It's a good game. All missions can be finished without raising alert but some missions will take you more time to plan ahead while you play. I Save&Load a lot, which helps me to get familiar with the mechanics and I am planning on starting a new game without any s&l. In a word, this game has provided enough work around for you to discover and use in all missions. There is no single mission where I got stucked because I have chosen the wrong agents. Therefore, you can dive right into missions and spend more time to work it out or spend some time to plan ahead before every mission. This is what I like. Tips: 1. Standing behind doors can block enermies. 2. Standing right next to doors is a good way to defence. As closing/opening doors doesn't take any movement point, you can always open the door the shoot and close the door before you end this round. Doors can block sight so you won't get shot unless the enermy enters your room. 3. You can always BREACH to kill any enermies within sight, even though they are not in that ROOM you are about to breach into. All you need to do is mark those you want to kill. They will all be taken care off when they breach in. And don't forget to scout and mark civilians. 4. Don't interrupt any plot on killing the source. Do the assult every time, you will be able to free a very powerful agent(the source that is about to be assasinated). That agent will join you. 5. Shooting your enermy when standing right next to them is not dodgable. So if you can get to them without further exposing yourself, just run to them then shoot. 6. Any kind of one-shot-kill in silence will not raise the alert. So silence mode is very useful. Silenced pistol usually deals 100+ damage so it's also very useful in killing trash. But in late game, enermies especially agents have 130+HP. If you have a silence mode on sniper rifle, you can always equipe them on low HP agents and let them take a close-up sniper shot.
When compared to the first game, there are more fun. Not just the XCOM element, but also the cases, the abilities, the trading and special event. But when it comes to the story, I think it's not as good as the first one. The writing is sometimes doll, long speech everywhere which is very annoying. It's not building the character if all characters yell at each other for 5min none stop. Literally 5 min. This is why I still miss the "GOOD GOD!" moment in the first one. Simple, straight forward and at the same time forceful, showing who our potagonist is. And the atmosphere of this game is not that right. Jack is going down hill so fast that there isn't any bad that he hasn't done. While in the first game, you can still say that Jack is not a total villian. Other than that, the special mission is way too simple and the enermys are lack of variety. Some of the mission are fun. It can be noticed that the tie gang final mission is definitly well design. For the enemy patrol routes intersect with each others, which forces the player to initiate a large scale arrest. I threw every flash bang, used up all peper splash and teaser gun ammos, just enough to get 12 enermies down in 4-5 rounds. It was an epic vitory. But it's still very stupid when you realise you need to move each character to escape to a certain 3 tiles area which is only shown at the end of the mission. I thought retrieting them back to the start point is OK so I lost a couple guys during this mission. In a word, there are still many flaw with this game. Not the kind that would stop you from enjoying the game, but the kind would feel uncomfortable. But it's a good game afterall. I would definitely play the sandbox mode, which is not something I would say about the first game.
