All the X-Com style games have a reputation for being difficult but this one is an exercise in masochism. When your soldiers see an alien most of them won't fire no matter how good their reflex rating is, most of your soldiers that do shoot will miss no matter how good their aim is supposed to be, and most of your shots that do hit won't get kills. Your soldiers will routinely miss aliens standing in the open while the aliens will routinely hit your people even when they're supposedly protected by cover. And the aliens have a longer visual range, especially at night, so they can shoot and kill your soldiers while the aliens are too far away for you to see, let alone shoot back at. You are outnumbered on all but the easiest of missions and most missions end up with your people having to cram into small rooms and corridors full of aliens defending from cover and through doorways. This game has a weird system for handling terrain objects and if there's so much as a blade of grass between you and the target your shot will be partially blocked, which never seems to stop the aliens from hitting your own people. And don't even try to throw hand grenades because there is absolutely no guessing where they will land and they're as likely to bounce off of something and hit your own people as the enemy. The aliens can make psionic attacks, but unlike most X-Com games, Xenonauts does not allow you to research psionics or find defenses against them. Even your soldiers with the highest resistance rating will frequently be stunned for a turn or even shoot at their squadmates, and there is absolutely not a single thing you can do about it. Xenonauts feels like trying to lead your team of poodles to victory against a team of rotweilers.
This is a conquest game in which ownership is determined not by military victory but arcane medieval inheritance laws. You can gain land only to have the inheritance rules give it all away again when your king dies, leaving your country the size it was before your successful wars. Sometimes you'll find yourself being invaded by a country you didn't know you were at war with, and you may think you're attacking country X and then find you're actually at war with country Y. Hostile armies can just pop up out of the ground and you don't even know where they came from or who is attacking you. You play as a country's king and every character has a numerical affection rating for you, but a character who likes you is no more or less likely to betray you than a character that hates you. You can try to give noble titles and gifts to NPCs to make them like you, but they have zero gratitude and will turn around and attack you anyway, yes, even if they supposedly like you. I failed to participate in one crusade but got big rewards for it anyway, then was instrumental in the success of the next crusade and received absolutely nothing by way of rewards. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Playing Crusader Kings 2 is very much like watching a movie in a foreign language, without subtitles: things just happen, you'll never understand why, and you're powerless to affect the outcome. Add to these flaws the usual problems with Paradox games. The user interface is godawful and important functions are buried in odd places, there is no manual, and the tutorial doesn't tell you anything useful. Last but not least, the base game only gives you access to a fraction of the game's content and you'd have to pay for DLCs to play as the majority of the game's factions. I struggled with CK2 for a week but finally gave up because there was no way to predict the results of my actions and events might as well have been completely random for all the sense they made.
This is one of the better turn-based tactical games I've played. The UI is a little clunky, but it's fun to play. Colorful soldiers running around shooting, ducking behind cover, flying, and setting fire to things with psychic powers. The game's biggest drawback is that the campaign is too short, but you'll certainly get your money's worth at GOG's price.
