FO:Tactics is probably my favorite game in the FallOut series because it strips away some of the tedium of Plot and dives headlong into the tactical battles that the system does so well. Of the turn-based squad games, only Jagged Alliance 2 does a better job with pulling together all the elements: Variety of troop capabilities and weapons, challenging scenarios, genuine fog-of-war and progression thru levels of difficulty and reward. There is a plot here to drive the scenarios, and that makes it a bit more linear than I might have liked, but there's a wide array of random encounters to explore if you want and you can revisit sites you have "cleared" to see how they have fared since. Overall, one of the best values on GOG and strongly recommended to fans of both FallOut games and squad-based fighting games.
This is an excellent value with hours of immersive and entertaining game-play. The size and scope of the adventure, and the variety of tactical options available in most missions, makes for a strong game that never lags or gets too redundant/repetitive. The characters of your teammates are clearly drawn and provide for some excellent dialogues and side-missions that lead you to making genuine choices about who you are and what you value. I love that the final climactic missions present several very different options for resolving the main story, all of which have impact on how the adventure resolves and on your identity as the protagonist of the story. Overall, an excellent value for the money and strongly recommended.
Overall, this game is a quality entry the Shadowrun series, providing entertaining missions with turn-based combat and many minor improvements over the interface from SR:DF. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the changes to the Matrix (I'm old and slow) but after a few trips I got used to it, and the supporting tools you get if you ramp up your Decker stats more than compensate for the annoyance of having to play Red Rover. I also wish I had much more control over the development and equipment for my teammates, but that's apparently down to the core design for the entire series, and in the long run you still get a good array of skills and kit. However: Please be aware that there is a LOT of text in this game. There are endless dialogue trees with all your teammates, including digressions that seem to lead nowhere. Sure, it adds to the immersion into the game world, but much of it is arcane (Japanese history lessons from a Ghoul???) or ultimately irrelevant. Particularly annoying are the deep dives into your "past" with Duncan where you have to supply information I guess your character already knows that, again, doesn't provide anything beyond chrome. So be prepared to click thru lengthy dialogues where, in many cases, you have only one reply or one *obviously correct* reply to choose.
