The game is 5 starts for everything (graphics, lore, music, art...) but combat, which is 0 stars because it's broken to make the experience intentionally unfair: -Stats are useless now, enemies with 25% of your stats can easily beat you. It looks like stats are now some kind of variable hidden threshold, where if you reached it the enemy could be won after several attempts, but if you didn't, the game will keep cheating on you (ignoring all stats, skills and whatever) to make you lose. -Initiative (the game mechanic allegedly responsible for determining who attacks first and when) is also useless for you because many enemies can attack you as much as they want while ignoring this. When the enemy AI decides to start cheating, the enemy fighter will start attacking you non-stop with 0 initiative consumption, while your character stands there doing nothing, despite having full initiative. -Energy is working except for when the enemy AI starts cheating to make you lose, in which case enemies start ignoring this stat and endlessly hitting you without response (ignoring your block/dodge). The closer the enemy bar is to being depleted, the worst shameless cheating will occur. I know there are people who enjoy this kind of roge-like unfair mechanics, so to cater to them you could add another difficulty level with clear indications that the AI can and will cheat on you at will to make you lose. But leave the normal and easy difficulty levels free of cheating, because creating a super elaborate stat and skills system just to proceed to throw it out the window when you are about to win ... is evil. I hope the developer will fix this in a future patch, because it's ruining the otherwise great content.
The graphics are cool pixelated art, 5/5 in that regard. The gameplay is repetitive but OKish, it would greatly benefit from more game mechanics, but it is obviously influenced by good games like Papers Please, 3/5. The story/dialogue is, oh my God how should I put this, just utterly and plain HORRIBLE and NOT 80's in the slightest. I've seen/listened to every 80's iconic movie, documentary, song, historical event, critical news coverage etc... and I can assure you and I assure you that this is NOT 80's in any way whatsoever. They put a few elements from the 80's here and there, like cop names from Police Academy or a mission with a Russian police guest (from Read Heat) but the way it's delivered and executed, from the dialogues to the action... it's either very, very bad writting or writting by an Instagram generation person with 1% knowledge of the 80s. The jokes and humor are very, very bad AND neither 80's whatsoever: wrong vocabulary, wrong tropes and horrible homages. You don't play a police game set in the 80's expecting either NOT to be set in the actual 80's, or to be that kind of a horrible homage, or to be that kind of unfunny (80's or not). -5/5
Deep, complex, innovative, details perfected to the extreme, beautiful graphical art and music, no lousy design decisions to force you to extend gameplay time, limitless strategies and tactics. You can choose to play each mission in turn-based or real time modes, you can either sneak your way into the geoscape with stealth precision strikes or rather annihilate the entire enemy armada with your full blown air superiority war ships), you can get money whichever way you prefer, everything breaks the way it's meant to, UFO crash sites destruction is actually realistic depending on the sustained damage (like it was in the original games and unlike it is now), there is a proper serious XCOMpaedia written and designed with care)... Everything is and works the way a PC gamer would think it would. Remember those times? They are almost gone now, and the "almost" part it's only because of the new games that TRY to replicate the Good Old Games days experience, whether indie (usually decent but lacking somewhere) or console-ized/mobile-ized (like certain so called games with the XCOM title in them, streamlined and dumbed down to braindead levels so they could be played half sleep in a couch with an almost dropped gamepad). This game, XCOM Apocalypse, it's the last game of those days, the last innovative enough game to stand its ground as a new game and not a-copy-of-a-copy. The last game designed with few but intelligent PC gamers in mind, and not millions of wallet-legged console/mobile clients.
