A likable game with cold war era vibes, and turn-based tactics that's fun. Unit roster and may layout often suggest an optimal approach but can often be solved with various approaches. The story is meh. It's in a nice, stranger things-y vein, not particularly deep. You get very little info in each cutscene, it builds much too slowly. Most cutscenes are a few sentences of soldiers making small talk and lameish one-liners. This would be a 4-star for me, but much of the difficulty comes from the fact that the AI cheats shamelessly. It's clever in the sense that it keeps ranges and unit capabilities in mind while manoeuvering, but as opposed to you, AI has no fog of war. You can test this easily with units that move a lot. If you start a round by leaving Anti Aircraft in the back, AI choppers advance boldly. Restart the same mission: if you now place them in a forward position, choppers will keep away, even though they should not be able to see your AA from their starting position, when they commit to movement. Some units, that need a 1-round setup suffer tremendously from this.
The game is apparently not multiplayer-compatible with Diamond Edition - according to the devs, specifically because they are constantly developing multiplayer code. A friend who owns Diamond Edition bought Enhanced Edition so we can play coop: we spent 2 hours trying to set up a game, browsing through forums, reading threads, to no avail. If you would buy this game to play with friends, don't. That function is broken. For me, it's 1 star because I cannot use the game for the purpose I bought it. Wasted money.
The theme of singularity-arms-race is very compelling, the style and the art is nice, the gameplay is generally fun, replayability if surprisingly good. It's Cyberpunk meets XCOM meets James Bond, and you play M. Really cool. There are some issues, though, currently, at least, which make the game somewhat frustrating. UI is often glitchy, Randomness feels weird and has a really powerful effect on the game, NPC messages are intrusive, slow and cannot be dismissed. Overall, keep my fingers crossed for this game, because right now, it's perhaps a bit too frustrating, but it has great potential.
A good game, which has been praised for the rich plot, meaningful choices, compelling universe. Most of those praises are true, and I will not repeat them. Instead I would mention why I think this game is, in many ways, overrated. The problem is that the game often confuses difficulty with the necessity to pursue a perfect constellation of point distribution, dialogue choices and gear to even have a chance at success. The margin of error is tiny, you often have to plan several levels ahead to succeed, and failure to do so can put you into a situation where even the main questline becomes insurmountably difficult - but you'll only notice this way past the point of no return. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the game world is not robust. It's a gradually expanding sorta-open world, but it doesn't take too much effort to exhaust available side-quests in a new area. You simply cannot afford mistakes in developing your caracter, because you'll get no chance for some non-crucial xp. No flair skills, or rpg-fluff here: you have to unchain your inner number-cruncher munchkin for merciless metagaming, or you'll keep dying, and the game will even gloat over you for it. The other issue is that the game ensures replayability by simply denying you certain quests. You will encounter those quests, or locations, or characters, but they will require a combination of stats that ensure you will never proceed with them unless they fit into you main character profile. I understand the reasoning behind this, but with the size of the game world, you are constantly running into inaccassible quests. It's not a bad game, but it's very frustrating. There's no "exploring" or "completing" this game. You have to let it kill you nineteen times over to learn its weaknesses, start with a dirty trick to bring it to the ground, and then keep stabbing at its windpipe until it stops moving. And then you will have yanked your first successful playthrough away from its cold, hard fingers.
