Too bad I can't refund this ♥♥♥♥...
I've done the tutorial and don't want to continue.

First, the combat model is a joke. In tutorisl you are explicitly told to shoot an alien, that's sitting between your soldiers, from assault rifle using lung bursts, and your other dudes don't get any stray bullets. Somehow this looks very funny when combined with the game's overall "military" style and, to quote the store page, "An in-depth squad management system with complex character attributes and skills, detailed combat mechanics, and elaborate inventory system."

Second, the writing is atrocious. The tutorial has the marines spew out literal walls of text, that are boring, and badly written. They give the impression of nerdy kids LARPing, not some space commandos trying to survive on operation.

Having played Laser Squad and Battle Isle Incubation, as well as the original Space Crusade games on the C64 and A500, this brings back nostalgic memories.

There are a variety of single missions, operations and a campaign. Almost all missions are 3 part phases which can take a long time. Resources ingame are scarce so make sure you got enough ammo and healing kits stocked, as you cannot re-stock between phases. Make sure you have some dedicated melee specialists as they never run out of ammo (except with the laser sword). The energy guns are also handy to have as they do huge damage and cost only 4 AP.
The squads you take into missions are fully customisable with name, stats, nationality, picture etc. This is a great feature as it makes you get attached to your soldiers. The equipping is a bit awkward at the start, but after you kitted out your squad(s), you can save them as well as the loadout, so that you will never have to do it again. You start out with a certain amount of credits and you need to carefully chhose which gear you will buy. Ingame soldiers have Action Points which they can use to take actions/movement.

Enemy variety is sufficient, on harder difficulties the enemies become really nasty. Morale is a thing, as well as DoT with poison, radiation, wounds and tranquilisation. For every debuff status, you have items which lower it.

The game plays well but has a bit of a learning curve. Optimisation is another thing though. Especially on older computers, but also in general, the game lags heavily. Your drive gets loaded to the max. Culprit are the Head Camera (unfortunately as this is a great feature), "Static Directional Shadow Quality" (just turn it completely off due get massive FPS gains) and "Clutter Detail & FX Quality" (also turn this one off, again, for massive FPS gains). The rest you can leave on. Even on newer computers the lag is there and I advise you at least turn off the Shadow Quality and Clutter detail, as those two are the most major FPS killers.

I thoroughly enjoy the game though and if you are old like me and played Laser Squad and any old AP-based strategy games, give it a try. A hidden Indie gem, well worth playing. I just hope they fix the optimisation, as this game really does not need that many bells and whistles.

With hundreds of hours in XCOM and Phoenix Point I'm the perfect audience for this sort of game and gave it a fair try. On the positive side, the base building mechanic is interesting. The tutorial does its job of introducing the player to movement and combat. This game very complicated and granular in the actions you take - you don't just move, shoot, or hunker down. Instead you take many actions each turn and each costs a few of many action points. Actions even include changing your stance so friendlies can shoot over you, or entering defense mode with melee weapons. Having said that, I couldn't see how the extra complexity made the game more fun. That may have become more apparent later. The bigger issue I had is the campaign doesn't seem to be guided like those other two games, where in those other games the player is presented missions on an ongoing basis with a clear choice of rewards and well-balanced difficulty. You always have something to do, there's a sense of urgency, and if you lose it's your fault. But in this game, after building my base, I was just left to pass turns without any idea what else I was supposed to do. I scanned randomly to find an alien horde, and while it seemed to be a bad idea to attack it, again I didn't know what else I was supposed to be doing. The game recommended a squad of 6 against 40, so I went ahead and did it anyway. Yet my squad could not even kill 1 alien. I was also bothered by the strange mechanic, at least with miniguns, where I can only shoot in specific directions rather than at any alien range. The map the mission took place upon was just dirt with a few rocks. It didn't seem there was a cover mechanic. So I'm not sure how I could have possibly won if there's no strategy mechanic to how I move or position my characters.