasional Longest Journey and Syberia, and little else. I loved the story on Unavowed, the characthers, the straight-forward puzzles and the overall aesthetic. I hate that there isn't a sequel yet.
As someone who has around 1300 hours in the Firaxis XCOM games and Midnight Suns, I absolutely hated this game. Tactical Turn-based games are some of the games I love the most and the old "one more turn" has always been true for me. For this game it's the complete opposite. For the past few days I would boot the game, play a turn or two, then quit the game. I just can't anymore. Writing wise, there is not a single likable character. You're supposed to root for you team, but I just can't. That's not to say I could root for the bad guys. Those are also laughably bad. One mechanic which in theory sounded good, but in practice I disliked, was the extra objectives, extra stars, you could accomplish during missions. In theory you replay a mission to get better at it and max out your score. The problem I have with it, is that you can't "get good" sometimes. You can run the same mission over and over again and you won't be able to max it because you don't have the abilities. If the game would promote me learning the fights, getting good, figuring out the puzzle, I would have loved it. But it promoted just grinding unlocks. If I wanted to grind I'd play a MMO. The other thing I don't get is how you manually design all missions, no procedurally generation, and yet you fail to balance the difficulty worse than games that do procedural generation? The difficulty spikes are insane. I would breeze through a mission just so that the next one to completely stomp me. Sometimes even during the same mission, you would do half of it with relative ease just so the game to then spawn a million enemies for the next part of the mission.
