Beautiful stylish game with AAA game design and mechanics. The beginning of game is a bit difficult, because the squad lacks augmentations and equipment, but mid and late part of game are absolutely awesome. * The real time aspect has dynamic pause (default quick button is D), but it is ability that your Coordinator must learn. You need to invest into it (and upgrade to maximum level), if you feel quickly overwhelmed managing your team. * Every facility has an unlimited number of security personnel, but new personnel arrives only when some of security guards or camera call them (big red exclamation mark). When you see that the guard is on alert, focus that concrete guard with all your firepower, hit in melee or use crowd control, like frag granade, personnel hacking, etc. to prevent spamming enemies. Hacking enemies is number 1 skill of hacker. You can have up to 5 hacked enemies fighting on your side, which rules almost every battle for your success, if managed at least half properly. * The enemy always has better equipment than you, but this is exactly why you need to hack your enemies. Use your enemy's power against themselves wisely! It took me 16 hours to finish the game, so it is kinda short. Still, it is definitely masterpiece and I recommend it to everyone who likes good tactical strategy. P.S. Music is awesome.
The game is just boring... I had a lot of fun during beta test, but though game has better visuals now, it lost its spirit and feels like a grind. Boring and dull.
Poor implementation. Difficulty is imbalanced, if you don't play the game like it was designed by developers (i.e. collecting all artifacts, leveling up all squads up to 5th level and having optimal squad composition along the way). Still, the game was funny to play, thus I think it deserves at least 3 stars.
This game has unique chess-like gameplay mechanic, and I would say it is even not a typical TBS game, but rather a puzzle. You always have squad of 3 mechs that have some mechanics. You have to combine mechanics to kill enemies, block their spawning or prevent enemies from hitting energy cells. Mechanics can be empowered between missions (in most cases just bonus +1 damage, +1 range, or + HP to mech). Your goal is to beat at least 2 islands (about 12 missions) and then final mission. Then the game repeats from the beginning, but you can unlock new mech squads with different mechanics (all in all the game has 8 squads plus plenty of community-made that you can add). This is basically all that you can find in the game. If you are fan of chess, the game will hold you for several evenings, but not more. Personally I expected much more content and replayability from it, and in the end found it to be too repetitive. You can beat the game completely within 1 hour (I once did it within 40 minutes, and my first complete walkthrough took about 2 hours). Overall, it is fun experience that you could hardly find in any other videogame (well, except chess, probably), but I would not recommend to buy it if you expect a real videogame and not a demo-version of neat mechanics.
