I picked this game up having heard next to nothing about it, except a couple of fair to good reviews, and having generally been happy with HareBrained Schemes games. I had a blast. It has a solid pulpy feel and storyline, with an art direction that matches, and the score is delightful. The turn-based tactical elements are familiar and easy to pick up, the real-time stealth components are also remarkably solid, though they can be twitchy if you are trying to lure a lone enemy from their position to kill them without raising a larger alarm. And the character skill trees combined with the random (and levellable) mystic abilities from the Undrawn Hand make for some interesting synergies & progressions. The biggest positive for this type of game were the granular difficulty settings - want the strategy on the world map to be a slow burn rather than a frantic race? Can do! Do you prefer story advencement difficulty on your tactics, or do you want to unleash Mythos-adjacent monsters with abandon? Can do. Want to suffer the total death of an agent because you want consequences? Or do you prefer that they merely flee the scenario, and need a few weeks to heal back at the hideout? It's got you covered. It does have some drawbacks. 1) Loadtimes into a mission aren't instant - but not particularly longer than Firaxis' X-Com reboots. Your mileage may vary. 2) There is re-use of maps, and it could've benefitted from a handful more, but it wasn't so few as to be a deal breaker. 3) No quicksave, and limited save slots per campaign save. For those who want a quick trigger to save, it's not there. However, as long as the enemies on the tactical map aren't nearby and suspicious, and you aren't in combat, you can save. If you are in combat, there's no save scumming each action/round. Overall it was very stable for me, crashing once, mid-mission during an entire 37 week campaign (1 week is one mission). If the above sounds up your alley, you may want to give it a try.
[Admin notice: Please be aware that this review is out of date and may not reflect the current state of the game.] On Jul 26 2021 the 1.1 patch dropped. I immediately noticed some graphical glitches - when spiders were summoned, they would appear on the opponent side of the field, and selection hover boxes weren't on the items in my inventory. There were more interface parts denoting controller buttons. But most of all, the entire UI for the decks was changed. Overall larger visually, but then so were the cards, so I couldn't actually see more cards than before. The book now allowed you to have all the cards you owned in your book of magic, rather than a limited amount, having to store cards in the Chest in the Pub. Except something wasn't right. I went to the pub - the chest was missing, and so were the almost 60 cards I had squirreled away for different decks. They weren't in the Book of Magic either. Some were copies I only had in the chest. Some of them were cards I happened to have in my deck or book, so I knew it wasn't that the cards had been removed wholly from the game. But dozens of max level cards I was holding on to for a different deck build are GONE. I rolled back to the previous 1.02...but clearly the system deleted the data from the save file, because the cards are missing from the save in the earlier version. Guess what really isn't acceptable in a purchased, released game? A patch that destroys content that you have worked to build up and save. Much like you don't make changes to a production server, you don't drop a patch which corrupts or deletes save data without giving the players the information and opportunity to properly back up their save. That is bad QA, and poor communication with players where they are not alerted that a patch will have potentially major, deleterious impact on their gameplay experience and progression. Now it's time to see if I can get my money back.
