I want to love this game, but I can't.
I started playing this genre with XCOM Enemy Unknown, and was drawn to Xenonauts as it did away with the artificial difficulty of the "group trigger" in XCOM EU, where spotting an enemy activates that group of enemies which immediately gives them free movement. This meant that if you triggered a group at the end of your turn, especially a group of Chryssalids, your whole strike team could easily get wiped out within 3 turns. Xenonauts doesn't have this "trigger" mechanic, which makes Xenonauts fundamentally better.
However, this superior design is nullified by the Zombie-Reaper death mechanic. The Reaper is effectively the Chryssalid from XCOM EU, and both are the most dangerous enemies in both games. Their mechanics are basically the same, where they kill any human, be they under your command or not, typically in one hit, and then infect their corpse with eggs to make another Reaper/Chryssalid, which are carried initially by the zombified human host they were implanted into.
In Xenonauts, when you kill the Zombie, even if you do so with explosives or otherwise an extremely powerful weapon, it instantly spawns the Reaper, which is free to act as normal once you end your turn. This means that to kill it, you need to kill both its Zombie host, and then the Reaper, in a single turn. This requires you to direct a enormous amount of firepower on to effectively a single enemy, and you must do so by using 2 separate attacks, first killing the Zombie, then the Reaper. Therefore, you can't deal with this problem with just 1 well placed rocket, or a high damage attack from for example a machine gunner. Often times you just won't have enough firepower nearby able to attack this enemy to deal with it, and sometimes even attacks from your whole strike team might not do the job, but even if it does, you've now used all your actions for this turn on this single enemy, so if there are other enemies nearby (usually the case), they will then be what kills you.
This creates this frustrating damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario whenever you encounter a Zombie, where either you focus everything on killing it, meaning something else kills your guys, or you split your attention to also deal with other threats, meaning you now won't be able to kill the Zombie-Reaper combo.
On the harder difficulties, the game is already hard enough. Playing on Veteran-Ironman, it's very common that my strike team takes casualties on missions, and it's not uncommon that I'll lose the whole strike team or almost all of it. When you encounter Reapers though, this dumb Zombie-Reaper death/spawn mechanic basically means unless you get lucky, all your guys are gonna die. Reapers are already the most dangerous enemy even without this dumb mechanic, and with it they are just straight overpowered and broken.
If you only consider everything else bar this mechanic, this game is great, but because Reapers are so consequential as a threat, this dumb Zombie-Reaper death/spawn mechanic ruins it for me.
