This game has me so conflicted. From the beginning I was left with a great impression, it portrays itself as a competent turn-based strategy game with actually interesting ideas to set itself apart. But the longer I played the more the flaws of this game ruined the experience so much that by the end I was just forcing myself to finish the game.

What's Good:

The Graphics are good on par with any other newer gears game. The characters armour and weapons look good and are detailed, although the randomly generated characters look a little blank faced during cutscenes but otherwise its fine.
The environments are where this game really shines, they look great and are very detailed it's just a shame they're so small and few in number.
The Core gameplay is also solid, it's nothing completely revolutionary and it borrows elements from other tbs games but it does attempt to incorporate its own ideas which work well if not better than other tbs games.
The action economy is also nice, you get three action points that you can use anyway you like. This allows you to pull off some insane damage turns, killing off multiple enemies especially when combined with the execution system.
The execution system has been adapted for a tbs environment, when enemies lose their hp they have a chance to be downed and you can execute them giving +1 ap to all your other teammates. With this you can chain executions for turns where you're able to do a lot, it's very satisfying and one of this games best features.
The overwatch system is also well done, enabling you to set up a cone as a danger area that if enemies move or shoot whilst inside it you'll shoot first. You're able to shoot as many times as you have ap and ammo meaning you can set up some nice kill zones and furthermore these shots can interrupt enemies meaning they might fall over whilst moving or cancel their shots, again a very nice mechanic.

What's Meh:

The recruiting units process isn't balanced well at all, you get random recruits made available to you after a story mission or if you do specific rescue missions, it can be annoying hoping to get the class you want from the random pool but it's not a huge deal. The main problem is that the level of the recruits also scale with how far you are in the campaign and they will start to out-level your older recruits by a fair amount the later you get into the game. This means the recruits you got at the first half of the game, the ones you trained and tried to personalise, they're technically the weaker option to choose and if you want the stronger option you should just get fresh recruits all the time which sucks.
Abilities that classes can unlock are serviceable, some interesting things but nothing on the level of Xcom. Also it feels like some of the classes are just more interesting to level up than others. Heavy, sniper and scout all had some interesting skills but the vanguard and support felt a little lackluster in my opinion, they weren't weak but just felt uninteresting when compared with the other classes. It's also worth mentioning that another class was added later on exclusively in the form of jack which has some fun stuff going on ability wise, the highlight being a mind control ability.
Enemy diversity was disappointing, the gears franchise has a sizeable pool of enemies and I was excited to see how they'd implement them. However in the end about a third of the locust horde is represented maybe even less. No Flame Grenadiers, Bolters, Grinders, Maulers, bloodmounts, reavers (they just drop off units), berserkers and that's only naming some of the missing units. There are some "new" enemies introduced but they're just the same enemy types you usually fight but they explode with gas when they die.
The lack of variation in the enemies is further extenuated by the ai's poor use of them. Locust units use their abilities in a odd way, just using them at any opportunity even when it makes no sense to. On the flip side some had abilities I never saw because the ai never uses them, for example the kantus unit has the ability to heal and revive allies. I completed the entire game without EVER seeing them do this. It's not the worst ai I've experienced in tbs games more like functional but underwhelming.
Lastly the story is uninteresting, it's there and it keeps things moving forward, barely. But character motivation and building up the villain is just messy at best. You don't really feel invested in the plot at all and the villain is laughably forgettable, still the main characters sometimes got a chuckle out of me.

What's Bad:

Gun/armour customisation isn't expansive, it's a handful of attachments you can put on different parts of the weapon you're using, giving small amounts of damage or accuracy. The armours are a bit better giving extra accuracy in cover or hp regen per turn ect. The problem is how you acquire them. You're incentivised to collect creates during missions to get a random attachment for a weapon or armour, the quality is determined by what rarity create you collect. Mission rewards also offer a random attachment or armour of a set rarity. I'm not sure who thought a random rarity create system was a good idea for this game, but it's not. By the end of the game you'll have so many of them that they'll clog up the inventory and become annoying to sort though.
Story missions force you to use preset hero characters for the unit slots. You can level up the hero units as you like but no customisation for how they look and not being able to take your recruits means they miss out on experience. The worst thing about this is the final mission forces you to take all hero units, so your recruits feel pointless.
Unit customisation simply is awful, one of the worst I've encountered in this genre. Recruits have randomly assigned faces, genders and voices, there's no way to change this. You can customise hair, tattoos, scars and add a hat or some glasses but that's it. I cannot begin to understand the motivation behind this, it's idiotic, half the fun is creating your own characters but instead it feels like you're playing with the games characters. This combined with the problems I mentioned earlier with the recruitment process makes it nigh impossible to become attached to your units which is a staple for these types of games.
Missions are repetitive and boring. This is by far the biggest issue this game has, it just becomes a boring grind playing them later in the game. The mission types are introduced in the campaigns first chapter and are then given to you as side missions for the rest of the game. After playing each type a couple of times you'll see how shallow and unentertaining they are. Well you might say if they're side missions why not just avoid them and do the story missions? Unfortunately the game decides to lock off story missions until you complete a set number of side missions and it does this multiple times per chapter with the amount of side missions you need to complete increasing with each chapter, making the experience feel extremely padded.

Overall:

There's still lots of things I've not gotten into like how the boss battles are mediocre and the best equipment is locked behind completing the main story and continuing to play the same side missions for the best equipment as rewards.
Overall this game is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played, not because it's the worst game I've ever played but because it's so close to being a competent unique experience. It feels like two groups of people worked on this game, one wanted to make a unique tbs game with great core game mechanics and the other just wanted to ship out a gears xcom game as quick as they could so they stuffed it with the bare minimum of mission types, gun customisation and unit customisation. If you still want to purchase this then make sure you get it on sale and play it sparingly, I got it 50% off and I'd still say that the game is barely worth it.