I've ruined a couple of night's rests on this game and kept comming back from more. So clearly this game is doing something right. But between the bugs, odd design choices and unexplained mechanics, there's plenty that might turn you off. It'll take some trial and error to figure out that knocking out three people in a level during infiltration will bring enemy agents down on you without fail the next turn. Knock them out first though, and you can wipe out an entire enemy cell undetected, which is quite satisfying. What I found less exciting was the time it took the scour the entire map for loot and intel prior. This tended to take a lot more turns than actually completing my mission. The combat system is also a quirky little beast, with its awareness resource that is great at mitigating some weapon's damage (single shots) but quickly drained from others (automatic fire). Once you master it though, it's quite functional, although I wish it were easier to see if an enemy has enough awareness to mitigate your next attack. The late game also gets a bit easy, thanks to extra move and action points. On the world map, I found some more annoyances. The semi-random perks made characters feel distinct, but it did leave many agents that didn't get the good perk combos doing support work, which incidentally gives insultingly little xp. The investigation boards get tedious, don't teach you (the player) anything, and the useful rewards (new training options and drugs) are outnumbered 50:1 by trash you don't need and especially more intel to solve other investigation boards. Boosting your agents with various drugs, which require other drugs and block different drugs, each with different positive and negative effects, is increadibly complicated to plan out, and can only be done one drug at the time. Queing up drugs to apply, and seeing their combined effects, would've made this so much easier. In short: I had fun, but there's quite a bit you have to be able to look past.
Having only played the reboot of XCOM, I was happy to have a chance to experience the old XCOM's feel without its dated interface. At first I had a lot of fun with it. Then the game became more and more of a chore sadly. I don't think I'll finish the campaign TBH. I'll start with the good parts: I could figure out the interface much faster than the old XCOM game, the 2d graphics are nice and the art style, while odd, has grown on me. The air-war of the game is fun, way better than in the reboot. In my first week-and-a-half, it did give me that one-more-turn feel. And the different weapon types (pistol, shotgun, rifle, sniper, machine gun) are nicely balanced and all have their uses. My problem is that the game takes too long and changes too little. The ground-assault missions are fun at first, but you have to do so many of them during the campaign that they get pretty repetitive. Weirdly, the 1-minute airbattles that you can just autoresolve DO change as the game progresses, with research unlocking new planes that have only missiles or only guns. But the 30+ minute ground battles stay mostly the same. The devs seemed so pleased with the balance of the weapon types, they didn't want to mess with it: You can get laser-, then plasma-, then railgun weapons, but only the damage changes. Otherwise, the laser-pistol functions just like the regular plstol. Your soldiers level up, but they don't learn new tricks either, they just get better stats, making them better at what they were already doing. Oh, and for XCOM veterans, two points on psionic powers. 1: Humans never get them, so forget about that spicing up the combat. 2: Aliens get them, and it sucks. Psions don't need line of sight and mindcontroled soldiers can act before you can. It's up to the RNG if a psionic alien mindcontrols your machinegunner from across the map and makes him immediately one-hit-kill one of the soldiers you spend hours leveling. No counter, no defense, no fun.
I own a box copy, and boy, the bugs I've encountered. Building units, but not having them appear. Surrendering a battle by withdrawing your army, which results in your army being destroyed, but the battle won. Ships that don't move across the screen, but stutter from place to place, not due to framerate issues, that's simply how it works. It is a shame, because I really do like some of the ideas in here. I was a fan of EE1, but not EE2. I liked the idea of having 3 sides that were completely different, instead of 20-something civs with one unique unit each. And the world-domination campaign would actually work for this game. You conquer several provinces with your tribes, and by the time you're bored with that style of fighting, it's time to tech up and fight with all new units. They put quite some ideas of bonuses you can pay for on the world map. Unfortunately, someone forgot to playtest this. The AI is poor on the battle map. On island-maps, once you conquer a province, it's yours forever. Invading AI armies generally need 10 minutes to figure out how to unload the troops on an island. By then, you have enough units ready to wipe them out before they can even begin building their base. You could even try to sink those transports before they unload, but that's unlikely. Ship sight range and turn speed are so low, a moving enemy is generally out of sight before your ship can get a shot of, and your units instantly stop their attack orders once an enemy leaves sight. Things get worse on the world map. You have a whole list of upgrades, but hardly any are usefull enough to justify their cost, when compared with spending your few recourses to buy a few more armies and steamroling the enemy. Worse, the enemy has very low priority on advancing to the next age. If you have a lead of 1 age, you have an advantage. If you have a lead of 2, you generally don't need to build a base anymore. Just the escort guards that you start the mission with can wipe out the entire enemy army and base, if you play your cards right. And the AI has no problem letting you get to the last age without aging up at all (or maybe once, to the middle ages) All my campaigns have ended with me using lightning-shooting gunships, invisible hovercrafts, supertanks and blackhole-creating robots against empires who fight back with bows for the last 15 battles, and that gets boring really fast. The only times I ever went up against gun-wielding enemies in the campaign was either during the special scripted missions, where an appropriate enemy spawns for you, or when I didn't pay attention, and the enemy captured a few of my units with monks. I've went and played it for some time anyway, and each time I'm again disapointed with how poorly this product was supported. With a few decent patches, the basis of this game would have made me love it. But they put out one launch-day patch, and then stopped paying attention. Such a pity.
