It may not be good old X-COM, but it sure is a good replacement for it! There's a few pros and a few cons of course. The cons being that the story is somewhat strange at times and the squad member limit is pretty low, you can't have 20 members like in X-COM. Another con (for me personally) is the style of the graphics, I like my graphics realistic and my weapons should look like they could conceivably work. Other than that, this game holds quite nice strategy elements to it and a certain character attachment which the X-COM series had too. There's also, like many other games of this type, an uninspiring amount of variation when it comes to enemies, it doesn't make the game bad, just, not as good.
I don't want to spoil anything so, if you are VERY afraid of spoilers, look away now.
You can play with aliens in your squad(!), it's amazing for me, I love that feature. There's even "voice" for them, which makes it ever so awesome. There's also a time in the game where you can choose between two different sides of xenos in the game. Which is a nice feature, I like the idea of the Xenos not being just chaotically evil for no reason, but actually having sense and being reasonable.