It sucks out your soul (especially Britenwalda DLC)! There is a learning curve on this game, so you WILL SUCK when you start, and you'll want to restart a couple times, and then when you just start to think you got it, the game will crush you. There is no "real plot" which is both good and bad. You can play in character or try to min max, but in the end, this game will suck out days of your life, and in the end, you will most likely lose, but you won't regret playing it. TIP: The most important thing is learning how to control your troops.
The Elvis_Nilsson review is very precise. This looks and plays like a test run for something better being developed, and is clearly a game attempting to rework FOTactics. The most important improvement is the camera rotation even if it is sluggish, but as others have mentioned it has many negatives: 1) You can't set up ambushes out of combat, only position your team in somewhat advantageous positions. 2) Weapon damage is unrealistic, an FAMAS does not do significantly less damage than an M16. And weapon range is totally unrealistic: 30-06 rounds can kill at 300 meters as well as it can at 30 meters. Ranged weapons (maybe not energy weapons) should have 5 times their current range limits, but have accuracy diminish over distance. 3) You can drink irradiated water with no bad effects and one radiation suit works for the whole team. 4) Apparently Rangers don't eat. 5) Why no vehicles? There are tons of parts lying around. 6) You're a Ranger, but it gives you no benefit except for pushing the plot. The Ranger Headquarters should provide at least SOME supplies (Like 20 rounds of ammo a day) for no cost. They do provide free medical. 7) The splitting of Lockpick and Safecracking is stupid, but creating a Brute Force skill to break down gates instead of using strength is moronic. 8) NO sneaking. 9) Enemies should drop all their possessions when killed. If this causes game balance problems, the creators should have balanced the game differently. 10) Guns jam too often. The atmosphere is good in the game. The character creation is fairly balanced. I don't mind taking an hour to create a good team with balanced skills, although the idea that safes, locks and computer programming gets harder as you get further away from Ranger Citadel makes no sense. Finding ammo all over the desert, and that enemies have unlimited ammo until they die is stupid. Enemy combat AI is not terrible. Not a bad game, but should have assimilated more good mechanical points from FOT.
The system is not bad. The story line is not bad. It needs at least twice as much content, and yes, it is MUCH too linear. If this came out 10 years ago, it would have been "good", but with all the graphics and stories and other things out there, it comes up short. It feels sort of like a teaser. I would recommend it for $4.99 or less.
If you like bugs and crashes, get this and discover the glory of a reasonable facsimile of JA2, with slightly better graphics, which crashes more or less every half hour or so. And since the original makers of JA2 didn't make it, there are no patches, no DLC and nothing of any other interest. JA2 with DLC is much better and smoother, and rarely crashes. The storyline doesn't matter since it'll crash before you get there.
