The only reason I haven't finished this game earlier is because I was playing the shit out of it. I'm nearly at 100 hours and that's a lot by my standards. There are probably no more than a dozen games that I reached 100 hours playtime with since I started playing videogames in the late 1980s.
So I didn't finish it because I kept re-starting the game to try different difficulty settings, and different strategies, until I finally settled on a playtrough that I decided I'll take to completion for the first time.

So this last weekend I beat the game for the first time after 90+ hours. When you can probably finish it in 20. The game requires a specific mindset to play, which is planning to fail and accepting losses. None of which I'm great at. I hate to fail even more than I like to succeed. So I kept save whoring until I got the most favourable outcome to each encounter in the game.

But let's not get ahead of myself here. The game is a turn based action game, which is an interesting genre for me. When I was younger I hated it, and now it's one of my favourites if it's done right. And this one is leaning towards done right, but it still has a few things that made me rage quit a few times, hence the save whoring approach.

So as I mentioned there are two ways to play this game successfully: Save whoring, or planning to fail. The first one is self explanatory You choose an action, and if the outcome is less than satisfactory you re-load and try a different approach to the problem. That's what I choose for my first complete playtrough but even now I'm in the process of playing the game in ironman mode, honing may skills on planning to fail.
What that means is that you must expect every action in the game to fail. Even if you have a 95% shot at an enemy, you must have a safe plan B in place in case it fails. So for example if you have only one enemy left, and one of your soldiers has a shot at him with a very high chance of hitting, but the soldier is in a vulnerable position. Then you must not attack, you must plan for the shot not succeeding. That's what I'm very reluctant to do. I always liked the fast and aggressive approach to games and not the slow and cautious one. But even when planning to fail there are occasions when the game will screw with you. For example I've had three over 90% shots fail in a row. That's something you just can't expect. And in ironman mode that can have grave consequences literally.

The great thing in the game is the variety. Since apart from a few key missions all the rest are procedurally generated, so most missions will be unique no matter how many times you play the game.

One of the things I hated most in the game is that the only thing that matters when taking shots at enemies is the cover they're behind. Line of sight has no effect whatsoever. This makes seemingly easy shots where the line of sight to an enemy is clear and it almost seems he's standing right in front of your soldier fail regularly. While other shots with numerous obstructions succeed. Actually there is one thing that matters, high ground. Which gives a huge advantage to aiming, almost an unnaturally big one.

The game also has a pretty good research / base building / resource gathering aspect to it. The just of it is that you need to make contact to certain areas of the world. And the more areas you contacted the more income you'll have monthly. But there are also random scanning sites providing various things when completing them. The problem with that is the game throws at you a lot of time sensitive missions that you have to do right away you can't delay them one second. So it happens very often that you just have a tiny bit left to complete a scan, but you have to leave to do a critical mission, and then fly back again to complete the scan, wasting a lot of time in transit. And it's also annoying when you're trying to finish a scan and there is only a tiny bit left to it, but everything seems to happen then. So the scanning will be interrupted half a dozen times within the last day of it. I wish they would've made it so that you can finish a scan if there is less than 1 day left of it, before going on time sensitive missions.

Speaking of missions that main types of missions in the game all follow one of the following templates:

  • Raid - You clear enemies defending a convoy to seize resources  
  • Destroy node - You must destroy a computer node before the timer runs out  
  • Defend node - You must defend a computer node before the aliens destroy it  
  • Access point - You must hack workstation / crate before the timer runs out  
  • Retaliation - You must rescue / defend civilians from an alien strike
  • VIP extraction - You must escort a civilian to an exfil point on the map.
  • Rescue - You must free a prisoner and then escort them to the exfil point  
  • Assassination - You must kill / capture an enemy collaborator
  • Sabotage facility - plant explosives at a designated point on the map, and then call of extraction  

I hope I didn't leave anything out. And of course there are the non procedural story missions besides of these. The rescue / assassination missions are usually timed too. But in general timed missions are the worst since you can't be too cautious if you expect to reach the objective in time. That's where the ranger phantom ability comes in handy so you can have a scout unit you can send forward without fear of running into an alien ambush blindly.


Let's see the pros and cons.

+

  • Procedural non repeating missions  
  • Lot's of ways to go about building your base and strategies  
  • Variety  
  • Good atmosphere mainly due to the narration of the characters, I especially like the autopsies : gruesome but strangely rewarding, and I don't just mean the actual technological rewards.  
  • Not much story, but it provides a satisfactory backdrop  

-

  • Line of sight not taken into account when calculating aim penalty.  
  • Too many interruptions on the main map.
  • due to the procedurally generated maps the same mission can end up being much harder/easier depending on your luck
  • too much micro management necessary for everything (staffing engineers, assigning soldiers, gear, upgrades, loadout, research, and so on)
  • last mission has a lot of bugs, and the enemies spawned are different each time, again making the mission either much harder or much easier depending on pure luck
  • failure/success is at least half part luck  


Scoring card:

graphics/realization: 6/10
story/atmosphere: 8/10
gameplay/controls: 10/10

overall impression: 9/10

No further comment necessary I think.