Recent reviews by VFusion8

Was fun before the forced Playstation account linking requirement to play it. My favorite lie is when they said it would make it safer for players when Sony Playstation has a lavish history of being hacked and losing their players personal data to hackers. Nah, I'll pass.
Sorry for all the areas where this game is unplayable, but I'll voluntarily join that list.

Much better than Dark Souls in terms of gameplay

This is honestly one of the best games I have ever played. Never saw people play it before I bought it so it all was a new experience for me! It starts out very wholesome and sweet but once you start getting deeper into the lore AND gameplay, there is a lot more depth to it than originally expected. Nothing feels grindy either.
Honestly, just buy it... the money is so worth it.

I will admit that I have never played an XCOM game prior to this one. There were 2 reasons I bought it:
1 - It was on sale
2 - The Yogscast played it on their channel and it looked really fun

It certainly gives a feeling of strategy and thought processing during each mission and which one is needed to be done to avoid raising city anarchy. You need to prioritize a lot of things carefully in order to progress without many consequences.
Being that I also greatly enjoy playing DnD, I get a huge feeling of it with this game virtually. It delivers that scratch for the itch for sure.

The only thing I will complain about is the voice acting. It feels too cartoon-like and young teen/childish for a game with this kind of story.
An example: I expected the viper, Torque, to sound more menacing with literal venom in her voice and a hiss as she speaks... not as a young adult woman starting college with insults one hears in high school and middle school.

I would still recommend it if you can get past the voice acting... but wouldn't recommend it unless you get it on sale.

JUST BUY IT!

The single player portion of this game, AKA the storyline without the expansions, is great. Very challenging game that requires you to think about your actions instead of mindlessly mashing buttons. I greatly enjoy finding the patterns the bosses have in order to beat them. The difficulty for new players is hard enough to where if it's your first time playing, you will feel great satisfaction when you get past that difficult boss or area.
My first time playing this game, or any like it, took me 2.5 hours to get past the first boss but I had fun in the process and it felt amazing when I finally killed Gundyr.

HOWEVER, the multiplayer portion (invasions, fights, etc) are complete garbage and fail to deliver what could have been a great concept for the game. I have a Soul Level 230 character, and it takes AGES to find a world to invade when I have the red eye orb and an invading covenant equipped at the same time. The connectivity issues are also a joke... sometimes you spawn and it's good... but most times you spawn and get hit when no one is around you and no one attacks you on your screen. You could be facing another player where you are already mid-attack, but you can still get backstabbed. Don't buy this game for the multiplayer experience, buy it for the story and single-player.

So I have about 100 hours in this game now... and I will say the Terrorist Hunt portion of this game is great!
Multiplayer is another story completely, there are 2 versions: Casual and Ranked (beta... still)
The characters are mostly balanced.. not all though. A sniper shotgun, hipfire headshots from ridiculously far away, etc.

Casual is an utter joke mostly because over 80% of the players are serious try hards. But that's every game isnt it? It takes the fun away from it.

Since it's also a Ubisoft game, expect shot delays and random headshot registrations. I'm glad I got the cheap version.