Good: - Story-lite tactics style game with interesting level and gear progression. - Action Point based combat which gives weight to opportunity costs for each action you take. - Very powerful build combinations if you tinker with the weapons and classes. (WILDCAT, I'm looking at you) - Enjoyable overworld exploration that offer bonuses depending on chance. You can increase the chances of rewarding exploration with certain classes in your squad. - Weapons and Armor have unique trade-offs that give you an edge in certain situations. This enhances the gamestyle you choose to play with. - Permadeath, however you can choose "Restart Mission" to reset a fight and start over. Bad: - Repetitive, very much doing the same thing on the same few tile sets. - Enemy AI is fairly simple, some rounds they will murder 1 or 2 of your squad and other rounds they will move back and forth and take no action. - By end game the game is played almost entirely with Overwatch;attack if an enemy moves on your turn. It becomes more profitable in the action economy to not take an attack and work off of actions that trigger other actions. My thoughts: I find this game to be quite wonderful. The challenge at the start of the game roped me in and slowly becoming more powerful kept me going. The leveling process and finding new gear helped me kick ass and really feel like I was owning the battles. The story was light-weight and the game had a choose your own mission style of exploration. I am not a fan of very long unskippable cutscenes in games and this game was great for that. The class system was interesting, however, I nearly had the same build on all of my characters due to some classes just being underwhelming. Free reload was NECESSARY on all characters. If you don't go for as many free actions as possible your turn would be wasted. I wish that less free actions granted on certain conditions exist and the player gets more AP to make their own decisions.
