To play online with a friend now requires you to be signed into Epic gamestore. Just no. They took a feature away after buying the product and locked it behind a paywall. GOG, you need to sort this out. This is completely against the entire ethos of buying things on your platform.
This mix of live and turn based just doesn't work - Choose one or the other, this mix of things is just not working. The game mechanics are terrible - You can't loot corpses for the gear that they had, just on occasion, if you are really, really lucky, the game might be generous enough to give you a single piece of shiny kit. - The game cheats egregiously and obviously. You can max out your stats and still not hit consistently at reasonable ranges with good weapons. The enemy can one shot you across the map with an assault rifle in full auto, enemies have far more AP than any merc you can field... Just so many things wrong. - The controls are archaic, annoying, restrictive, ill thought out, and just not commensurate with a modern title. The sound design is ridiculous - I DON'T want the characters to talk at me constantly. Every click. Every action. In ways that are supposed to be funny and endearing. No. Just no. Everything about this game just adds up to be terrible. Deeply and abidingly disappointed. If this is the latest and greatest this series has to offer I will not be looking at the earlier offerings.
The game feels like it's halfway done, like it's in late alpha or early beta. There are a lot of issues with textures and sizes of textures in the environment, the monsters are not well thought out, the game seems to lack any method of combat that doesn't involve firearms (at least in the early stages once you are past the intro). It's just dark, constantly foggy, with vast largely empty environments with little direction on where to go and how to proceed. I didn't make it very far it to be fair. It's just not particularly engaging in the state that it is in.
X-Com UFO Defence (Enemy Unknown) set the bar very high. This game, and it's predecessor miss the mark. Completely. They are a pale shadow, a seeming, of the original title in this series. It is as if someone read a short review, without pictures, on what the first game was and thought, 'Hey, we could make a sequel to this and make money' and away they went. Tiny squad sizes, turn based mode where the other team always acts as soon as you actually see them without any hope of them being surprised, RNG is clearly weighted against the player, action points nerfed to the point of being pointless... There are just so many design decisions here that scream 'We didn't understand what really worked about the original game and why it is so beloved, but we can sure make things pretty with graphics nowadays!' Am I a curmudgeonly old guy who loves the original game (And Laser Squad on the ZX Spectrum of course...)? Yes. Does this new series of games completely miss the mark for me and not hold up when compared to those experiences from decades ago? Also yes. Cannot recommend for anyone who played and loved the games under the same name back in the day.
