This is one of the best tactics games I've ever played and I can not recommend it enough, it's plenty of interesting and unique mechanics that make feel different than any other game without bloating the core experience. The updates added have consistently added new interesting content and worked to towards fixing problems the community have brought up. It combines almost all of my favorite mechanics from other strategy and tactics games while leaving behind the bad ones(mostly, soldier growth never not sucks:/). I would already consider this game more than worth it in current state but if it continues on its current path of expanding the strategic layer and fixing issues, then it could easily surpass X-com 2 for me.
This game is NOT an X-com like and that's a good thing
While it shares many of the best core aspects it give the player a lot more control by dropping the more random and annoying aspects. If you also hate missing three 95% shot in a row :| or having to incredibly slowly move your soldiers up little by little only to still activate three pods completely outside of your control, then this is the game for you. THERE IS NO POD SYSTEM! enemies are active from the start and are triggered individually through sound and vision, but camo and silencers can help with that ;). Hit chance is done bullet by bullet so your squad weapons won't just fully whiff, but your special weapons like rocket launchers can. However the game is full of ways to counteract this such as marking an enemy, deploying, promotion abilities or other buffs. Actions and movement are based on spending action points giving far more control over what you can do with your turn, You still have the excitement of things going wrong making you plan ahead and figure out how to get out of a bad situation, which is one of my core joys x-com, but it does this without removing player control like many other games do.
The game is sadly missing much of the arms race aspect that added so much of the tension in x-com but they've been improving on this in updates and have shown plans for more in the future leaving me hopeful. They've also included soldier growth similar to old x-com or modern Xenonaughts and it rly does feel like bloat in its current state, even with the changes they've added it. At it's best soldier growth feels like a min max chore(like flash banging your own Xenonaughts), it distracts and takes me out of mission while also making me track tons of numbers across multiple soldiers that go up in too small of increments to make a noticeable increase until after a long time but they have too much of an impact later in the game for me to completely ignore them. PLZ just remove it entirely, I have never had soldier growth be actually fun, its just a chore.
Story and characters
I see such a bright future for this game, it has some of the most fun and well put together mechanics. All of my gameplay gripes seem to be things the devs are actively thinking about, planning for, and working on. The only thing that really holds back this game for me is the story and some characters. The story right now is your pretty basic central military power comes in and saves the day eventually taking over far away foreign region. It really just feels like propaganda for the US military right now. If they fully leaned into this in the like helldivers satire style this game would be unstoppable. But as for right now, this games makes feel like I'm invading a foreign country and then killing the people for resisting / being poor(like I get the human enemies are attacking people in the game so we are supposedly actually defending people but it feels like such a forced reasoning for murdering hundreds of people). I trust the story will continue to get updated and improved based on the dev plans. What I've seen from the in game events has actually been rly good and added a lot of immersion and enjoyment to the game. I just hope they move away from the military propaganda and towards the fighting corporations or military satire style (or any honestly thing else, I just don't want to feel like what I'm doing is any way similar to how actual militaries behave towards foreign countries...)
Many of the character also feel like they have some unintentional racism behind them. They go for more exaggerated and over the top designs and personalities which is great design and makes me absolutely love most of the characters but this can also come off as racist stereotypes some times. There's a squad leader that's entire thing is that he's a hyper obsessed catholic Hispanic person which honestly feels really hurtful. There are so many interesting things you could do with like the unique aspects and history of like Mexican Catholicism, maybe something around some of the saints. Instead he doesn't have any depth and gives off crazy person vibes. Zama feels the worst in this regard, he really does just feel like a racist stereotype of an African warlord. His voice acting is so good that he's still a very lovable character and the amount of quality diversity in this game means that if they just gave him more depth, motivations, and unique aspects they could turn him from a racist stereotype into a real character
I really love the exaggerated personalities of the diverse cast of characters and I wouldn't want them to tone that down at all. Having so many people of these different ethnic groups really makes these characters exaggerated personalities feel like statements about their individual personalities rather than about the groups as a whole which is how it can come off as if they're the only person of that group. I just think that adding some depth to the particularly stereotypical characters would make them feel a lot better and make me feel a lot more comfortable with them.
(P.S. Devs pls don't change rewa or carda, they're so perfect. I will never not run them both together it, the clash of their extreme personalities is perfect )
This game is amazing and the devs seem to rly be listening and improving the game. It has the best core gameplay of any tactics game I've ever played. I can't wait for the full release, it might just become my favorite game ever(depends on quality STS 2 full release lol).
