Repetition, The Worst Enemy
I'm a huge fan of all things squad-based, turn-based, and tactical. I picked this up mostly to see what it was about. Going into this, I wanted to like the game. Don't glance at FTL when considering this game. It has nothing in common there except a superficial similarity in the meta game.
If this game had come out in the early 90's before XCOM, it would have set the gold standard for tactical combat. Sadly, it comes out in late 2018 amid a field full of superior tactical squad games - and it dares to be mediocre by those standards. It doesn't bring anything really fresh or new to the table.
It checks a lot of boxes. Squad combat. Tactical. Turn-based. Rogue-like. Equipment earned carries over from one play through to the next. There is small innovation in having the squad semi-intelligently follow a single leader, but that's a solution to a problem the game itself creates in forcing everyone to move each turn across larger maps.
Where it falls right down flat on its face is repetition. The game re-uses - over and over - the same mix of set pieces and tiles to randomly generate every single mission. After a couple hours of play, I was pretty confident I had seen almost everything the game could throw at me, and none of it made me say "Oh, cool!" ... instead I just got to chew on the same cardboard visuals again and again. Maybe there were subtle differences in the color palette? I didn't check. I just got really bored really fast as it felt like I was doing the exact same thing on repeat. Having to start a mission over from the beginning - or the entire game - if you botch a mission and wipe your crew doesn't help alleviate that feeling.
So - in summary - it's a good effort, but dry and repetitive. Technically proficient, but not outstanding.