Overall I enjoyed my time with the game, and would recommend it as something a little bit different to fans of things like Xcom, Gears Tactics and Cyberknights Flashpoint. It's a more straightforward affair than any of those, but taking 12hrs for a fairly comprehensive completion on Hard difficulty (the default), it didn't outstay it's welcome. First person aiming is a welcome change from 90% misses, but does end up trivialising things somewhat - on multiple occasions I dealt with supposedly tricky situations on the first turn. During my play-through I had just three wipes - after which I reloaded from a checkpoint - once early on and twice on final mission. The difficulty feels quite binary - either win easily or get destroyed - partly due to the high lethality on both sides, several enemy types can easily kill 1 of your 3 people if caught in the open or flanked (Though if you win the fight they'll come back to life). Likewise, your people can happily dispatch multiple enemies in a single turn. There's minimal armour for your people so they remain fairly squishy throughout. One gets a shield but this character best lends them self to sniping, which is incredibly powerful given the player aiming, so the shield seemed somewhat redundant. Skill trees were a mixed bag, each character having a unique one with 3 sections. Some were interesting and genuinely made the characters specialised and powerful, while others - particularly those involving applying a 'status effect' such as electrified or bleeding, neither of which were ever explained - seemed lifted from a completely different game. The approach to action points (AP) was a refreshing change from other genre titles. Each character is given 20 (I think), albeit 5 can be carried forward to the next turn. Everything (including movement) cost differing amounts of points. For example firing the sniper rifle cost considerably more than firing a pistol. Most things could be done as many times as you like, except punching, which seemed a bit weird to be limited given it was relatively weak on two of the characters. As ever maximising action point economy is crucial so weapon mods that reduced AP costs are a priority. Similarly one character can gift action points at the cost of their own, so they basically become a buff support as the game progresses. The plot feels quite thin. and tonally it struggles. There's quite a bit of world building that hints at a fairly bleak existence, but the characters' dialogue will frequently include quips or attempts at humour that didn't quite mesh for me. They also make frequent logical leaps to propel the plot that don't necessarily feel justified, but will naturally turn out to be correct. It's not /bad/ per se. But it's definitely not /good/. Enemy types are fairly distinct, albeit behaviour is generally to just bum rush the player, which makes it fairly trivial to set up kill zones and first person aiming means even when they're in cover you can generally hit them without issue. Out of combat you can explore the city and complete various puzzles to access loot, this is generally about finding an angle to shoot off a lock, blowing a hole in something with a grenade or explosive barrel, or clearing blue crystals or teleporting to certain locations (these last two require items from the main plot). Almost every location has a combination of these puzzles and the city remains accessible throughout, so it becomes a bit pointless exploring until you have the two items unlocked, as otherwise you'll need to return to each location. In theory the motivation is to get 'scrap' that enables crafting, but honestly the crafting system seemed largely pointless. I made perhaps 4 items in the whole game and ended with over 20k scrap. The encounters with enemies shower you in more than enough loot to kit out your weapons which can be customised with 4 different mods, including 1 powerful epic mod. The epic mods were somewhat interesting, but after equipping one I rarely thought about it again, nor did I often go out of my way to proc their special effects. Similarly there are different guns, including alien ones, but none of them seemed notably better than the starting ones, so I finished with the same three guns I started with - just kitted out with mods. Not sure if I got unlucky, but I only found what I think is the equivalent of a basic SMG (the Buzzard) about 9 hours into the game. Weapon mods offered significant upside, but were annoying in that they seem to have just two names but then had differing underlying stats - I think the name meant they had a particular primary attribute, but then the other stat could vary. Either way I quickly identified what I felt was the best and didn't tinker much after that. Final mission - requiring you to shoot off armour pieces without killing target was pretty frustrating, given this is not something we'd been trying to do the rest of the game. The visibility of armour versus exposed skin needs to be dramatically improved - use a clear different colour! There were a bunch of other minor annoyances / areas for improvements: - Map shouldn't unzoom when you reopen - Map should zoom toward cursor - Teleporter use in 'explore' mode should be MUCH faster - Other characters immediately jumping off ledge you've teleported to is a bit immersion breaking - The loot appearing in the sewers seemed largely pointless? - Enemies getting to act after teleporting in can occasionally be incredibly fatal if you choose poorly - e.g. in one fight enemy reinforcements came from each angle, I went toward one that happened to spawn 4 guys, while the other two spots spawned 1 each. - Mantle / Hide prompts should be a different colour (and possibly use a different key) to picking up loot - KO mechanic never seemed to be explained, was it just a random chance on punching? Nor did the challenge count punching someone to death - Identifying which doors can be opened would be nice - easiest way currently is to just pan camera into wall. - Didn't seem to be a way of cancelling an ability - I would end up right clicking which would aim down sights. - Controls menu is horribly structured with two locked scrollable panes - just add the bottom section to its own tab. - UI for mods is pretty annoyingly console-y - a lot more info could be presented. This has possibly ended up sounding more negative than it should. Overall I'd give it a 6.5 out of 10 - it's pretty good, but there's plenty of room for improvement. But the core gameplay of being able to take the shots myself was very satisfying compared to my moronic, supposedly highly-trained xcom soldiers missing with a SWORD from point blank range. On the flipside, I'm in no hurry to give it another play through.
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