Well put together, well polished. Perfect capture of the vibe and aesthetic as well as having a good enough start, albeit rather slow.
I just don't think the actual gameplay was well thought out. It's clear they took a lot of inspiration from xcom 2 and a bit of chimera squad, with an almost exact copy paste of the avenger base system, and loadout before launching missions.
To dog a bit on the positive aspects a bit more. I think it's cool that they're trying to do a realtime strategy thing, I think it's cool they're trying to mix stealth into the core system, and I think it's cool they want to punish you for staying in a fight too long. There are cool ideas in this that standalone kindof work including preventing attacks while running, and having a manual look in order to help scavenge and discover the map.
My big issue though is with how it all comes together. I'm just not sure squad based strategy game is appropriate for real time, when you're not trying to do something akin to commandos or shadow tactics or that undead magic pirate one who's name I forget which plays better than the former two. I think the easiest thing to point to would be the stealth and map detection.
In true alien fashion they make sure to include the lifesign detector in the form of making a dot appear on your minimap. Something that almost singlehandedly kills any concept of stealth. Running is supposed to prevent you from firing which cancels out the need to hurry since you're supposed to be wary, instead when you have this radar covering a majority of the map, as long as that's clear you're allowed to just run across the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map and it just keeps pinging and pinging making it clear nothing is stopping you. You can even place down a stationary standalone detector anywhere you want that you can ALSO overload to reveal every alien on the map, AND self-destruct to draw their attention away from you. You're supposed to sorry about a cover system, an ability to crouch and hide, but you're never commanding a single unit since it's real time, every character is attached to this squad further deincentivizing you from making any bold strategies or being wary at all.
You'll also, furthermore, usually be looking for spots on the map that you aren't aware of, so you'll basically be running all over the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map hoping to stumble across literally anything, until either you complete an objective or find a bunch of random scattered people. Just extremely obnoxious, and it just felt boring forcing my squad to run here, run there, we can't see there, run around. OH AN ALIEN, they're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead.
You'd think that if you can't make these separate strategies and stealth is barely a factor despite being in missions and maps that specifically discourage any approach other than stealth, did they maybe add focus to combat???
NOPE, because it's realtime and treating your squad as one collective entity, they'll all autofire if any alien is in sight, and they're always looking every direction unless you're running, but you also have the motion tracker, so if any ARE nearby you can press the look around button to force them to walk which solves any problem. Even if you have a problem where maybe your tracker is showing a swarm around you so you need to get out and there's more aliens than you can deal with. Don't worry, you have skill points that will recharge shotgun blasts that will oneshot any alien within an arc, you have a grenade launcher, flamethrower, sentry turret, suppression fire forcing them all to shoot in one cone that ALSO slows every alien down.
So look, I've been unfair here. I've only played a little over an hour and it's completely feasible there are variations or later mechanics that might actually strain this system. There might be ideas done later on that I'm not currently aware of, but when I spend an hour and have been let loose in a few missions with full control and all it's felt like on the standard difficulty is that the game is broken and not designed around it's systems it feels like I've wasted my time. Especially when it seems clear that there are more than a few ways to make the systems better such as allowing the squad to split up. Not having the motion tracker for all of them, switching between real time and pausing so you can make commands between multiple units to do multiple things, while real time is still a factor so you can't just switch decisions with no consequences.
