Picture this: What if X-COM: UFO Defense was remade, but now it's necessary for some soldiers to carry an utterly impossible shield in one hand (with either a pistol or nothing in the other). This one foolish design decision rather ruins the game if you can't let it slide. I played and enjoyed it for a while, but ultimately . . . You carry a slab of boilerplate that weighs more than you do and wouldn't stop a rifle round, and it will absorb several shots from super-powerful alien ray guns? (Rather than spraying molten steel over you and your buddies the first time it's hit?) And even if you can get past that, you have to surrender the tactical flexibility of loading your soldiers with various actually effective weapons in order to "arm" several of them with these magical (IDK, maybe they levitate or something, but then why doesn't any of the other gear...) shield-slabs? Naw, hard pass. bud. They tried to revitalize the old-style X-COM game. They came so close. So. Close. Like I said, it's a good game if you can get past the stupidity and tactical inflexibility of the shield-love. Maybe you can. After a while I couldn't. Happy gaming, whatever you play.
This game is enormously fun & engaging, but I have run into three really unpleasant bugs that deserve to be the focus of my review. I will present them in the order that I encountered them: 1.) Occasionally the viewpoint will switch from forward to straight down. Even more rarely, it will switch back on its own, but more often I have reset it by moving to a different map. Not the most fun workaround in the world, but that still makes this bug the least intractable of the three. 2.) People that are supposed to attack me instead stand around being all neutral and invulnerable, with no conversation. Two of these people blocking a path ended my first playthrough; I physically could not get my character to the place where act 2 finishes. Backing up to a previous scene did not open the path. On my second playthrough I experienced the same bug in a different (and non-blocking) location. 3.) On my second playthrough, shortly after the end of act 1, the framerate dropped to <10fps. This is (ahem) highly incompatible with the quick and decisive real-time combat mechanics. I will also be submitting this list to GOG directly, and hopefully I will be able to write and updated 4- or 5-star review on some future date. In the meantime, people who might buy this game deserve to know. P.S.: My system is brand new as of July 2016, runs win-10 on an AMD A10-9600P with Radeon R5 graphics.
